While working on Tinker Tailor in the early 1970s he made photographic studies of locations he planned to use (“partly to give me documentary help”), but in later years travel notebooks sufficed. “It’s not a shooting war anymore, George. His bitter disappointment at New Labour, and its free market theology, made A Delicate Truth a testament to the continuing power of a writer by then in his 80s. Virtually the same words were used by Le Carré in an interview in America. It was all small-bore stuff, and he did not much enjoy it. No one knows where the lines are,” Sachs says in the final novel of Le Carre’s Karla trilogy. Bonn was an important posting, and his fluency in German made him a coming man. “It is here, it is here.”. He was raised in a bookless household, and left to find his own way to Sapper, the creator of Bulldog Drummond, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The festering suspicion that Kim Philby was a Soviet agent and Philby’s disappearance in 1963 brought to boiling point the spy hysteria in the press and in the security services. “Mr David, why have you come to see me?” I have come, Le Carré said, to put my hand on the Palestinian heart. An account in The Pigeon Tunnel places Le Carré in Beirut, being driven blindfolded to an anonymous building, and then taken into a room to wait. John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell), novelist, born 19 October 1931; died 12 December 2020, Writer whose spy novels chronicle how people’s lives play out in the corrupt setting of the cold war era and beyond. He feared that Le Carré possessed a mole, an informant, within Wolf’s agency. The Secret Pilgrim (1990) introduces the first of a new variety of villain: Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, a smooth-tongued amoral capitalist for whom the Thatcherite and Reaganite theology of free markets proved highly serviceable. He came in wearing Ray-Bans with his hookers and his men and his people.” In Our Kind of Traitor (2010), he achieved the near-impossibility of making his fictional Dima, a Russian gangster and money launderer, into a complex and sympathetic figure. “I found I was involved in a kind of social war. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/best-le-carre-novel His real name is David John Moore Cornwell. Yet the chapter titled Son of the Author’s Father, first published as In Ronnie’s Court in the New Yorker in 2002, is a troubled, brilliant and unforgettable portrait of his parents. American sales made Le Carré a wealthy man, as writers go, but his marriage did not long survive his transition to the life of a full-time writer. Why, he demanded, would any decent person soil the good name of the service and provide encouragement for the KGB? Claire Bloom and Richard Burton in the film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965, directed by Martin Ritt. Alan Furst in the New York Times said A Most Wanted Man was Le Carré’s “strongest, most powerful novel” with “near perfect narrative pace”. He was a protege of the spy-catcher Maxwell Knight. After leaving the Foreign Office, he took his family to live in Crete, where he wrote A Small Town in Germany. Every potential location was visited and conversations, tones, accents, dress and the feel of a location found a place in his travel notebooks. He is survived by his wife, Jane, and four sons. Le Carre wove the story of betrayal into the Karla trilogy, beginning with the 1974 novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and ending with “Smiley’s People” (1979). Mikhail Lyubimov, the “most brilliant and level-headed” of the large KGB contingent at the London residency from 1960 to 1964, and who served as chief of the British department of the KGB in the 1970s, claimed that it was Philby who betrayed Le Carré’s identity as a spy to the KGB. 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