2024 the best house in london 1969 review

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“Deighton, Greene and John le Carré comprise the reigning triumvirate of fictional spymasters beside whom all others pale.”—Seattle Times

In 1963, Berlin is dark and dangerous. Len Deighton’s skilled, jaded, anony­mous hero of The IPCRESS File is now set to arrange the defection—and fake the death—of a leading Soviet scien­tist. “A ferociously cool fable” (New York Times) and one of the first novels written after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Funeral in Berlin revels in the fraught, chilling atmosphere of a divided city.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CX5WRWK2
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press (October 31, 2023)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 31, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1020 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 306 pages
Reviewer: bbrio
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: a master of the genre
Review: Hard to explain the tremendous pleasure I get reading a great master of the spy story when there is so much drivel around. This is one of Deighton's earliest, but all of his mastery is easily observed. Don't expect glamorous 'James Bond' type spy adventure here. Deighton is all about the dirty end of the stick - the field guys. Sharp as tacks, and with a mean streak. And struggling to get their expense accounts approved by their bosses.If you like this, be sure to check out his stuff featuring Bernard Samson - they are masterpieces.

Reviewer: kayakpete
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: greatly enjoyed both the movie and book storylines
Review: Just a heads up for those who intend to read the book based on seeing the movie of the same name: two of the high level plot premises are different. In the book the plot is based on smuggling an East German scientist to the west. In the movie the plot is based on smuggling a Russian officer to the west. The contents of the coffin is very different in the movie versus the book. Without giving too much away these differences may sound petty, but as you pull the thread on the 2 plots they do go in different directions. I tried to find information on why the movie plot was alter so much but came up empty. If anyone has some info on why movie producers decided to alter the storyline please do share. Otherwise I greatly enjoyed both the movie and book plots.

Reviewer: H.L.J.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: “The moment that you think that you know who your friends are is the moment to get another job.”
Review: It’s 1963 and Mr. Deighton’s English Agent arrives in the divided city of Berlin under the name of Edmond Dorf, a somewhat amateurish not so secret agent. He’s been sent on behalf of the English Government, to facilitate the transfer of a Soviet scientist from East Berlin into West Berlin, simple. Everyone he meets professes their desire to see the transfer go through without a hitch, which in Mr. Dorf’s line of work means somebody, maybe everybody is lying.The transfer lies at the center of an ever widening group of self interested characters who give Mr. Dorf cause to take a few days vacation in Spain during the off season, grab a particularly fine Czech lager in Prague, revisit the horrors of Treblinka and in London to be introduced to a cat that answers to the name of Confucius. All in service of discovering exactly what’s really been set in motion by the transfer.The story effectively channels the sprit of the times, with many phrases, references and descriptive incidents set in a historical continuum well known and still somewhat immediate to those first readers of the book in 1964, but may be vaguely familiar or totally unknown to a 21st century reader. Be prepared to stop and do a bit of research when presented with a metaphor or cultural reference that seems just thrown out there, nothing is wasted in this book, as either a joke or a hint.Mr. Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin once again expertly guides us through the labyrinthine No Man’s Land of the Cold War human intelligence officer, where survival is the only currency worth trading in, and anything else is just a lie.Remember - you’re a spy.

Reviewer: Pat in Phoenix
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: I like the Cold War setting in Berlin
Review: I got lost on some of the British stuffiness of the characters. Some sections were very good. But it is not John Le Carre quality.

Reviewer: Bradley West
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Funereal Setting, but Adroit Writing
Review: Deighton portrays Cold War Berlin in such detail that the reader creates his own film in his mind rather than watch the 1966 movie starring Michael Caine. The unnamed protagonist ("Harry Palmer") is a working class spy, the deliberate counterpoint to Connery's Bond. The plot is complicated and plausible. The bad guys come across as real people: you can smell the stale booze on their breaths. The tension builds without much need for slam-bang action. Twenty years later, the first Bernard Samson thriller "Berlin Game" covered much of the same ground with a little more verve and polish.Despite being over fifty years old, this espionage classic more than holds its own against contemporary entries. Recommended.

Reviewer: In Vino Veritas
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best of the series
Review: I wanted to finish all four books in the series before commenting. With 'Funeral in Berlin', Deighton achieves mastery of his art. Though the original publication date of this book is listed as 1964, and the Michael Caine film of "The Ipcress File" is listed as 1965 release, the unnamed protagonist in this work is certainly recognizable as Caine's 'Harry Palmer', right down to the eyeglasses. Colonel Stok is a hoot.I highly recommend the last 3 books in the series, 'Horse Under Water', this book, and 'Billion-Dollar Brain', read in the order published, to anyone who enjoys LeCarre. I found 'BDB' burdened by too many Capitalism vs Communism vs Socialism speeches by the characters, but still give it 4 stars. Not a fan of 'The Ipcress File'; there are at least 3 books jammed in there- the missing scientists, the Middle East trip, and the H-bomb test site story- with the whole IPCRESS thing getting lost, and resurrected only in the last few pages. How anyone adapted the Caine film from this muddled mess is the real mystery here. I give 'Ipcress' one star; read it first, and only for background on the protagonist and secondary characters who are present in the later, better, books.

Reviewer: Martin
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Good spy story around the start of the Berlin Wall
Review: Good, as always with well formed characters and a great sense of time and place. All the details of Post-war deprivation in Britain and the ponderous old boy network of the Civil services. Anyway, a good and complex spy story about bringing a Russian defector over to the west. Full of twists and turns and double agents. Good read.

Reviewer: D. P. Birkett
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Who was first?
Review: An oldie but goldie in the cold war spy double double-crossing genre. This has an original 1964 publication date. It came after Spy Story. Some characters recurr in The Ipcress File where the proragonist (nameless in this) is called Palmer. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold had already been written (and we'd had Graham Greene). I remembered it for the ingenious plotting. Re-reading it I'm struck by the quality of the prose. Later Len Deightons don't contain such fancy writing. He loves describing the shabby and dingy: "I looked around at Grenade's office: the brown-stained wainscotting, the plaster walls discolored in patches near the ceiling and the old-fashioned metal radiators under which a rash of cream-colored pimples proclaimed the haste of a clumsy painter."

Reviewer: Paul Gaysford
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I too, like other reviewers, have re-read this book after such a long time. The Cold War and references to it and echoes of the intelligence world of that time still resonate as if it were yesterday. So for me (as an 80 year old Cold War "warrior"), Deighton's storyline, with all it "details", is "real" and understandable (I'll say no more about my own knowledge of that world) and, like the other two books of his "Harry Palmer" trilogy, are still a delight to read. However, in this book Deighton errs, and errs badly: He writes about Treblinka and the "forced march" away from the camp as the Russian army was approaching. I'm sure many who have a knowledge of the Holocaust, and especially of the death camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmo) will know that there was no forced march from Treblinka. There was an escape attempt and it partially succeeded (some 600 tried to get out, only some 400 (I think) succeeded and of those only 67 made it to the end of the War. I rely on Deighton's accuracy in his fictional and non-fictional story-telling (where appropriate) and so I was somewhat surprised at this mistake. Nevertheless, it is a great story and well worth the re-visit.

Reviewer: Waymark, Graeme
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Having read all his newer novels, this takes us back to when he was still teasing his craft.It definitely would have encouraged me to read more of his novels had I Read it at the time, but now, although the storyline and researched facts are excellent - the writing leaves enough to be desired to take away a star!Still love reading Len Deighton!

Reviewer: Gianluca Carpiceci
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is a pretty good book, a very enjoyable old-style cold war story. I had discovered Leighton with the Samson trilogy, which I loved; this, despite being earlier work by the author, has already all the ingredients which made that series great reading.

Reviewer: Dr. C. K.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Das Vorwort des Buchs hat mich zunächst schockiert - es schien mir sehr unbeholfen zu sein. Zudem fand ich den historischen Rahmen (Berlin zur Zeit des kalten Krieges) ziemlich uninteressant. Aber weit gefehlt: Das Buch gehört zu den besten Spionageromanen, die ich gelesen habe und kann sich auf jeden Fall mit den früheren Meisterwerken von John le Carré messen.Wahrscheinlich ist es Geschmackssache, aber ich finde den Stil des Autors einfach atemberaubend gut. Er schafft es, mit Kleinigkeiten eine immens dichte Atmosphäre zu schaffen. Schön, dass Deighton ein Vielschreiber ist. Ich werde mir noch viel von ihm gönnen.

Reviewer: Sto
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Finally, a semi believable plot. The book was a reasonably easy to read.