Читать книгу Hope - Len Deighton - Страница 2

Wishing to continue the notion of Bernard Samson spying through windows or doors, I took the author’s very good suggestion of having the book’s protagonist peering through a glass public house window. I found a perfect example among my collection of photographs that I had taken of windows, this one from a London pub. Combined with the title of this book, Hope, it conjures up the saying “last chance saloon”, in which there is always hope, even for an ageing spy who is on the ropes in both his career and his love life!

For the back cover, I placed a china souvenir of London’s Tower Bridge on a map of divided Berlin and straddled it across the Berlin Wall, which I likened to the River Thames. As readers of this series will by now know, London has exported something – or rather someone – more precious than a souvenir to the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, and our Bernard still lives in hope of returning them to the West.

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