David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931-12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels.
During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works.
Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. His books include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008), and Our Kind of Traitor (2010), all of which have been adapted for film or television.
More information: BBC
David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England.
Cornwell's schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School. He grew unhappy with the typically harsh English public school régime of the time.
From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950, he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West.
In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents. During his studies, he was a member of a dining society known as The Goblin Club.
More information: The Conversation
He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines, and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as John Bingham), and whilst being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961).
In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn; he was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as John le Carré (le Carré is French for the square) -a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.
In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).
He left the service to work as a full-time novelist. Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as the upper-class traitor, codenamed Gerald by the KGB, the mole hunted by George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).
Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political.
Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.
Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama.
More information: Scholar Commons
The novels emphasise the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of east–west moral equivalence. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible.
The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an antidote to James Bond, a character le Carré called an international gangster rather than a spy and whom he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature.
In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.
In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy, saying I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".
He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance -all of that we called anti-communism prevailing during that time.
Download The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
world of espionage, you never shed it.
It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
John le Carré
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