The XPD of Deighton's enigmatic title [XPD] should be glossed as 'expedient demise'. His latest blockbuster is based on the factoid that there are three unaccounted-for days in Churchill's and Hitler's movements in June 1940. What happened, we are to believe, is that the supremos met in France where Churchill offered craven surrender terms, involving the carve-up of the Empire, sovereignty of the seas, and vast reparations. The record of the exchange—the so-called 'Hitler Minutes'—is dynamite. It must be suppressed at all costs and for ever. A decently off-stage Mrs Thatcher goes puce with rage at the thought of its being released: 'It would mean the end of the Tory party.' Any uncleared person who does find out the secret has his dossier stamped XPD….

XPD belongs firmly in the 'secret history of the war' genre. (Genetically it seems a mixture of The Mittenwald Syndicate, The Goering Testament and The Eagle has landed.) As with others of its kind, its main contention is the folkloristic one that the real truth of history has been covered up, that secret fortunes have been made, and that it only needs the removal of one card to bring the whole thing tumbling down. [Since The Ipcress File,] Deighton has shown himself to be the most protean of British best-sellers…. XPD borrows many of Forsyth's tricks: the rapidly changed international setting, the deadpan reportage style, the cut-out characters, the stress on insider's knowledge and terminology, familiar to the author, alien to the average reader. This Forsythian XPD I take to be something of a come-down from the earlier sequence, which had a genuinely engaging anti-hero. It is an even bigger come-down from Bomber, probably the best and certainly the most accurate popular novel about the Second World War in the air. Compared with these, XPD is a routine and nerveless performance, though such is the potency of Deighton's name that the novel is bound to sell well….

For all its diversity, there are certain core elements in Deighton's fiction. His novels all betray the other ranks' hatred of the commanding-officer class. It is the front-line men, agents, pilots, detectives, who are admirable. Another core element is Deighton's urge to demythologise. This is at its most aggressive in his recent work of history, Fighter, which presumes to dismantle the Churchillian myths about the heroism of the Few. His last novel, SS-GB, goes a step further: an alternative universe novel, it fantasises a Nazi victory and occupation in 1940 (Churchill—against whom Deighton seems to have something personal—is shot). Both the bolshy and the debunking aspects of Deighton are on display in XPD, which features a very slimy Director General of MI6 and seeks to convert Churchill's image from bulldog to whipped cur. There's clearly a lot of writing energy and creative disgruntlement left in Deighton. I hope it produces better things than XPD. (p. 22)