Somebody once told me that to write a book for the movies you must do it in episodes—Act 1, Scenes 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on…. If you write spy novels intended for the movies (and I can only conclude that such was the intention of the author of "XPD"), you must have regular violent episodes, the violence preferably mayhem, but an occasional accident will do if it is screechy enough.

I wish Len Deighton had let the movie people do his plot and had only then decocted a novel from the script, because what he has brought forth is most painfully unreadable, the violent episodes like telephone poles meandering over the landscape, stringing along a plot line that keeps sagging to the ground. When you reach a murder, an assassination or other butchery, your attention is temporarily hyped, but the business in between is so drained of literary or emotional interest that you are left feeling as benumbed as you would after looking at 100 pictures of murdered corpses to identify a person with whom you are concerned—though you are unlikely to be concerned with anyone by the time you have flogged your way through Mr. Deighton's tedious scrapbook. (p. 12)

The author is unwilling to leave to the imagination of his readers the importance of the [Hitler] Minutes, and his intuition may well be justified since with the encumbrance of an imagination how could a reader plow through such passages as abound in "XPD"?

"'Oh, my God,' said the M.I.5 man [on hearing about the Minutes from M.I.6]. 'Every last bloody friend Britain has in the world would be enraged overnight if this sort of stuff was ever made public.'" That's in case the reader is unwilling to imagine the gravity of the Hitler Minutes. It is, unhappily, characteristic of Mr. Deighton's verbal imprecision that he should at once urge that such Minutes are unique, and refer to them as "this sort of stuff," i.e., like just another embezzlement.

But Mr. Deighton has not hit his stride. Further on in the conversation the head of M.I.6 says to the head of M.I.5, "Do you realize what this would do to our delicately balanced economy? Foreign investors would flee from sterling and the stock market would crash … the social consequences of that would be terrible to contemplate." The reader at such a point would welcome the collapse of sterling in place of any prolongation of such conversation between the wooden Indians who by agonies of affirmative action have been elevated to chiefs of British Intelligence.

Perhaps there are readers who expect that admirals of the ocean fleet speak to each other in such fashion, but, in Mr. Deighton's book, so also speak the mates…. One has the sensation of being in a movie theater reading subtitles written by a translator unfamiliar with the idiom. The author's anxiety to stress the importance of the Minutes does not let up: "But we are playing for big stakes, my friend. Who knows what money can accrue from a careful and skillful utilization of this fine asset? But make no mistake about the price of failure. How long do you think it will be before they make … an attempt upon your life too?" It eludes understanding how such tone-deafness can make its way into print, even if what was intended was merely a few Xeroxed copies of a screen script for Hollywood.

Such tusheries beget a similar treatment of violence. Example: "Billy Stein had no way of knowing who they were, because their killers had hindered identification by cutting off and taking away the hands and heads of both men." Good for a quick jolt, until the reader wonders why the killers' anxiety to hinder identification didn't prompt them to remove the victims' bodies from their home. (pp. 12, 31)

Historical invention is justified in spy novels. But (I think) the invention should not be pressed so hard as to suggest that the author is begging the reader to believe that It Was Actually So. In the concluding chapter—which gives us the only ingenious surprise in this endless volume—Mr. Deighton over-documents his thesis, so to speak, as if whispering to the reader: "Just between you and me, such an encounter between Churchill and Hitler did once take place."

If so, it was the lesser of the two villainies that confront the reader on closing the covers of "XPD." (p. 31)