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 Novelist,
Politician, and Essayist
First United Methodist Church
March 23, 1999
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Best known for his superpower espionage novel The Spy Who Came in from
the Cold (1963), John Le Carré introduced the world of spy
intrigue to a generation of eager readers, exploring complicated issues
of Cold War policy through fiction. Le Carré is the author of seventeen
novels, nine of which have become films or television miniseries. His
books are classics of intrigue that employ the plots and settings of international
espionage to illuminate complex political and personal situations. In
a recent interview, Le Carré commented, "I hope to provide
a metaphor to the average reader's daily life. I think that what gives
my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical
secret world to describe some realities of the overt world."
Born David Cornwall in England in 1931, Le Carré was educated at
the universities of Bern and Oxford, where he earned an honors degree,
and then spent five years in the British Foreign Service. His first novel,
Call for the Dead (1961), was written during his commutes to work.
With this book, Le Carré introduced the character of mild-mannered
British secret service agent George Smiley, who would also appear in several
other novels. After the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came
in from the Cold, Le Carré devoted himself to writing full-time.
With this novel, which received the Somerset Maugham Award, Le Carré
is credited with establishing a new, more realistic genre of espionage
literature as a reaction to the James Bond cult. Graham Greene gave the
novel considerable praise, and J. B. Priestley wrote that the book was
"superbly constructed with an atmosphere of chilly hell."
Connected to a long tradition of spy writers, from Christopher Marlowe
and Ben Jonson to Daniel Defoe, Le Carré draws material for his
novels from his own experiences and familiarity with intelligence agents.
In fact, some of the espionage jargon Le Carré created for his
books has found its way into Scotland Yard. British agent George Smiley,
reintroduced in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), is based on
two real-life people: Lord Clanmorris, who wrote novels under the name
John Bingham and worked for MI5, and Vivian Green, Le Carré's teacher
at Oxford.
In 1986, Le Carré published one of his favorite books, The Perfect
Spy, drawing heavily on his own relationship with his domineering
father. Reflecting the changes in international politics and the end of
the Cold War, the villains in The Night Manager (1993) and Our
Game (1995) are international dealers in drugs and guns. In Single
& Single (1999), Le Carré transcends the spy novel genre,
finding intrigue in a new setting: the sinister world of international
finance. The story explores the corrupt liaisons between criminal elements
in the new post-Soviet states and the world of legitimate finance in Europe.
Excerpt taken from Single and Single (1999)
This gun is not a gun.
Or such was Mr. Winser's determined conviction when
the youthful Alix Hoban, European managing director and chief executive
of Trans-Finanz Vienna, St. Petersburg and Istanbul, introduced a pallid
hand into the breast of his Italian blazer and extracted neither a platinum
cigarette case nor an engraved business card, but a slim blue-black automatic
pistol in mint condition, and pointed it from a distance of six inches
at the bridge of Mr. Winser's beakish but strictly nonviolent nose. This
gun does not exist. It is inadmissible evidence. It is no evidence at
all. It is a non-gun.
Mr. Alfred Winser was a lawyer, and to a lawyer facts
were there to be challenged. All facts. The more self-evident a fact might
appear to the layman, the more vigorously must the conscientious lawyer
contest it. And Winser at that moment was asconscientious as the best
of them. Nevertheless, he dropped his briefcase in his astonishment. He
heard it fall, he felt the pressure of it linger on his palm, saw with
the bottom of his eyes the shadow of it lying at his feet: my briefcase,
my pen, my passport, my air tickets and travelers' checks, my credit cards,
my legality. He did not stoop to pick it up, though it had cost a fortune.
He remained staring mutely at the non-gun.
This gun is not a gun. This apple is not an apple.
Winser was recalling the wise words of his law tutor of forty years ago
as the great man spirited a green apple from the depths of his frayed
sports coat and brandished it aloft for the inspection of his mostly female
audience: "It may look like an apple, ladies, it may smell like an
apple, feel like an apple"—innuendo—"but does it rattle
like an apple?"--shakes it—"cut like an apple?"—hauls
an antique bread knife from a drawer of his desk, strikes. Apple translates
into a shower of plaster. Carols of laughter as the great man kicks aside
the shards with the toe of his sandal.
Winser's reckless flight down memory lane did not stop
there. From his tutor's apple it was but a blinding flash of sunlight
to his greengrocer in Hampstead, where he lived and dearly wished himself
at this moment: a cheery, unarmed apple purveyor in a jolly apron and
straw hat who sold, as well as apples, fine fresh asparagus that Winser's
wife, Bunny, liked, even if she didn't like much else her husband brought
her. Green, remember, Alfred, and grown above ground, never the white—pressing
the shopping basket on him. And only if they're in season, Alfred, the
forced ones never taste. Why did I do it? Why do I have to marry people
in order to discover I don't like them? Why can't I make up my mind ahead
of the fact instead of after it? What is legal training for, if not to
protect us from ourselves? With his terrified brain scouring every avenue
of possible escape, Winser took comfort in these excursions into his internal
reality. They fortified him, if only for split seconds, against the unreality
of the gun.
This gun still does not exist.
Selected
Works
Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
A Small Town in Germany (1968)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
The Honorable Schoolboy (1977)
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1978)
Smiley’s People (1980)
The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
A Perfect Spy (1986)
The Russia House (1989)
The Secret Pilgrim (1991)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single and Single (1999)
Web
Site Links
Official web site
of Le Carré
Interview
with Le Carré on Salon.com
New York Times featured author
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