The author who reimaginged the spy thriller

John le Carré’s works focused on Cold War intrigue

John le Carré, who forged thrillers from equal parts of adventure, moral courage and literary flair, died Sunday at age 89. Mr. Le Carré explored the gap between the west’s high-flown rhetoric of freedom and the gritty reality of defending it, in novels such as “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Night Manager,” which gained him critical acclaim and made him a bestseller around the world.

Born as David Cornwell in 1931, Mr. Le Carré began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland at the end of the 1940s. After teaching at Eton he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and looking after spies behind the Iron Curtain from a back office at the MI5 building on London’s Curzon Street. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, the novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym of John le Carré — despite his publisher’s advice that he opt for two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as “Chunk-Smith.”

A spy modeled on Bingham, who was “breathtakingly ordinary … short, fat, and of a quiet disposition,” outwits an East German agent in Mr. Le Carré’s 1961 debut, Call for the Dead,” the first appearance of his most enduring character, George Smiley. A second novel, 1962’s “A Murder of Quality,” saw Smiley investigating a killing at a public school and was reviewed positively. But a year later, when his third thriller was published, Mr. Le Carré’s career surged to a whole new level.

Smiley is only a minor figure in “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” but this story of a mission to confront East German intelligence is filled with his worldweary cynicism. According to Alec Leamas, the 50-something agent who is sent to East Berlin, spies are just “a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”

According to Mr. Le Carré, the novel’s runaway success left him at first astonished and then conflicted. His manuscript had been approved by the secret service because it was “sheer fiction from start to finish,” he explained in 2013, and so couldn’t possibly represent a breach in security. “This was not, however, the view taken by the world’s press, which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing.”

Smiley moved centre stage in three novels Mr. Le Carré published in the 1970s, charting the contest between the portly British agent and his Soviet nemesis, Karla. In “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” he unmasks a mole in the highest echelons of the British secret service, while in “The Honourable Schoolboy” he goes after a money laundering operation in Asia, before piecing together Karla’s Swiss connections in “Smiley’s People.” The world of “ferrets” and “lamplighters,” “wranglers” and “pavement artists” was so convincingly drawn that his former colleagues at MI5 and MI6 began to adopt Mr. Le Carré’s invented jargon as their own.

As the Cold War came to a close, friends would stop him in the street and ask: “Whatever are you going to write now?” But Mr. Le Carré’s concerns were always broader than the confrontation between East and West, and he had little patience for the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled any kind of end either for history or the espionage that greased its mechanisms. He tackled the arms trade in 1993 with “The Night Manager,” big pharma in 2001 with “The Constant Gardener” and the war on terror in 2004 with “Absolute Friends.”

Mr.Le Carré returned to Smiley for the last time in 2017, closing the circle of his career in “A Legacy of Spies,” which revisits the botched operation at the heart of the novel that made his name.

The consistent love of his life was writing, “scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk”.

“Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit,” he wrote. “First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.”