After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive. Loses a fight with the Narrator on the motor-boat, then spills the beans: he has been using the Weiss List to blackmail, as well as helping HK run the heroin operation. As with the other novels, Horse Under Water has an intricate plot with many false leads and plot twists.

This despite the fact that I could never quite bring myself to believe that a submersible weather buoy from 1945 would still be working when Harry Palmer and Petty Officer Edwards scoop it out of the sea at the end of the novel. There are lots of paragraphs worth reading and rereading and savouring for the pure pleasure of their prose. He closed his eyes, gulped down his claret and leaned against the wall like a worn-out roll of line. Len Deighton's second Secret File about a sunken German U-boat which has lain undisturbed in the deep water of the Portugese Atlantic coast since WWII until now (anno 1963).Len doesn’t go into details but I assumed that such a machine would be like a small submarine with a floodable chamber to make it sink and a compressed air cylinder to clear that chamber of water to make it surface again. A very good book without inscriptions in a very good clipped wrapper with some browning to the edges and some wear to the edges and tips and corners. Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). N promptly raids it and interviews HK, is prepared to release him but Charly shoots HK, though not fatally.

It hadn't occurred to me that it was on the technological forefront, I had always thought that the "horse" was the heroin. Now a fresh generation have the chance to sample Deighton's wares as Penguin republishes many of his books. A small man in a suede jacket poured thimble-size drinks from large unlabelled medicine bottles under the counter. This is a first edition of the work, in smart red cloth binding with a decorative stamp motif to the front board and gilt to the spine.As well as the supposedly official stamp on the flyleaf (saying the text has been ‘Downgraded to unclassified’), and the letter placed before the narrative and dated 1941, which is meant as a clue to the plot, and the customary footnotes throughout as well as longer appendices explaining references in the text, there is another page before the main text, titled ‘Solutions’ with 58 numbered words on it. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East. And was Smith the same person as "Henry", Jay's contact in the British government (and upon whom Ross opened a file) in "The Ipcress File"?