I have had enough of today!

Work sucked. I got into it with my boss, who seemed to disapprove me eating lunch. I am not sure how I can get fired, but I have my hopes up.

I was so angry that I forgot to wear my walking shoes home. Therefore, I stayed in place all day.

Good news: I did get through the mail on the table. I understand now whey ODHS wants me to pay a bill. That I lack funds is a different problem.

I managed to add a few pages to "The Dead and The Dying".

And I wanted to highlight Len Deighton and the Spy Novel from CrimeReads. Everything quoted below is why I think you should read Deighton.

Entreken was flabbergasted and quickly agreed to reissue Deighton’s entire body of work in the US – new cover art and several new introductions, including a foreword to Bomber by Malcolm Gladwell.  

Entrekin explained his decision to me.  “Deighton is one of the three or four most important writers of espionage fiction.  On one end of the spectrum this is Le Carré, a master of characters whose novels are full of resonance, and on the other end of the spectrum there is Ludlum, whose books are action, action, action.  Deighton is in the middle.  His novels have complex plots, great characters, remarkable settings, and the prose is so good.”

***

 Deighton’s sarcasm aside, his novel was popular in part because it wasn’t cut from Fleming’s spy cloth.  Deighton’s first-person hero (unnamed in the novel but given the name Harry Palmer in the 1966 movie starring Michael Caine), is a bespectacled, low-salaried, slightly overweight junior employee in the War Office who is dispatched to a shabby office on Charlotte Street in Soho to investigate the disappearance of a missing British nuclear scientist.  Harry Palmer is the anti-James Bond and there is no love interest to speak of in the book.  Bond is a Commander and Palmer a lowly sergeant; Bond is English upper class, like his creator, Fleming (Eton and Sandhurst), and Palmer is the product of an English grammar school (like Deighton). 

Now, enough is enough.

sch