Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton

Funeral is the third in a series of spy thrillers by Deighton, featuring an unnamed hero made famous in films by Michael Caine. The epitome of London cool, his style perfectly fits the character—slick with a rough edge, without the frost of John le Carré's George Smiley.

Our hero is assigned by a covert British department to courier Semitsa, an elite Russian scientist, from East Berlin to London. The Russians have penetrated the German intelligence bureau, and Colonel Stok of the Red Army State Security is willing to sell Semitsa for a payout. Our hero goes undercover as Edmond Dorf, using the efficient services of their contact in Berlin, Johnnie Vulkan, a man facing danger every day as he works for and against various organizations. A charismatic rogue, suitably codenamed 'King', he is a new breed of European who speaks like an American, eats like a German, dresses like an Italian, and pays like a Frenchman. An ex-concentration camp guard with connections in every organization, it's hard to know where his allegiance lies. The female angle arrives with Samantha Steel, whom Dorf meets in a swinging club as she twists on a tabletop. Dorf finds out firsthand she bathes wearing her expensive jewels, but in reality, is an Israeli operative working for Egyptian intelligence to capture Semitsa, yet is closely connected to Vulkan. Cautioned he is surplus to requirements, Dorf is to only act as a receiver in Stok's elaborate plan to smuggle Semitsa out in a mock funeral, passing through the soldiered checkpoints and barriers between East and West Berlin. Specific British identification is requested in the name of Paul Broum to create the illusion the corpse in the coffin is a naturalized subject returning home. However, the Broum identity is not false; it once belonged to a man with a connection to the source of this whole affair.

"The skilled player memorizes and uses the classic sequences of the games of masters."

Len Deighton's first in this series, The Ipcress File, may be the better known, but Funeral was a massive bestseller about the machinations of double agents in swinging 1963, when neither side of the wall was safe. Like le Carré, the writing is convincingly written as if by someone in the know. Who or what is in the coffin was just one of the entertaining twists; however, there is a lot of background, a lot of driving the strasses and the platzes that take away from the pace. Each chapter is headed by a chess term, and there are copious footnotes and an appendix as explanation for the international organizations at play.

Michael Caine starred in the films (which named his anti-hero Harry Palmer) The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967).

1964 / Hardcover / 322 pages