An Expensive Place to Die

"An Expensive Place to Die" is a 1967 novel by Len Deighton. It is set initially in Paris and takes its title from an Oscar Wilde quotation about the said city. ("Paris is a very expensive place to die.") The action concerns the shady dealing and possible expensive pimping of one Monsieur Datt against a background of espionage.

The unnamed narrator, a British agent, is told to leak to the Chinese information about the effectiveness of nuclear weapons, in order to bolster their deterrent effect. M Datt, posing as a psychologist, believes he is working for the Chinese by accumulating compromising film of the sexual activities of various influential people. However in fact the Chinese have no interest in these films. The narrator does a deal with the French security services to bring together the Chinese agent Kuang with the American nuclear scientist Hudson in a farmhouse in northern France, so that the information can be communicated. He then escorts Kuang to a pirate radio station ship moored in international waters off Ostend and returns to the harbour, where Datt is shot while trying to flee by a Belgian paratrooper. A sub-plot concerns Datt's illegitimate daughter Maria, who had been married to the French policeman Loiseau and had also fallen for the narrator. She protects the narrator when he is given a truth drug by Datt, and then drives an ambulance containing the films to Ostend. Despite having caused her father Datt's death, at the narrator's suggestion she is let go.