Spy Line
The long-awaited reissue of the second part of the classic spy trilogy, HOOK, LINE and SINKER, when the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but a world.Berlin-Kreuzberg: winter 1987. Through these grey streets, many people are hunting for Bernard Samson - London's field agent. He is perhaps the only man who both sides would be equally pleased to be rid of. But for Bernard, the city of his childhood holds innumerable grim hiding places for a spy on the run.On a personal level there is a wonderful new young woman in his life but her love brings danger and guilt to a life already lacking stability. In this city of masks and secrets lurk many dangers - both seen and unseen - and only one thing is certain: sooner or later Bernard will have to face the music and find someone to trust with his life.
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LEN DEIGHTON
Spy Line
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Ltd 1989
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1989
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780586068984
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007395378
Version: 2017-05-23
Contents
The deceptively simple titles of the Bernard Samson series still yielded a wealth of possibilities with regard to how they might be illustrated. This second book of the middle trilogy was no different, suggesting lines of authority, responsibility, accountability, relationships both open and hidden. After much consideration, I eventually incorporated the concept in a more visual way. For the cover of Spy Line I replaced the photograph on my Russian visa with that of Bernard Samson’s and then ran it through our studio paper shredder to emphasize the notion of lines, particularly lines of destruction, as if Bernard’s identity is being struck through, erased.
The vignette on the back cover features a doctored photograph of one of my old passports, an Eastern Bloc immigration officer’s rubber stamp plus a Russian pack of cigarettes. The attentive reader will clearly be alerted to the fact that travel plays a significant role in the story, though to what ends only the following pages will reveal.
At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
The nine Bernard Samson stories, ten if you include Winter, have been written as complete and separate stories. “Beginning, middle and end” said a large yellow sticky note prominently displayed in my workplace. Sometimes visitors asked me what it meant but it wasn’t easy to explain and when I tried most of them looked puzzled. Didn’t every book have a beginning, middle and an end?
Giving each book a proper beginning, middle and end was a part of my assumed contract with the reader. Each book is designed to be read alone and without pre-knowledge. But I began to receive mail asking about the planning and what was to come in the next book. Not wanting to tempt fate I was somewhat evasive in my replies, but now I have an opportunity to explain a little about how the books were designed to fit together. I hope you will forgive the references to the other Samson books. (If you are not in a forgiving mood turn the page and start reading the story.)
First let me say something about the contrived and cryptic atmosphere in which Bernard moves. The intelligence services of the world, the secret police, the electronic snoopers and all the apparatus of poking and prying that governments resort to, are not the smooth, polite and competent organizations that their press and public relations experts wish us to believe they are. They are part of the same government bureaucracy that hides its failures less well. If you have visited your Town Hall or made a planning application you will have had a demonstration of the slow-moving, myopic misunderstandings that dog the trade of espionage. This is the world in which Bernard Samson works and lives. It is a fraternity where awards and pensions are on everyone’s mind and where departmental vendettas cloud decision making. It is a world where, for the most part, danger and hard work is provided in inverse proportion to pay and promotion.
