Deighton to become Penguin Modern Classics author

Penguin Press will publish all of Len Deighton’s novels and three works of non-fiction as Penguin Modern Classics in 2021. 

Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Tim Bates at PFD.

Deighton was born in London in 1929 and published his debut spy novel, The Ipcress File, with Hodder & Stoughton in 1962. 

In April, Penguin will publish The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar Brain. In May, Bomber, SS-GB, Winter, Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match will be published, followed by his three non-fiction works on the Second World War—Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly—in June. 

Winder said: "Len Deighton’s books give the reader an amazingly vivid and thoughtful sense of the continuing aftershocks of the Second World War in British life and of the grim decades of the Cold War.  His novels are exciting, enjoyable and sometimes very funny, but they also brilliantly preserve a very different Europe from today—of secret police, dictatorships and the terrible poison of ideology. There are few better places to understand the new flavour of 1960s Britain than in his quartet of novels beginning with The Ipcress File. He was also an extremely varied writer, as skilled with historical fiction (the superb Bomber), dystopian fantasy (SS-GB) and non-fiction in his three fascinating books on the Second World War.

"As the publishers of John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler and John le Carré, we are delighted to give a new generation of readers the opportunity to enjoy this wonderful writer."

Deighton said: "In the 1950s, when I was an illustrator, I did many covers for Penguin and my first paperbacks were Penguin paperbacks. I’m thrilled to be working with them again to bring all my novels and non-fiction to a new readership through Penguin Modern Classics. My thanks to Tim Bates at PFD and Simon Winder at Penguin for making this happen."

Photo credit: Adrian Flowers