Raymond Hawkey time at the Royal College of Art Hawkey first encountered Len Deighton when Deighton (another RCA scholarship student at that time) gatecrashed a literary party that Hawkey was helping to organise. Instead of ejecting the intruder, Hawkey found much in common with him and they became "lifelong friends" (Dempsey, "ibid"). In 1962, Hawkey was Deighton's choice to design the cover of his first novel "The IPCRESS File", which some regard as the template for the covers of all subsequent airport novels. He went on to design covers for Deighton's books, including "Horse Under Water", "Funeral in Berlin" and "The Action
Harry Palmer been theorised that the protagonist in another of Deighton's spy novels, "An Expensive Place to Die" (1967), also written in the first-person-anonymous narrative, is also 'Harry Palmer'; however, differences in characterisation and plotting indicate this is someone else other than Palmer. "The IPCRESS File" novel came out just after the release of the first James Bond film "Dr. No" (1962). When the novel reached best-seller status, Eon producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli approached Deighton to write the script for the second Bond film, "From Russia With Love" (1963). Little of Deighton's screenplay was actually used on the shoot. Saltzman