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Goldsboro Books

9780002243520

Violent Ward

Violent Ward

by Len Deighton

Publisher HarperCollins

Genre: Crime

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover


Regular price £100.00
Regular price Sale price £100.00
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  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    A very good first edition, signed by the author to the title page. Slight push-in to spine, foxing to page block, and some denting to the top of the front cover. In a very good unclipped dust jacket. Slight chipping to front cover (visible in picture above). Several light surface marks.

About the book

If America is a lunatic asylum, then California is the Violent Ward.

Mickey Murphy is a criminal lawyer with an office in LAs downtown low-rent district, an ex-wife who bleeds him for money, clients who would plead the Fifth Amendment if they could count that high, and an unrequited passion for his wealthiest clients wife. To make matters worse, Mickey finds himself embroiled against his wishes in an elaborate and clever scam thats going askew, and being interrogated by the LAPD about a brutal murder.

With an observant eye and ear for the California scene, Deighton once again uses his brilliant storytelling skills to propel an exciting and suspenseful narrative at breakneck speed to a dramatic climax in a riot-torn city.

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About the Author

Len Deighton

Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British author. His publications have included cookery books and works on history, but he is best known for his spy novels.

After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended the Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London; he graduated from the latter in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator and designed the cover for the first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote his first novel, The IPCRESS File, which was published in 1962 and was a critical and commercial success. He wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, an unnamed working-class intelligence officer, cynical and tough. Between 1962 and 1966 Deighton was the food correspondent for The Observer and drew cookstrips—black and white graphic recipes with a limited number of words. A selection of these was collected and published in 1965 as Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the first of five cookery books he wrote. Other topics of non-fiction include military history.

Many of Deighton's books have been best sellers and he has been favourably compared both with his contemporary John le Carré and his literary antecedents W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and Graham Greene. Deighton's fictional work is marked by a complex narrative structure, extensive research and an air of verisimilitude.

Several of Deighton's works have been adapted for film and radio. Films include The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Spy Story (1976). In 1988 Granada Television produced the miniseries Game, Set and Match based on his trilogy of the same name, and in 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a real time dramatisation of his 1970 novel Bomber.

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