STYLISH AUTHOR OF SPY NOVELS
Briton drew on his own experiences as Cold War-era spy
• John le Carré, who drew on his stints as a spy to write novels about a world in which intrigue and personal betrayal went hand in hand, died Saturday. He was 89.
John le Carré, a British author who drew on the enigma of his incorrigibly criminal father and his own experiences as a Cold Warera spy to write powerful novels about a bleak, morally compromised world in which international intrigue and personal betrayal went hand in hand, died Saturday at a hospital in Cornwall, England. He was 89.
The cause was pneumonia, his U.S. publisher, Viking Penguin, said in a statement.
In a literary career spanning six decades, le Carré published more than two dozen books. His bestknown titles, including “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974), sold in the millions and were made into acclaimed film and television adaptations. More than a master of espionage writing, he was widely regarded as an elegant prose stylist whose skills and reputation were not limited by genre or era.
After the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s, le Carré turned his attention to a changing landscape of global insecurity, sending his fictional spies to Israel, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Central America in such books as “The Night Manager” (1993), “The Tailor of Panama” (1996) and “The Constant Gardener” (2001).
His literary admirers included Graham Greene, Philip Roth and Ian McEwan, who once called him “the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain” and championed him for the prestigious Booker Prize. (Le Carré rejected any entreaties to compete for literary honors.)
Praised for his cunning plots, psychological complexity and flawed, many-faceted characters, le Carré also showed a deft hand for misdirection. Even his name was an act of deception: “John le Carré” was a pseudonym adopted by David Cornwell — his given name — because British intelligence officers were forbidden to publish under their own identities.
Having created such brooding anti-heroes as Alec Leamas, George Smiley and Magnus Pym, le Carré offered an understated view of the spy world that was in sharp contrast to the sex, gadgets and chase-scene formula of Ian Fleming ’s James Bond.
Instead, le Carré’s agents tend to furrow their brows, adjust their eyeglasses and walk inconspicuously along rain-soaked streets, relying on careful observation and endless paperwork. Conversations are muted, offices are shabby and guns remain (mostly) holstered. Everything in his novels, from the weather to the clothing to the fine-grained moral choices, seems outfitted in shades of gray.
Tension builds through cryptic gestures, dry humor or meditative glimpses through windows. Loyalties are questioned, relationships are sacrificed, and the fate of nations seems to hinge on alltoo-human frailties.
During his years in Britain’s domestic and international spy services, known as MI5 and MI6, respectively, le Carré did not hold a high rank. Yet his foreign assignments and his experience in the London headquarters of the spy service — known as “the Circus” in his books — gave his fiction an air of verisimilitude.
A con man for a father
David John Moore Cornwell was born Oct. 19, 1931, in Poole, England. His childhood was one of constant upheaval, in large part because of “the extraordinary, the insatiable criminality of my father and the people he had around him,” he told The Guardian in 2019.
His father, Ronnie, was an inveterate con man, gambler and rogue. He never held a conventional job, was continually in and out of jail throughout his son’s childhood and got by on his immense charm.
To complicate his early life, le Carré was 5 when his mother left the family. He did not see her again until he was 21. She later said she deserted le Carré and his older brother because she feared retribution from Ronnie Cornwell and his underworld friends.
Le Carré and his brother, Anthony Cornwell — who later became an advertising executive in New York — attended separate boarding schools and were often left to fend for themselves. Living like “millionaire paupers,” le Carré wrote that their father would take them to Switzerland for vacations, then sneak out of hotels without paying.
Fed up with his school in England, he left at 16 and enrolled at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he studied German language and literature. He was soon “recruited as a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, “The Pigeon Tunnel.”
He was 18 when he entered the British military, assigned to an intelligence unit in Allied-occupied Vienna. He interviewed World War II refugees and had his first taste of the world of espionage.
Returning to England, le Carré studied at the University of Oxford, where he infiltrated Communist student groups for Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5. After graduating in 1956, he taught German at Eton, an elite English boarding school for boys, then two years later joined MI6. After his childhood, the world of spying presented an odd sense of stability.
Le Carré refused to discuss what he did during his years undercover, except that he posed as a diplomat, usually in German-speaking countries. He published his first three books while still working for crown and country.
He gave various explanations for how he chose his nom de plume — le Carré means “the square” in French — before ultimately admitting that he did not really know. The success of “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” his third book, allowed him to resign from the intelligence service.
Ronnie Cornwell, meanwhile, married several times, had countless affairs and was incarcerated in at least half a dozen countries.
Le Carré once bailed his father out of jail in Jakarta and, years later, learned that he was entangled in arms dealing and currency fraud, among other shady ventures. When Ronnie Cornwell died in 1975, le Carré paid for the funeral, but did not attend.
In “A Perfect Spy,” which critics rank among le Carré’s finest work, the morally conf licted central character, Magnus Pym, composes a novel within a novel, examining his relationship with his reprobate father and questioning his career as a spy.
Many film, TV adaptations
No fewer than 15 films and television miniseries have been based on le Carré’s books, including “The Little Drummer Girl” (1984), starring Diane Keaton as an American actress recruited by Israeli intelligence; “The Russia House” (1990), with Sean Connery as a publisher unwittingly caught up in an international arms race; “The Tailor of Panama” (2001), starring Geoffrey Rush as an expatriate British tailor who becomes trapped in a web of lies; and “The Constant Gardener” (2005), with Ralph Fiennes as a diplomat in Africa fighting corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.
Smiley, the character le Carré called “my secret sharer, my companion,” was portrayed by Alec Guinness in two six-part miniseries, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982) and by Gary Oldman in a 2011 film of “Tinker Tailor.”
Le Carré’s first marriage, to Ann Sharp, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 1972, Jane Eustace; three sons from his first marriage; a son from his second marriage; and several grandchildren.