John Le Carré

John Le Carré (1931- ), British novelist and master of the political thriller.

Le Carré, pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, received a public school education, and then attended Berne and Oxford universities, gaining a first-class degree in Modern Languages. He taught at Eton for two years (1956-1958) and then joined the Foreign Service (1960-1964).

He wrote a series of highly successful novels about the dark underworld surrounding the secret service, which are now regarded as perceptive documentations of the post-World War II Cold War climate. His first novel was Call for the Dead (1961), which was made into a film, The Deadly Affair, in 1967. It introduced his most famous character, George Smiley, who was to reappear in several later novels. It was followed by A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963), the novel which established his name and won him the Somerset Maugham Award and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), and A Perfect Spy (1986), were serialized for television. The Little Drummer Girl (1983), about the cause of Palestinian liberation, and The Russia House (1989), inspired by a visit to the Moscow Bookfair towards the end of the Cold War, were both made into popular films. The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1981) was an unsuccessful attempt to break away from spy fiction. His novels The Secret Pilgrim (1991), The Night Manager (1993), and Our Game (1995) demonstrated his intention to continue to write about the characters and settings of the world of espionage even after the end of the Cold War.

In The Constant Gardener (2001), a middle-aged British diplomat searches for the killers of his murdered young wife, a human rights activist, in Kenya. Le Carré returned to the spy novel with Absolute Friends (2003), set in the world of international politics in the post-9/11 period. In his 20th novel, The Mission Song (2006), a gullible translator finds himself caught up in a scheme to plunder Africa.