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Showing posts from November, 2010

London Match by Len Deighton

The last part of the trilogy starting with "Berlin Game" and continuing with "Mexico Set", this book is in some sense an anti-climax. The spy story brings out a whole host of emotions that are so well told and thats what I like most about Len Deighton. The main character Bernard Samson (the book is written with him in the first person) grew up in divided Berlin soon after WWII with his father being a colonel in the British army. Some of the incidents about the English boy growing up in post-war Germany are incredibly touching. At the present time, Samson is near 50 years old and with British intelligence posted in London and specializes in German issues and their connectivity with Soviet Russia. He is in Berlin for an assignment and meets a German police officer over a case. The police officer remembers that Samson was with him in the same German school where there was a "crazy English colonel" who used to teach them football but couldn't kick the ba