Читать книгу Spy Sinker - Len Deighton - Страница 2

The title of the third book in this middle trilogy, Spy Sinker, conjures an array of interesting possibilities for the designer when attempting to capture it. For those readers who have been following the adventures of Bernard Samson thus far, I am sure they could venture a number of scenarios into which Bernard could be said to be sinking – his relationship with Fiona, Gloria, his growing isolation among his colleagues in the shadowy and labyrinthine world of his work, even his relationship with himself. All of which were considered to some degree or another, but in the end I took the design in a slightly different direction. For me, the mousetrap seemed to perfectly symbolize the idea of subjugating one’s adversary, which in this instance would be employed by the KGB to ‘sink’ their antagonist, Bernard Samson.

The back cover’s vignette is of a Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka, depicting a bemedalled Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary. I purchased the set of dolls on Arbat Street, Moscow in exchange for two packets of Marlborough cigarettes. The doll’s content reveals that this KGB agent wears red lipstick from Boots the Chemist …!

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