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...