Espionage agent-turned-writer of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’
John le Carre, the spyturned-novelist whose elegant and intricate narratives defined the Cold War espionage thriller and brought acclaim to a genre critics had once ignored, has died. He was 89.
Mr. le Carre’s literary agency, Curtis Brown, said Sunday that he died in Cornwall, southwest England, on Saturday after a short illness. His death was not related to COVID-19.
In such classics as “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Honourable Schoolboy,” Mr. le Carre combined terse but lyrical prose with the kind of complexity expected in literary fiction. His books grappled with betrayal, moral compromise and the psychological toll of a secret life. In the quiet, watchful spymaster George Smiley, he created one of 20th-century fiction’s iconic characters: a decent man at the heart of a web of deceit.
Born David Cornwell, Mr. le Carre worked for Britain’s intelligence service before turning his experience into fiction.
Mr. le Carre’s other works included “Smiley’s People,” “The Russia House” and, in 2017, the likely Smiley farewell, “A Legacy of Spies.” Many of his novels were adapted for film and television, notably a film version of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (1965) that starred Richard Burton and BBC television adaptations of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982) featuring Alec Guinness as Smiley.
Mr. le Carre was drawn to espionage by an upbringing that was superficially
conventional but secretly tumultuous.
Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, southwest England, on Oct. 19, 1931, he appeared to have a standard upper-middle-class education: the private Sherborne School, a year studying German literature at the University of Bern, compulsory military service in Austria — where his tasks involved interrogating Eastern Bloc defectors — and a degree in modern languages at Oxford University.
It was an illusion: His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man who was an associate of gangsters and spent time in jail for insurance fraud. His mother left the family when David was 5; he didn’t meet her again until he was 21.
After university — which was interrupted by his father’s bankruptcy — Mr. le Carre taught at the prestigious boarding school Eton before joining the foreign service.
Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a “lowly” operative with the domestic intelligence service MI5 — he had started as a student at Oxford — and then its overseas counterpart MI6, serving in West Germany, then on the Cold War front line, under the cover of second secretary at the British Embassy.
His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym. Mr. le Carre kept the pen name for his entire career. He said he chose the name — “square” in French — simply because he liked the vaguely mysterious, European sound of it.
“Call For the Dead” appeared in 1961 and “A Murder of Quality” in 1962. Then in 1963 came “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” a tale of an agent forced to carry out one last, risky operation in divided Berlin. It raised one of the author’s recurring themes — the blurring of moral lines that is part and parcel of espionage, and the difficulty of distinguishing good guys from bad.
The novel was immediately hailed as a classic and allowed him to quit the intelligence service to become a full-time writer.
His depictions of life in the clubby, grubby, ethically tarnished world of “The Circus” — the books’ code name for MI6 — were the antithesis of Ian Fleming’s suave action-hero James Bond, winning Mr. le Carre a critical respect that eluded Mr. Fleming.
Smiley appeared in Mr. le Carre’s first two novels and in the trilogy of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “The Honorable Schoolboy,” and “Smiley’s People.”
Mr. le Carre said the character was based on John Bingham — an MI5 agent who wrote spy thrillers and encouraged Mr. le Carre’s literary career — and the ecclesiastical historian Vivian Green, the chaplain of his school and later his Oxford college, “who became effectively my confessor and godfather.”