This is another by Len Deighton (I read Spy Hook last year). Deighton, by the way, was born in 1929, is still with us, and is therefore even older than Penelope Lively...

The title comes from what is apparently an Oscar Wilde quote: "Dying in Paris is a terribly expensive business for a foreigner." Which is poignant, given that Wilde did indeed die in Paris, and in poverty.


Wilde's tomb, at Pere Lachaise, Paris, 2019

It's quite a good title. The novel is set in a rather grungy Paris, and many of its characters do indeed die, or flirt with death.

Deighton's fifth novel, it was published in 1967 -- and I think this may be at the root of my problem with it. It's just very sixties...

So, it's upfront in presenting us with a weird clinic-cum-brothel, run by the larger-than-life M. Datt. He claims to use his premises for research into the psychology of sex, but the venue is noted as a site for out-there parties; our narrator, having been drugged there with some truth-inducing mixture, comes round in a bizarre kind of bondage dungeon; and we subsequently learn that all the rooms are bugged, and serviced by sophisticated call-girls who are trained to winkle secrets out of high-level diplomats. And I've not even told you the most lurid bits...

Alongside all that free love and libertinage, we have opinions like that of Maria: "Girl tourists -- they only come here to be raped; they think it's romantic to be raped in Paris." A bit later she comments: "France is a land where men command and women obey."

There's a lot more stuff from various characters on the inferiority of women, and it's probably all very authentic and reflective of its era. Doesn't stop it being annoying, though... I often find the sixties annoyingly self-contradictory. Or maybe I'm just jealous. My formative years were the miserable seventies...

But I'm digressing. Back to the story.

Our lead character, unnamed, lives in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, and -- under cover of a job as a journalist -- works as some kind of special agent for the British.

Now, the question is: Is this the same unnamed spy who features in Deighton's first four novels? Ie, is this Harry Palmer (as he came to be known after some of the titles had been made into films)? Some claim that Deighton himself confirmed this is indeed the fifth unnamed spy novel, and therefore the lead character is the same. Others dispute this. This blogger points out that it's one thing to say it's the fifth and last in the sequence of novels that started with The Ipcress File, and quite another to be sure it's actually the same lead: "In my opinion use of an unnamed spy narrator and the theme of espionage certainly do link it to the first four... but it is not the same character." S/he goes on to note the change in style from the first four.


Michael Caine played Harry Palmer in the movie versions of three of Deighton's early novels (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and The Billion Dollar Brain)

One of the differences from the previous four books, I'm told, is that they consistently used the first person, whereas the spy's I-narration in this novel is interspersed with third-person accounts focusing on other characters. I didn't feel those third-person accounts worked that well. The narrator has a much more interesting mode of delivery.

I don't want to wreck the suspense, so I won't go into the plot in detail (for reference, it's set out at length here). But the starting-point is the arrival of a courier instructing the narrator to deliver to the aforementioned Datt a file of information about nuclear weapons fallout. The book contains some amusing exchanges, and this is the occasion for one such:

"It was a large black case and contained reams of reports. One of them he passed across to me.
"'Read it while I’m here. I can’t leave it.'
"'It’s secret?'
"'No, our document copier has gone wrong and it’s the only one I have.'"

Everyone warns our narrator that Datt's a dangerous guy, and sure enough it's not long before he has that drug experience that opens him up "like a cheap watch". Luckily, he's protected by one Maria, who's supposed to be translating what he says to Datt, but decides to give his account a wholly different meaning.

I won't go further into Maria's identity either, because like many of the characters in the book, she's one surprise after another... There's Byrd, an English artist and a friend of the narrator's; there's Jean-Paul, Byrd's friend; there's Annie, who works as a model for Byrd. And of course, there's Datt. None of them is quite what he/she seems to be. Even Loiseau, a conscientious but sensitive French policemen, seems to have odd motives for some of his actions.

There's a lot to be said for this assessment: "The way everyone is related to everyone else, and is spying on each other and misleading each other about everything... begins to give it the feeling of a farce: a small cast of characters getting caught up in more and more complex predicaments, generally with their trousers round their ankles."

Datt is supposed to be the master-villain, but he somehow didn't work as a character for me. He's creepy, definitely, but he could have been REALLY creepy. Instead, he feels a bit like a cardboard cut-out of creepy.

And they all -- apart from the narrator -- pontificate a bit too much.


Where else but Paris?

The somewhat hard-boiled take on the French capital doesn't quite come off either. It tends to sound just a bit cliched. Examples:

"The bell rang. There was a girl standing there. She may have been twenty-five but it was difficult to say. Big cities leave a mark. The eyes of city dwellers scrutinize rather than see, they assess the value and the going rate and try to separate the winners from the losers. That’s what this girl tried to do."

Monique, Annie's friend: "Paris is a woman with a little too much alcohol in her veins. She talks a little too loud and thinks she is young and gay. But she has smiled too often at strange men and the words ‘I love you’ trip too easily from her tongue. The ensemble is chic and the paint is generously applied but look closely and you’ll see the cracks showing through."

It's a pity that the story veers off into so much complication and sixties-inspired technicolour, because the background politics is actually quite interesting. Hudson, an American hydrogen-research man, tells the narrator that the false atomic fallout data put out by the US have persuaded the Chinese to believe they can survive a nuclear war: "I'm here to leak the correct information to the Chinese scientists." China's first nuclear test was conducted in 1964; their first hydrogen bomb came along in 1967. And the Americans DID cover up their knowledge of the effects of nuclear fall-out...

And in this political sense, Datt is a more interesting type: The man whose ideological convictions are disregarded by the cause he serves, which has by now outgrown them.

All in all, then, I wasn't too convinced by this. But I wanted to read to the end, which is always the acid test, I suppose. And I want to read more Deighton, because I still don't feel I've experienced his best.