Deighton's first five spy novels form a group featuring his no-name, tough, wise-cracking British intelligence agent introduced in The Ipcress File. He works for a special provisional and civilian branch of the British Secret Service, or MI-6. The other novels of this group are Horse Under Water (1963), in which he seeks to salvage Nazi-forged currency from a sunken German submarine; Funeral in Berlin (1965), in which he smuggles a Russian biochemist out of East Berlin; The Billion Dollar Brain (1966), in which he penetrates a computer-based, right- wing espionage unit headed by a Texas multimillionaire; and An Expensive Place to Die (1967), in which he attempts to prevent a catastrophe triggered by a U.S. lie that leads to the imminent explosion of a Chinese H-bomb. These fictional narratives have their real-life settings and approximate parallels during the conflict of the Western powers and the Soviet Union after World...