Len Deighton, creator of the 'anti-Bond', dies at 97

British writer Len Deighton, who created the sardonic working-class spy played by Michael Caine in the 1965 Cold War film "The Ipcress File", has died, his literary agent said Tuesday.

Deighton "passed away peacefully on Sunday" aged 97, his literary agent said in a statement, calling him "one of the greatest spy and thriller writers of the twentieth century".

Deighton's thick-bespectacled, rough-edged spy provided an antidote to the debonair navy officer James Bond and gentleman spy George Smiley of his contemporaries Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

The spy was anonymous in his first book "The Ipcress File", and its sequels "Horse Under Water" (1963), "Funeral in Berlin" (1964) and "Billion-Dollar Brain" (1966).

But the anti-hero was baptised Harry Palmer for the hugely successful film version of the book starring Caine, which brought Deighton to a wider audience.

Deighton, who like his spy also wore thick spectacles, lived life out of the limelight, rarely giving interviews.

Yet he sold millions of books in the English-speaking world and was translated into 20 languages over a career spanning half a century.

Reflecting on Deighton's legacy in 2021, the Financial Times newspaper wrote that "The Ipcress File" had "a plot that was impossible to follow, and a title that was an impenetrable acronym."

"Yet its appearance marked a sea change in the Cold War spy novel and today the first edition is a collector's item," it said.

In an afterword to the 2009 edition of the book, Deighton recalled the enthusiastic reviews it garnered when it published in 1962.

"The critics were using me as a blunt instrument to batter Ian Fleming about the head," he wrote.

Ipcress stands for "Induction of Psychoneuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress", the brainwashing to which a group of abducted British scientists are subjected in the novel.

The role of Harry Palmer helped propel Caine, a porter's son from gritty east London, to Hollywood glory.

Caine later praised writers like Deighton for giving him his big breaks.

"They started writing for working-class people, and it made all the difference," he said in 2017.

Many of Deighton's books have been best-sellers and he has been favourably compared both to 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).