The former intelligence operative who elevated the spy novel
John le Carré 1931–2020
John le Carré turned the spy thriller into high art. A former British intelligence agent who wrote 25 novels over six decades, he won fans around the globe with intricately plotted best-sellers such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Those books, which sold more than 60 million copies and were adapted into hit films and TV shows, lifted the spy genre with their elegant prose and moral complexity, depicting Cold War intelligence agents not as dashing heroes but as conflicted, flawed figures grappling with isolation and disillusionment. Instead of a James Bond–like tuxedo-clad playboy, Le Carré’s best known protagonist, George Smiley, was a short, fat, ill-dressed man “of a quiet disposition” who wrestled with ambivalence about his work. “Calling him a spy writer,” said Robert Gottlieb, who edited some of Le Carré’s books for Alfred A. Knopf, “is like calling Joseph Conrad a sea writer, or Jane Austen a domestic-comedy writer.”
Le Carré “knew deception intimately” from an early age, said The New York Times. Born David Cornwell in the southern English town of Poole, he was 5 years old when his mother ran off with another man; he wouldn’t see her for 16 years. He would have “a ragged, destabilizing childhood dominated by his father, Ronald, an amoral, flamboyant, silver-tongued con man.” Ronald was in and out of prison for fraud and always working up a new getrich scheme, but he “craved respectability for his children” and sent David and his brother Anthony to separate boarding schools. David became adept at posing as the product of a stable bourgeois home and supplying excuses for missing tuition checks. Hating the school, he decamped for Switzerland at age 16 and studied German at the University of Bern.
It was there he “came to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service,” known as MI6, said The Guardian (U.K.). Employed as
“a teenaged errand boy of British Intelligence,” as he put it in a 2016 memoir, he filled that role until he was called up for military service in 1949. Working as an intelligence officer in Austria, he interviewed Communist defectors, then studied at Oxford University, where he “compiled dossiers” for Britain’s domestic intelligence agency on classmates “suspected of left-wing activity.” After marrying in 1954, he taught German at Eton—the elite boarding school for boys—then rejoined MI6, working in Germany while posing as a British diplomat. He began writing fiction, filling red notebooks in longhand.
His first book, Call for the Dead, was published in 1961, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). It and a follow-up, published under the pen name John le Carré to cover his true identity, were “well reviewed” but sold poorly. Then came The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the “tale of an agent forced to carry out one last, risky operation in divided Berlin”—a mission whose true nature isn’t what he thinks. The book “was immediately hailed as a classic,” said the Associated Press, and Le Carré quit espionage “to become a full-time writer.”
For years Le Carré’s name was synonymous with Cold War intrigue. But following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he “turned his attention to a changing landscape of global insecurity,” said The Washington Post. He sent “his fictional spies to Israel, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America,” in works such as The Little Drummer Girl and The Constant Gardener, and wrote of arms dealers, Big Pharma, and Russian money launderers. “In later years, he became outspoken in his opposition to the U.S. intervention in Iraq” and to Brexit. Writing primarily at his remote cliff-top home in southwestern England, Le Carré published his final book— Agent Running in the Field— last year. The themes of duplicity and deception consumed him until the end. “I’m a liar,” he once said. “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”