John Le Carré

John Le Carré, pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (1931- ), British writer of spy novels that realistically portray international espionage. He was born in Poole, England, and educated at the University of Bern in Switzerland and at the University of Oxford. He taught at Eton College from 1956 to 1958 and then worked for the British foreign service.

In the early 1960s Le Carré began writing works about the underworld surrounding the British secret service. His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), introduced the character of George Smiley, a clever, aging British intelligence agent who also appears in several of Le Carré’s later novels. The critical and popular success of Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963), convinced him to work full time as a writer. Many successful thrillers followed, including the popular trilogy—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley's People (1980)—in which Smiley struggles against a secret service agent from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley’s People; and the later novel A Perfect Spy (1986) were serialized for television. The Little Drummer Girl (1983), about conflict in the Middle East, and The Russia House (1989), inspired by a visit to the Moscow Book Fair, were both made into popular motion pictures. Le Carré's novels are regarded as perceptive depictions of the political climate during the Cold War, the period between the end of World War II (1939-1945) and the early 1990s during which the United States (and its allies) and the USSR (and its allies) regarded each other with mutual suspicion and hostility.

Three later novels—The Secret Pilgrim (1991), The Night Manager (1993), and Our Game (1995)—demonstrated Le Carré’s intention to continue writing about the characters and settings of the world of espionage even after the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War. But the following year, with The Tailor of Panama (1996), he switched locales and forms of corruption: The evildoers seek to overturn the Panama Canal treaty. The Constant Gardener (2001) centers on political conflict in Kenya as a middle-aged British diplomat searches for the killers of his murdered young wife, a human rights activist. He returned to the spy novel with Absolute Friends (2004), set in the world of international politics in the post-9/11 period. Le Carré’s 20th novel, The Mission Song (2006), drops a gullible translator into a scheme to plunder Africa.