Mexico Set. Len Deighton

       Cover designer’s note

      Some years ago I attended a design congress in Oaxaca, Mexico, where for a few pesos I purchased some wonderful papier mâché masks, my favourite being the umbrella salesmen, a moustachioed gentleman with a gold tooth. This image seemed to fit perfectly as a matching half to Len Deighton’s protagonist Bernard Samson’s face in Mexico Set. This two-faced quality seemed, to me, to speak volumes for the nature of the business that Bernard is in, and also to the conflicted nature of his character.

      Some time later I was invited to speak at a design conference in Queretaro, Mexico. To my delight the event took place during the festival of ‘Día de los Muertos’, ‘The Day of the Dead’, during which time many wonderful related artefacts are sold. One of these items comes from the folk art of ‘papel picado’, the brightly coloured tissue paper-cuts. I thought that the image of a skeleton reading a book would be a most appropriate illustration for this book’s back cover.

      At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

      Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

      LEN DEIGHTON

      Mexico Set

       Copyright

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1984

      Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1984

      Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010

      Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

      Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

      Thanks are due to the following for permission to quote lines from ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’:

      The Remick Music Corporation, New York and Detroit, and EMI Music Publishing Limited,

      London. Copyright © 1926, 1948

      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.

      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.

      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: 9780008124991

      Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007387199

      Version: 2017-09-07

      Contents

       Cover

       Cover Designer’s Note

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Introduction

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

      

       Chapter 7

      

       Chapter 8

      

       Chapter 9

      

       Chapter 10

      

       Chapter 11

      

       Chapter 12

      

       Chapter 13

      

       Chapter 14

      

       Chapter 15

      

       Chapter 16