Читать книгу Horse Under Water - Len Deighton - Страница 2

In creating cover designs for the new publication of Len Deighton’s quartet of spy novels, I came up with the metaphor of the chess game as it relates to the spy game. Three enamel U-boat sub-mariners’ cap badges became pawns on the chessboard.

A constant feature of Deighton’s nameless protagonist’s Charlotte Street WOOC(P) office was the ubiquitous pack of Gauloises cigarettes and the ever-present tin of Nescafé. (This very same street was used as the location for the HQ of the nest of spies in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.) The Swiss had invented instant coffee prior to World War II, but it only became available in the UK in the 1950s, so when freeze-dried soluble grains were introduced a while later they became the beverage of choice for the Swinging London set. My search for a UK Nescafé tin of that period ended when I located one in far-off Australia!

Finding a contemporary, key-opened Portuguese sardine tin became virtually impossible. Discovering the illustration of a sardine on a cigarette card and a crested souvenir spoon from Lisbon became much easier, thanks to eBay!

My wife, Isolde, who produces all of my art work, and is a dab-hand at Photoshop, reproduced the period British European Airways ticket, incorporating the exact flight number described in the book.

One obsession of Deighton’s nameless protagonist is solving crossword puzzles. Since I have kept copies of the illustrations I produced for the London Sunday Times during the 1960s, I was able to find among the pages of the newspaper a crossword puzzle of the period.

The 1943 German postage stamp on the spine of the book depicts a German U-boat. The group of cigarette cards on the back of the cover spells out in semaphore K.U.Z.I.G. and Y. The nautical interpretation of these letters is referred to in the book as ‘Permission granted to lay alongside’.

Some years ago, given the possibility of producing a feature film on the subject of the Nazi plan to flood the Allied economy with counterfeit money, I purchased a fake £20 note.

On meeting a survivor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where, as an engraver, he was forced to produce the counterfeit bank notes, I showed him my note, which he held to the light and proudly proclaimed, ‘Yes, it’s one of ours!’

I photographed the jacket set-up using natural daylight, with my Canon OS 5D digital camera.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI