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Remembering John Le Carré, British Spy Turned Best-Selling Novelist

Terry Gross

Le Carré, who died Dec. 12, worked for MI5 and MI6 early in his career and later drew on that experience in thrillers like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . Originally broadcast in 1989 and 2017.

Hear The Original Interview

Novelist John Le Carré Reflects On His Own 'Legacy' Of Spying

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John le Carré

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John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) was born in Dorset in 1931, and was educated at Sherborne School and the University of Berne, before reading modern languages at Oxford University. He taught at Eton from 1956-58, then spent five years in the British Foreign Service until 1964.

He started writing in 1961, and his first novel, a spy thriller, was Call for the Dead (1961), later made into the film The Deadly Affair starring James Mason. This was followed by A Murder of Quality (1962), a detective novel set in a boy's school, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the novel which brought him worldwide public attention, which tells the story of the last assignment of an agent who wants to end his espionage career.

Since then, John le Carré has written many novels, including a series which feature the character George Smiley: Call for the Dead (1961), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Smiley's People (1980) and The Secret Pilgrim (1991). Other novels, all of which have been made into successful films, are: The Looking Glass War (1965);  The Little Drummer Girl (1983); The Russia House (1989); The Tailor of Panama (1996); and The Constant Gardener (2001). In 2005 the film of  The Constant Gardner , starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, opened the London Film Festival. The book won the 2006 British Book Awards TV and Film Book of the Year.

John le Carré's latest novel is A Delicate Truth   (2013). He worked with screenwriter Peter Morgan on a film adaptation of Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Sp y, which was released in September 2011, starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley. Eight of his 'Smiley' novels have been dramatised for BBC Radio 4 and were broadcast during 2009 and 2010. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011.

Critical perspective

David cornwell, better known by his nom-de-plume john le carré, is, quite simply, a natural storyteller, a master..

In the enviable position of being a critically acclaimed writer who tops international bestseller lists he is, like Graham Greene, without whom there may never have been a Le Carré, able to combine complex, thrilling plots with a measured, formal narrative style.

Le Carré has always had an alchemical ability to make fictional gold out of his real life experience working in intelligence, creating some of the best spy fiction ever written. In his work, MI6 becomes the 'Circus'. That name alone informs us that Le Carré’s world is not that of Ian Fleming. 'What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?' Leamas asks Liz in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), the novel which established Le Carré’s reputation: 'they’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs?' The Spy Who Came In From The Cold has had extraordinary cultural resonance. Greene described it as 'the best spy story I have ever read'. Even those who haven’t read it are aware of its presence; it has become part of the culture. The tale of Leamas, forced to play the role of a lost, aimless, drifting ex-agent so as to be able to destroy the East German Mundt, someone whom the Circus have long wished to apprehend, is, from its stunning opening, full of a lingering sadness, both moral and intellectual. Terse, suspenseful, and powerfully gripping, it has an atmosphere of chilly, end of days darkness, and is arguably the best of Le Carré. Many consider what is often known as  The Karla Trilogy, to be Le Carré’s finest achievement, but, whilst its range and impact is undeniable, I do not think that any of the three novels has the black punch which makes The Spy Who Came In From The Cold a near flawless piece of work.

The Karla Trilogy gives centre stage to the iconic George Smiley, who appears in a minor role in the early novels. Out of retirement and acting head of the Circus, we follow his battle with Karla, his Russian nemesis, across continents and within his own establishment. The novels are engrossing and full of brilliant flashes - the relationship between Smiley and his team in all three and particularly in Smiley’s People (1980), the descriptions of an Asian continent ravaged by war in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), the manner in which Smiley goes after the Russian mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) - but the novels work best when George Smiley is present. When he is not there, they somehow fade. Described in Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy as 'small, podgy and at best middle-aged … one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth', it is Smiley’s insularity, his meticulousness, his lack of physical grace and his undoubted brilliance as both a field man and head of the Circus, that draws us in; it is never less than fascinating to watch him operate. Smiley is a master spy, but a man with a personal life in free fall. Unlike Bond, who is of course a fantasy object, George Smiley is real and flawed; he elicits sympathy and awe. With no hint of exaggeration he is amongst the most memorable fictional characters of the 20th century.

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Le Carré has written 19 novels. The majority concern themselves mostly with espionage but there has also been a love story, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), which was poorly received, a semi-autobiographical study of his troubled relationship with his father; A Perfect Spy (1986), considered by many to be his masterpiece; and an attack on Western greed in Africa, The Constant Gardener (2001), recently made into an Oscar winning film.

One book stands out in Le Carré’s oeuvre, in the way in which it demonstrates the author’s natural flair for comic narrative, a facility Le Carré has perhaps never fully exploited. Whilst his sardonic humour is never absent from any of his novels, it is in The Tailor of Panama (1996), inspired by Greene’s Our Man in Havana , that he gives it a freer reign. Andrew Osnard, a young, headstrong agent, whose mission it is to keep an eye on the political manoeuvrings leading up to the handover of the Panama Canal on 31 December 1999, hires Harry Pendel, proprietor of Braithwaite Limitada. Osnard wants Pendel to supply him with vital information on the Panamanian underground and keep him abreast of the talk around town. Pendel, tailor to the great and the good, is a deliciously drawn protagonist, whose lies and betrayals eventually begin to get the better of him. Satirical and at times farcical, The Tailor of Panama is, like the novel it is a hymn to, full of a sense of impending political chaos; it amuses and entertains yet it also provokes and unsettles.

This last point is key to Le Carré. He is the most politically aware of authors. His fiction engages fully and passionately with the times. He enters charged arenas like the Arab/Israeli conflict in The Little Drummer Girl (1983), and offers not only a thrilling entertainment, but also a considered study of the situation. He gives warning while providing pleasure; his storytelling is fuelled with a need to take the world to task, to unearth failures of justice and abuses of power and privilege, to offer insights into the minds of those who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

This is particularly evident in Le Carré’s most recent novel, Absolute Friends (2004), as angry, passionate and complex a book as he has ever written. Absolute Friends is a deliberately provocative analysis of the current 'War on Terror', something which could have unseated a lesser writer. It is cogent, witty, tender, touching and, at its end, devastating both in what transpires and in the sudden brutal economy of the narrative. The story of Ted Mundy and Sasha, who first become friends in the Berlin of the late 60s, meet again as agents in the Cold War, then come together once more in the present day world of terror and lies, it is fuelled by a deeply engaged, moral sensibility. Whatever our politics we must answer the questions Le Carré poses. Allied to the bitter rage, there is a sober, rational, precise intelligence that cannot be ignored. This novel belongs at high table, with the very best of Le Carré’s work; it proves, if nothing else, that there’s not only life in the old dog yet, but new direction.  John Le Carré has, like, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene, transcended a genre, and made literature. His work is notable for its meticulous construction and its immensely detailed, rich, elegant style. Le Carré has a gift for deep and subtle characterization. This from the opening of Absolute Friends : 'a failure at something – a professional English bloody fool in a bowler and a Union Jack, all things to all men and nothing to himself, 50 in the shade, nice enough chap, wouldn’t necessarily trust him with my daughter. And those vertical wrinkles above the eyebrows like fine slashes of a scalpel, could be anger, could be nightmare, Ted Mundy, tour guide'. In one paragraph - strangely reminiscent in its beat and rhythm to the opening of Nabakov’s Lolita - we have a full flavour of the character. Le Carré is to be cherished. He is, as The Observer says, 'a literary master for a generation'.

Garan Holcombe, 2006 

Bibliography

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Second John le Carré biography to reveal secrets held back while author was alive

The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman, who published an authorised biography in 2015, promises ‘a hidden life of secrecy, passion and betrayal’

A biography focusing on the “turbulent private life” of crime writer John le Carré is to be published, illuminating “a hidden life of secrecy, passion and betrayal”, according to the book’s author Adam Sisman.

The Secret Life of John le Carré is a follow-up to Sisman’s authorised 2015 biography, which was published by Bloomsbury.

The new book will contain, said Sisman, information that he was “obliged to withhold” from the previous book when Le Carré was “very much alive and looking over my shoulder”. It is being published with the knowledge of Le Carré’s estate and will be released in October this year by independent publisher Profile Books.

Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, died in 2020 , aged 89, of pneumonia. He was famous for spy novels including those featuring the character George Smiley, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and A Legacy of Spies, the final Smiley novel, which was published in 2017.

Although Le Carré was a private person, his affair with Susan Kennaway , the wife of his friend, the novelist James Kennaway, is well documented: the relationship was portrayed by Kennaway in his novel Some Gorgeous Accident, by Le Carré in The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and in The Kennaway Papers, edited by Susan Kennaway in 1981.

Sisman spent four years writing his first biography of Le Carré, and in an article for the Guardian said that while the book was “written with my subject’s cooperation, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there was no strain between us” during that time.

Speaking about the new book, Sisman said that he came to realise that Le Carré’s “turbulent personal life, which he wanted to keep private in his lifetime, was key to an understanding of his work”. The official blurb for the book says that while Le Carré was “apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades”.

“His son Simon urged me to keep a secret annexe for publication after his father’s death,” Sisman said. “The Secret Life of John le Carré is based on that annexe. It shows how Le Carré conducted his affairs like espionage operations, running women as if they were agents. The tension involved became a necessary drug to his writing.”

Nick Humphrey, editorial director at Profile, said The Secret Life of John le Carré was a “fascinating examination of the complex relationship between a biographer and his subject”.

Reviewing John le Carré: The Biography in the Guardian, Robert McCrum said it was a “fascinating truce between candour and guile” .

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Sisman’s book came out just 12 months before Le Carré released his own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, which McCrum said in the Guardian was a “rag-bag compilation of old and new material” which seemed like “vintage Le Carré”.

“Cornwell remains a magician of plot and counter-plot, a master storyteller,” said McCrum. “But look behind the smoke and mirrors and you will find a more reflective and slightly chastened figure, all passion spent, and perhaps less comfortable than hitherto in the world of cross and double-cross he has created around himself.”

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ARTS & CULTURE

John le carré, dead at 89, defined the modern spy novel.

In 25 novels, the former British intelligence officer offered a realistic alternative to Bond, using the spy genre as a vehicle for imperial critique

Ted Scheinman

Senior Editor

In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he'd spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the restless child of an estranged mother and a con-man father, and a precocious student of modern languages to boot, the young wayfarer was a natural recruitment target for the security services, which scooped him up in the late 1940s to be “a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” as he put it in his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel . Over the next 15 years, those little errands would continue and grow, furnishing Cornwell with the material that would fill the whopping 25 spy novels he wrote under the pen name John le Carré.

It would be true to say that he was the finest spy novelist of all time, but in fact he was one of the greatest novelists of the last century. In a blow to his millions of readers, le Carré died of pneumonia on Sunday, at the age of 89.

“I spend a lot of odd moments these days wondering what my life would have looked like if I hadn't bolted from my public school, or if I had bolted in a different direction,” le Carré wrote in his memoir. “It strikes me now that everything that happened later in life was the consequence of that one impulsive adolescent decision to get out of England by the fastest available route and embrace the German muse as a substitute mother.”

During his parentless, wandering days in Switzerland and Germany, and indeed throughout his life, German was more than a mere second language to le Carré. He was fond of quoting the axiom, often attributed to Charlemagne, that “To possess another language is to possess another soul.” Among his adored German authors, le Carré was particularly fierce in his love for Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the latter is a love that le Carré shared with his most famous creation, the portly, diffident, all-seeing George Smiley, who appears in nine of le Carré's novels.

In part as a result of his youthful devotion to Goethe, a strain of romanticism runs through nearly all of le Carré’s books: an idealism and an affinity for tragic beauty that serves as a natural counterpoint to his pessimism and career-long obsession with betrayal. These two impulses, the sentimental and the cynical, were fundamental to his fictional world. His uncanny ability to harmonize them in a witty, lyrical style marked by a fatigued but spry irony redefined what the modern spy thriller could be: ambivalent, complicated, unflashy and capable of sophisticated humanitarian argument, with rich characters and a literary depth one doesn’t find in (say) Ian Fleming .

Le Carré’s own intelligence career, typical for men of his education, race and class during this period, was on and off, with the two often blending together. His most serious work seems to have been abroad, running clandestine operations in Bonn and Hamburg around 1960. “In all, I don’t suppose that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years,” he told writer George Plimpton in a 1997 interview. He was apparently well liked in MI-5 and MI-6, both of which he served in. The quality of “clubbability” mattered a great deal at this time, and le Carré had no shortage of the requisite pedigree: He had earned a degree from Oxford and taught at Eton, where he spotted potential talent and reported suspected dissidents on behalf of Her Majesty.

During a period of active service, he began his literary career in 1961 with the short novel Call for the Dead . (He adopted his famous pseudonym at the behest of his bosses at MI-6, who didn’t want one of their boys’ names plastered across the covers of a spy thriller.) He wrote his next two novels under similar operational circumstances and made his fortune with the third, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold —a barbed wire of a spy novel, plotted with virtuosic tightness and narrated with a weary irony befitting the gray areas its characters so tragically inhabit.

Le Carré left the service after one of the most embarrassing moments in its history: Kim Philby , the former head of MI-6’s anti-Soviet desk, was revealed in 1963 to have been a double-agent for the Soviet Union, and an investigation showed he had blown the covers of many British officers and agents across Europe, including the young novelist. In 1964, le Carré was reportedly asked to leave MI-6. Luckily for him, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was on its way to becoming an international bestseller. He now had the cash to devote himself full-time to writing, an arrangement he had desired for at least a decade.

He spent the next half-century and more between homes in Cornwall and Switzerland, writing some of the most ambivalent, moving, psychologically deft thrillers about the Cold War—and, eventually, about much more. It's fair to say that he blew the possibilities of spy fiction wide open with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), with its shambling, middle-aged hero George Smiley patiently chasing a mole placed in British intelligence by Smiley's KGB counterpart, the mysterious, omniscient-seeming Karla. Still, le Carré's fictional world was much bigger than the Cold War. Some critics liked to say that he lost his muse when the Iron Curtain fell (“Since the [Berlin Wall] came down, his writing has often seemed a little uncertain,” a New York Times reviewer wrote in 2004), but le Carré never depended on one metaphor, or one war, for his livelihood. A post-Glasnost world saw le Carré telling tales of Ingush rebels in Chechnya ( Our Game , 1995); addressing the erosion of civil liberties and the entrapment of Muslim refugees in A Most Wanted Man (2008); and dramatizing the brutal, world-spanning consequences of pharmaceutical corruption ( The Constant Gardener , 2001).

In his later life, le Carré took greater creative control of film adaptations of his novels, even co-writing the screenplay for 2001’s The Tailor of Panama . But with or without his oversight, his novels have been keeping movie audiences reliably rapt for decades. Actors who starred in le Carré adaptations include some of the most famous of the last 50 years: Richard Burton, James Mason, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Richardson, Gary Oldman, Sean Connery and Alec Guinness, who brought Smiley to vivid life in the 1979 BBC miniseries of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” (After that character-defining performance, even le Carré couldn’t think of Smiley without picturing Guinness: “George Smiley, whether I liked it or not, was from then on Alec Guinness—voice, mannerisms, the whole package,” he wrote in an introduction to Smiley’s People .)

Throughout his career, le Carré was never content to research his subjects from a chair, or to settle for government reports—though, thanks to abiding connections within the intelligence services, he had access to various official secrets. The novelist sometimes treated his work as though he was a wartime journalist. To build characters and scenes for The Honourable Schoolboy , set in southeast Asia in the mid-1970s, le Carré visited perilous zones throughout the region and reportedly dodged bullets in Cambodia by diving under a car . (I happen to know the African correspondent who served as one of le Carré's consultants for his 2006 novel about the Congo, The Mission Song ; she came away impressed with his punctiliousness.)

Even people who haven’t read his novels are likely familiar with the many words and phrases from the world of intelligence that le Carré introduced: “honeytrap,” for instance, and, most famously , “mole.”

Le Carré lived a bit like the characters in his books: He traveled widely, skied at speeds beyond his own capacity, had affairs, and dined with eminences and kings while remaining suspicious of ostentation and charm—perhaps because, after the Philby affair, le Carré said he could never trust charisma again.

He sometimes chafed at being dismissed as a simple spy novelist, or else would deny that he cared about those who considered his work to be pulp: “I honestly believe that critics will gradually come round to what the public has long recognized, that the spy novel is as flexible, as valid a theme in our time as any other major theme, as valid as the love story,” he told the Washington Post in 1977.

He’s largely been proven right. Philip Roth has called A Perfect Spy (1986) “ the best English novel since [World War II] .” In 2013, Ian McEwan echoed this sentiment, saying le Carré would “be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain.” The critical consensus has largely moved in the same direction. Like Graham Greene, le Carré crafted stories that evoke the alienation of having to move through worlds shaped by secret forces beyond our control. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or J.R.R. Tolkien, he created a host of recurring characters whom his readers could follow through new books as old friends (or enemies). Like Joseph Conrad, he was deeply attuned to the human capacity for casual barbarism, and to the bloody consequences of colonialism. His novels are as much anti-spy novels as they are spy novels, standing indictments of genteel imperial bureaucracy. Despite this lack of apparent glamour, the world never stopped reading.

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Ted Scheinman is a senior editor for Smithsonian magazine. He is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan .

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A John le Carré Reader

The novelist transformed moral ambiguity and the lives of Cold War spies into high art. If you’ve never read any of his thrillers, here are seven we recommend.

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By Joumana Khatib

John le Carré, who died over the weekend at age 89 , left behind a remarkable literary legacy . He wrote 25 novels over nearly six decades, zeroing in on the machinations of the espionage community and distilling complex interior conflicts into eminently readable tales.

For millions of readers across the world, his allure lies in the authenticity and believability of his novels. Le Carré worked as a British agent until his literary success allowed him to quit his undercover work to write full-time. His spies are morally ambiguous, genteel, solitary — a marked departure from the suave and high-octane figures like James Bond, who glamorized the practice of espionage. His books feature labyrinthine plots and high stakes; the greatest betrayals and acts of deception are often internal.

One of his most enduring heroes, Alec Leamas, perhaps best summarized le Carré’s feelings about espionage in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”

If you’ve never read any of le Carré’s work, start with any of these seven books.

‘ The Spy Who Came in From the Cold ’ (1963)

Newcomers might begin with this novel, which catapulted le Carré to international fame and which Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read.” Alec Leamas is a Cold War-era spy who takes one last assignment before he can retire — or so he hopes — sending him down a twisty path of betrayal, deception and tragedy.

‘ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ’ (1974)

This is the first in a trilogy (followed by “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People”) in which George Smiley, the dowdy, pudgy, restless and brilliant intelligence official, faces off against his Russian nemesis, Karla, a K.G.B. mastermind. “I don’t think that anyone is likely to write a better suspense novel than this one,” the critic Anatole Broyard wrote in these pages . “And it is probably unfair to restrict it altogether to that category, because this book is not about the good guys against the bad guys, but about most of us against ourselves.”

‘ The Little Drummer Girl ’ (1983)

It’s 1979 and Charlie, a young British actress, has been recruited by the Israelis to infiltrate a group of Palestinians. The setup makes many of le Carré’s literary preoccupations literal — the fuzzy lines between acting, self-deceit and manipulation, for starters — and the story is rare among his novels for its female protagonist.“‘The Little Drummer Girl’ is about spies as ‘Madame Bovary’ is about adultery or ‘Crime and Punishment’ about crime,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in The Book Review . “He is a very powerful writer. His entertainment is of a high order. He gives pleasure in his use of language. And his moral focus is interesting and provocative.”

‘ A Perfect Spy ’ (1986)

It’s never a good sign when a spy goes missing. Magnus Pym, a British double agent, retreats to the Devon coast after the death of his father, a remorseless cheat whose negligence drove Pym to find comfort and order in the intelligence service. The novel is also his most autobiographical work; le Carré’s father was a charming and flamboyant con man, too. As he told Vanity Fair : “Though I’ve never been to a shrink, I think that writing ‘A Perfect Spy’ is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway.”

‘ The Constant Gardener ’ (2001)

The murder of a British diplomat’s wife in Kenya sets off an international hunt for justice and an emotional reckoning, too. Justin, a career officer in the foreign service, is jolted out of professional and personal complacency after his wife, Tessa, is killed. As he investigates, he is forced to consider the possibility that a huge pharmaceutical company — or even the British government — may have been involved in her death.

‘ A Most Wanted Man ’ (2008)

The moral and political outrage which fueled le Carré’s books was especially strong in his later novels. In post-9/11 Hamburg, Issa, a Russian-Chechen fugitive, appears with a bag of money around his neck, claiming a fortune in a private bank account there. Issa has been jailed and tortured in Russia and Turkey, leaving him with profound psychological wounds. Who, exactly, is he? Alan Furst, who reviewed the book for the Book Review, wrote , “The sheer desperation of those whose job it is to prevent another 9/11, another Madrid commuter train, another London Tube attack, is written as a slow-burning fire in every line, and that’s what makes it nearly impossible to mark the page and go to sleep.”

‘ Our Kind of Traitor ’ (2010)

A British couple, Gail and Perry, are drawn into an international conspiracy thanks, in part, to an impeccably stylish game of tennis. Perry’s opponent, Dima, is a flashy Russian mobster hoping to defect to England. The themes and subject matter may be au courant, however, “the appeal of the book is not in its modernity, but in its stubborn embrace of the past,” our reviewer Chelsea Cain wrote . “It’s sort of thrilling to inhabit a world, even briefly, where characters are surprised when people and institutions fail to live up to their expectations.”

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