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Berlin Game
by Len Deighton
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Knopf (1983-11-12)
ISBN: 0394534077
EAN: 9780394534077
Dewy Decimal #: 823.914
Hardcover: 345 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1983-11-12
SKU: 05739
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: Book states first edition but no number line, in very good condition
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
When a valuable agent behind the Iron Curtain signals he wants out, it's up to Bernard Samson, once active in the field but now anchored to a London desk, to undertake the crucial rescue. But soon, Samson is confronted with evidence that there is a traitor among his colleagues. And to find out who it is, he must sift through layers of lies and follow a web of treachery from London to Berlin until hero and traitor collide.
"Each scene in this story is so adroitly realized that it creates its own suspense."
NEWSWEEK
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Customer Reviews
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ok - if you haven't read 'the Spy Who Came in from the Cold'
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-09-06
The standard cold war plot after 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: 1) bring back an agent from the 'other side'; and, 2) there's traitor inside 'our' spy operations. As in detective stories the identity of the mole has to remain hidden until the very end. This creates the usual problems of characterization and plausibility: the writer can't draw too much attention to the 'criminal'. Deighton therefore chooses a subjective point of view of narration. Given the identity of the traitor in this novel, the hero's description of his family life (happily married and two children (non-existing, as far as the novel goes) has no sense of plausible realism to it and merely serves as a ploy to misdirect the reader.
Worse, his hero is supposed to have grown up in Berlin, but Deighton's forte is not rendering the experience of living in cold-war East Berlin, which merely serves as cardboard background.
But the dialogue is good, and the fact that the upperclass rich are the [...] gives compensatory satisfaction.
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Not Free SF Reader
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-11-04
Defectors and moles.
Len Deighton's Game, Set Match trilogy is of a similar style to John Le Carre's books about George Smiley.
A quiet, unassuming, unheroic and unprepossessing and sometimes overlooked spy is wasted in obscurity until someone realises he is the right man for the job to help out in a defection.
Life soon gets too adventurous for Bernard Samson when he realises there are problems in his own office with enemy spies.
Good, intelligent espionage fiction is to be found here.
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Berlin Game Sucks
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-06-29
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Len Deighton's Berlin Game is very lame. It's the ONLY book that I stopped reading. It is boring; very boring!
Best,
John
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The master of the genre
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-08-27
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
If you enjoy spy novels, I presume you know of this guy. If not, you need to get some Len Deighton right away. He's better than Robert Ludlum. (But aren't we all?) Better than Ian Fleming. Better than John LeCarre. Even better than Gerd Balke, who you probably haven't read. Better than any spy novelist I'm aware of. His writing is snappy, fast, easy to read, full of good stuff. He's a keen observer of human nature and he doesn't use 100 words when he only needs 10.
Having heaped such praise upon the man, I'll tell you that I didn't finish reading this book. I read 5 of its 26 chapters and found that I didn't actually care why our spy in East Berlin wanted to cross the wall and get out of the game. Yep, it's kinda old, but I doubt I quit reading just because the wall came down. But if you like spy novels, I think this author is for you.
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Great novel
Rating  (5)
Date: 2005-10-28
2 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a particular spy novel. If you are looking for action you will be satisfied. Neverless I remeber Berlin in 1983 and later from two sides of the famous wall. Lot of those specific atmosphere of divided city can be find in the trilogy. The book is really worth reading for that reason.
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