id="u28f36b29-f07f-5040-938d-211199347167">
LEN DEIGHTON Spy Line This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Ltd 1989 Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1989 Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010 Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010 Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010 Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780586068984 Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007395378 Version: 2017-05-23 Contents
The deceptively simple titles of the Bernard Samson series still yielded a wealth of possibilities with regard to how they might be illustrated. This second book of the middle trilogy was no different, suggesting lines of authority, responsibility, accountability, relationships both open and hidden. After much consideration, I eventually incorporated the concept in a more visual way. For the cover of Spy Line I replaced the photograph on my Russian visa with that of Bernard Samson’s and then ran it through our studio paper shredder to emphasize the notion of lines, particularly lines of destruction, as if Bernard’s identity is being struck through, erased. The vignette on the back cover features a doctored photograph of one of my old passports, an Eastern Bloc immigration officer’s rubber stamp plus