“Leamas said nothing, just stared through the window of the checkpoint, along the empty street.”
That’s the second sentence of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I first read it my freshman year of college. My earliest taste of le Carré’s prose, it hooked me from that moment forward. His third book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold put him on the map. A Cold War thriller published in 1963, it tells the story of a spy forced to do one last job before he can retire. In a scant 212 pages, le Carré manages to deftly weave a world of veiled espionage, vivid characters, and vicious suspense. An ex-British Intelligence officer, le Carré uses his own experience in the field to add detail and an air of reality to his otherwise fictional works. Since Came In From The Cold le Carré has written many other books, most famously, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Constant Gardener, The Looking Glass War, and The Night Manager. Many of these titles have been adapted into various film and TV projects of varying acclaim. Still alive today he continues to put out new works, many dealing with various forms of espionage whether Cold War related or not.
John le Carré is not a typical mystery or spy novelist, however. While many of his works now sit in airport bookstores, his similarities with authors such as Sue Grafton, Ian Fleming, and Tom Clancy end there. Le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley, who appears in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, acts, looks, and thinks like an anti-James Bond. Smiley receives the following description early on in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, “Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London’s meek who do no inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet…. ‘Like an egg-cosy,’ his beautiful wife had remarked not long before the last occasion on which she had left him…” In summation, Smiley, the hero of more than one of le Carré’s tales is short, fat, awkward, and has a wife that is prone to cheating on him. Not exactly the stuff of Bond movies. And neither do the books read like action films. Sure, the occasional shoot-out or car chase occur, but they usually end in untimely death, lost information, and failed missions. Le Carré’s spies never uncover the plans for secret Russian space missiles, or foil nuclear launches, or race sun-powered lasers on parasails. They might take down an odd general, or a nefarious gun runner, but only on their best day. More often than not, they fail.
Seems like boring reading. In le Carré’s world, spies, good spies like Smiley, seemingly the best spy who ever lived, mostly read old files. Every once in a while, they might have to make an exchange of information or people in an East Berlin apartment, but most of the time reading old files gets the job done. But in these seeming minutiae le Carré shines. An absolute master of his craft, le Carré gets at the psychological aspect of spying. And therein lies his genius. Not one to sugarcoat the damages of the Cold War, le Carré’s characters don’t come in guns blazing, the Union Jack flying in the background while they murder a bunch of Soviets. No, they mostly suffer from making choices that get people killed. All while working for a country and an ideal they don’t really understand, and possibly don’t believe in anymore. Le Carré paints a picture of a world run by vain, incompetent men who leave their messes to people like Smiley to pick up. Le Carré doesn’t just stick with the Cold War either. While the fall of the Iron Curtain didn’t end le Carré’s use of it as a setting, he also expanded beyond it. Books like Single & Single, The Night Manager and others deal with multinational companies and post-Cold War governments trying to make their beds in a new globalized world. Most of the time in awful ways. Le Carré does not buy into the Cold War rhetoric and simply making the Russians bad and the West good. Instead he shows how people muddle through something, even when they don’t always believe in it. And he’s not afraid to write about himself. One of his greatest works, A Perfect Spy takes the form of a semi-autobiographical work about his relationship with his father. You don’t have to enjoy spy novels to enjoy le Carré. These things make le Carré’s work great.
Certainly, one can find faults with le Carré’s work. He mainly writes about white men. He maintains a large amount of sympathy for Britain during the Cold War despite its many flaws. He can sometimes lose the plot. His whole thing is rather British. I get it if you don’t want to give the books a chance. But he also wrote Connie Sachs, one of the best female characters in spy novel history. And he hates the shit out of the U.S. or, perhaps to be fairer, he thinks they’ve gotten way too big for their britches. I often write about books that have “good world-building,” “great character development,” or “fantastic plotting.” Most le Carré works have all three in spades. So, what I really want to say here is that I have a bunch of his books. Hit me up if you ever want to read one of them. Or visit your library or used bookstore. They will have his work. I think you’ll probably enjoy it. If not? Well, my bad.
Here are some good places to start:
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
A Perfect Spy
Single & Single
A Delicate Truth