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Portrait of Len Deighton Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (1986)

Sample of authors

Deighton, Len

The British author Len Deighton was born as Leonard Cyril Deighton in London. His father was a chauffeur; his mother worked in a hotel kitchen. He was a boy when he helped his father as a volunteer during the London Blitz. After leaving school he worked briefly as a railway clerk, and at the age of seventeen he joined the Royal Air Force Special Investigation Branch as a photographer. He then...

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Literary figures

Joe Ryker

Gender: Male

A worn-out but effective police detective in New York, accustomed to violence and for that reason always armed with two revolvers. He is a disillusioned lone wolf and the main character in a suite of novels by Jack Cannon (pseudonym for Nelson DeMille). Disagreement about rights, however, meant that for a while several authors wrote books about Joe Ryker – and DeMille was forced to re-name his h...

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