Yesterday's Spy

Introduction

They say that New York City is the place to enjoy when you are young and Paris is the city for those of mature years. Maybe it depends how much money you spend.

It is not true that I prefer to stay in broken-down dumps rather than grand hotels. I love grand hotels but I also find certain sorts of dumps, and the people who frequent them, intriguing. Back in the distant past I had a room in the Adlon in Communist East Berlin, or at least in that hotel’s ruined remains. It was so dilapidated that it seemed as if a violent sneeze would be enough to make it fall apart. But looking down from this back room I could see the East German border guards and their barrack rooms, their armoury, kennels and guard dogs. The noise from the dogs being brought out gave notice of some new drama at the nearby Wall. It was rather like standing in the wings for a Grand-Guignol show.

A quite different and more enjoyable time came when my family squeezed into the attic of a Gasthof not far from Munich. The discomfort was more than made up for by the friendliness of the Swabian couple who worked so hard and kept so cheerful and let us into the kitchen to learn some secrets of south German cooking. We stayed in that lakeside village for months. My two sons went to school nearby and my understanding of the German south and its people proved valuable for my book Winter, which I wrote there using one of the earliest laptop computers. We were all sorry to depart.

When Charlie Kasher, the executive producer of the film of The Ipcress File, visited me in the Hotel Chelsea — on West 23^rd Street NYC — he was appalled at what he described as its ‘squalour’. He dragged me away to somewhere he felt more salubrious: a small smart luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.

As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.

Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.

When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.

The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually — and long after this book was written — it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is — like so many of the family names — Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.

Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.

Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.

Len Deighton, 2012