Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s John le Carré has died

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1965 British Cold War spy film directed by Martin Ritt and starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Oskar Werner. Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by John le Carré, the film is about a British agent who is sent to East Germany in order to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. With the aid of his unwitting English girlfriend, an idealistic communist, he allows himself to be recruited by the communists, but soon his charade unravels and he admits to being a British agent—a revelation that achieves the ultimate objective of the mission. Electric vision trailer

Penguin Books remembers : Born David John Moore Cornwell to Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–75) and Olive (Glassy) Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, le Carré’s relationship with his father, “conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird” [The Pigeon Tunnel], would be the inspiration behind his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy. 

In 1950 Cornwell joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in 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. 

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under ‘Second Secretary’ cover in the British Embassy at Bonn; he later was moved 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’ – a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish under their own names. 

As he wrote in a postscript to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: 

“I wrote The Spy who Came in from the Cold at the age of thirty under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. From the day my novel was published, I realised that now and for ever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it. The novel’s merit, then – or its offence, depending on where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible”.

Publication of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold would change the course of le Carré’s writing life forever – not only enabling him to live as a writer full-time but also providing an incredibly rich fictional seam to mine. He would go on to write the greatest novels of the Cold War, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, both of which were adapted by the BBC with Alec Guinness inhabiting the role of George Smiley – so much so that in the future it would be impossible for a certain generation to imagine Smiley without hearing Guinness’s inimitable voice.  For the full bio visit Penguin