Simon Wood“I ate an early peach, and put a blue cornflower in my buttonhole. “
RIP #LenDeighton, one of my absolute favourite writers.
“There was a pot of coffee clipped into an electric contraption that kept it warm for hours. I poured some into Marjorie’s cup and sipped it. It tasted like iron filings with a dash of quinine.” #LenDeighton (Spy Story) #coffee
‘You didn’t like the coffee?’ she asked.
‘Is this anarchist’s coffee?’ I asked the girl.
‘Grounds enough for arrest,’ she said.
I suppose someone had said the same thing before. Or maybe they thought of the joke and then built the coffee shop around it.
⁃ #LenDeighton (Spy Story) #coffee
“Dawlish sprinkled a cold smile over me. He wore the sort of spectacles that customs men tap for hollow noises. He rested them on his large ears and then tucked a handkerchief as big as a bedsheet into his cuff.” #LenDeighton (Funeral in Berlin)
“Inside the semi-precious light of the stained glass softly dusted the smooth, worn pews, and a complex of brass candlesticks glinted like a medieval oil refinery.” #LenDeighton (Funeral in Berlin)
“I gave him the Browning FN pistol and three 13-round magazines. Dawlish put them into a large manilla envelope and wrote ‘gun’ on the flap.” #LenDeighton (Funeral in Berlin)
“It was the morning of my hundredth birthday. I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting” #LenDeighton (Billion Dollar Brain)
“Outside was February and the first snow of the year. At first it was the sort of snow that a sharp P.R. man would make available to journalists. It sparkled and floated. It was soft yet crisp, like some new, sugar-coated breakfast cereal. Girls wore it in their hair and the Telegraph ran a picture of a statue wearing some." #LenDeighton (Billion Dollar Brain)