Читать книгу London Match - Len Deighton - Страница 2

On reading a synopsis for one of Len Deighton’s trilogies I was immediately taken by the sentence, ‘And we are back in the mazes of Secret Service mystery and intrigue – mazes that now lead into Samson’s own tangled past.’ There I found my concept for the London Match cover! I would place him within the maze, trapped, with pathways leading to danger, in the form of the gun, and perhaps worse, the KGB, represented here by one of the agency’s badges – this Soviet-era icon features the hammer and sickle together with Cyrillic letters for ‘KGB’ and ‘USSR’.

Some years ago I was commissioned to design a calendar for a leading British sign company. I decided to use the many door numbers that I had photographed during my travels around the world, showing a different number for each day of the year. I contacted the Prime Minister’s press secretary, who kindly gave me permission to photograph the door of Number 10 Downing Street. This photograph has once again found a good use adorning the back cover of this book of intrigue in London’s Whitehall.

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