David Cornwell, who wrote for six decades under his famous penname, John le Carré, and who died Dec. 12 at the age of 89, came from a long tradition of British writers who were also spies. Unlike others in that tradition, however, his books transcend their spy-novel genre. Like espionage itself, they are about human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice. And for the same reason, le Carré’s fiction had the rare distinction of tangibly influencing his subject—the intelligence world.
Although he worked for British intelligence for only a few years, in low-level positions—le Carré was the only novelist to have served in both MI5 (Britain’s domestic-focused Security Service) and MI6 (foreign intelligence)—his experiences shaped his entire subsequent writing career. He wrote his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), a minor masterpiece, while commuting by train to MI5’s London headquarters—making it surely the best novel ever written on a train—though he had moved to MI6 by the time it was published. At the time, both services were heavily shrouded in secrecy, far more so than today. Britain’s government then did not even publicly avow the existence of its intelligence services. Forbidden from even mentioning either service, le Carré instead amalgamated them into a single fictional institution: the Circus.
