Book review: Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

I didn't like this book, even though it is a Len Deighton, and I'm not quite sure why. The title is irritating, as is the cover picture, but my dislike and indeed disappoinment goes deeper. I think it was mostly that the sequence of things that happen, though perhaps quite interesting in themselves, don't fit together terribly well. It is too much just one thing, then another thing, until we reach the end.

This is set during the cold war, obvs, and we start with Our Nameless Protagonist in the desert with Major Mann of the CIA, in the middle of an operation to pickup commie defector Bekuv, a maser expert. We never go to England, and I miss WOOC(P) and Dawlish and so on. Anyway, they pick him up although he doesn't seem keen and on the way back the vehicle he was in - fortunately driven on ahead by some local arab - is shot up by a helicopter. But, never mind. We then wander around the States a bit in various rather sterile well-off surroundings.

There's a weird bit where ONP gets off with "Red", a beautiful backgammon player who just happens to be floating around, turns out to be CIA, and then turns out to be a - gasp - lesbian, as does Bekuv's wife. ONP is comically thrown by this, making the story vastly more dated than the cold-war frame does.

We then return to the desert, for a very silly and patently unnecessary car chase, before the denoument - look away now - that the dastardly commies have a big dish in the desert able to eavesdrop on our relay satellites over the Atlantic. But this makes no sense as the comms would hacve been encrypted anyway - no?