Spy novelist John le Carré dies at 89
`His like will never be seen again'
David Cornwell, better known by his nom de plume, John le Carré, author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and other well-known thriller novels, died on Saturday night at age 89 after a short battle with pneumonia.
“His like will never be seen again, and his loss will be felt by every book lover, everyone interested in the human condition,” wrote Jonny Geller, CEO of The Curtis Brown Group, in an announcement. “We have lost a great figure of English literature, a man of great wit, kindness, humour and intelligence. I have lost a friend, a mentor and an inspiration.”
Born Oct. 19, 1931 in Poole, in the county of Dorset, England, le Carré taught French and German at Eton College in the early 1950s and went on to service in the intelligence community during the Cold War.
“He used the experience to create a fictional world, full of moral ambiguity, professional compromise and institutional corruption, that felt vividly real.,” says a 2009 profile in the Observer.
By 1960, he'd transferred to MI6, but his career as an intelligence operative was brought to a close by the revelation that Cornwell was the author of the 1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the exposure of MI6 agents by Kim Philby, a British spy and Soviet double agent.
In 1964, he devoted himself to writing. Over the course of his career, he wrote 25 novels — the latest of which, Agent Running in the Field, was published in October 2019 — and one memoir.
In his later years, he was deeply critical of the United States and worried about fascism regaining its foothold in Europe. In 2003, he wrote of the Iraq War, which was to begin just weeks later, as the beginning of an age of “historical madness.”
“The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dream,” he wrote in the essay for The Times, a U.K. newspaper.
And, in 2017, he mused at a charity event about Donald Trump's presidency, the rise of a populist right in Europe and its parallels to 1930s Europe.
He leaves his wife Jane and four sons.