JOHN LE CARRE' (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell)
If Eric Ambler can be called the father of the spy story, John Le Carré is the one that has made them famous. David John Moore Cornwell, was born in Poole, Dorset, and studied at Sherborne School. He attained a first class honors degree in modern languages at Oxford and even studied German for a year at the University of Berne. After having taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958, Cornwell worked for the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, first as Second Secretary to the British Embassy in Bonn and then as political counsel at Hamburg. He published his first novel in 1961, A Call for the Dead, which introduced the character of George Smiley, a sad master spy. He chose his pseudonym, John Le Carré, seemingly from a jeweler's shop. Fame arrived with his third book, The Spy that came in from the Cold, two years later. Defined by some as the best spy story ever written, the novel won the Gold Dagger in 1963 (as well as an Edgar for best novel in 1965), an award he won again for The Honorable Schoolboy in 1977. Cornwell was also given a Grand Master Award in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America and a Diamond Dagger in 1988. He currently lives in Cornwell.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CALL FOR THE DEAD
Why should a routine security check drive Fennan to suicide? Why should a suicide arrange for a GPO alarm call? Le Carre's debut novel blends murder investigation with a spy story.
A MURDER OF QUALITY
Carne School kept itself apart from the Dorset town it dominated. But something terrible had happened in this enclosed world: the wife of a junior master had been murdered. Smiley goes to solve this murder.
For Leamas the espionage business has become an hermetic, enclosed world, detached from outside reality. He has watched his last agent being shot, crossing from East to West Berlin, and his death marks the end of the Circus' East German network. But Control is planning an operation against the head of East German Intelligence. And Leamas is to be the instrument, set in East one last time....
THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR
Uncertain evidence suggests Soviet missiles are being put in a place close to the German border, while vital film has gone missing and a courier is dead. The Department has to find an old hand who will prove its mettle.
A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY
A middle-aged Second Secretary from the British Embassy in Bonn has vanished after 20 years' loyal service, and he has taken vital office files with him. Alan Turner is sent to find him.
THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER
Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, carousing artist and Helen, his nakedly alluring wife.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
British Secret Service Agent George Smiley, has a world-class problem. He has discovered a mole--a Soviet double agent who has managed to burrow his way up to the highest level of British Intelligence. Under the direction of Karla, Smiley's equivalent in the Soviet Union, the agent has already blown some of the most vital secret operations and most productive networks. Now-how can Smiley use a lifetime's worth of espionage skills to ferret out a spy who possesses them as well?
THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY
George Smiley is chief of the battered British Secret Service at a time when the betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network. Smiley wants revenge. His method is attack, the quarry Karla, the battleground Hong Kong, and the choice of weapon the Honourable Jerry Westerby.
SMILEY'S PEOPLE
Into a shadowy, violent and intricate world steeped in moral ambivalences steps George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus, as the Secret Service is known. His brief is to bury crime, not to solve it, as he fights his own private battle from London to Paris and Hamburg.
THE LITTLE DRUMMMER GIRL
Lured by Israeli intelligence into the world of espionage, Charlie, a young actress, is plunged into a deceptive and delicate trap to ensnare an elusive Palestinian terrorist.
A PERFECT SPY
Magnus Pym, Britain's premier spy, has vanished-sending intelligence communities on a frenzied international manhunt. As the search plays out, so does a chain of clandestine operations surfacing in Washington, Vienna, Prague, London, and Berlin.
But the most powerful drama of all comes from exploring Pym's background - his education as a spy, and the spectacular motives and mentors who transformed him into a master of guile and deception.
THE RUSSIA HOUSE
British Intelligence recruits a derelict, saxophone-playing publisher who visits the Moscow Book Fair and stumbles across the hottest Soviet defence secrets in years.
THE SECRET PILGRIM
The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is forced by the explosions of change to revisit his secret years.
THE NIGHT MANAGER
In the shadowy areas of international law criminals work hard at figuring loopholes. One such wheelerdealer is Paul Firman. He pursues his own ends in a quiet, unobtrusive way. Why would anyone want to bother about him?
But he is unaware that an obsessive academician, Professor Krom, has stumbled on Firman's activities and is determined to expose him. Two of Krom's colleagues are on hand as witnesses as Krom prepares to confront Firman. But none have bargained with a third party threatening to put a permanent stop to the encounter.
The booby-trapped grounds of the Mediterranean Villa Lipp, a hovering motor cruiser, a sudden attack - Krom is prepared for none of these. But Firman, always cool and self-possessed, responds with force and decision, and in the end pulls Krom's chestnuts out of the fire.
OUR GAME
Tim Cranmer, retired scret servant and Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and for 20 years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat, have an unresolved rivalry that dates back decades. They follow each other to Moscow and then Southern Russia.
THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal. Seldom has the weight of politics descended so heavily on such a tiny and unprepared nation. And seldom has the hidden eye of the British Intelligence selected such an unlikely champion as Harry Pendel - a charmer, a dreamer, an evader, a fabulist and presiding genius to the house of Pendel & Braithwaite Co. Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of London and presently of Panama City. Yet there is a logic to the spies' choice, for everybody who is anybody in Cental America passes through Pendel's doors. He dresses politicos and crooks and conmen. His fitting room hears more confidences than the priest's confessional. And when Harry Pendel doesn't hear things as such - well, he hears them anyway, by other means.
SINGLE & SINGLE
When a corporate lawyer from the House of Single & Single is murdered in Turkey, a string of events occur, from the arrest of a Russian freighter to the disappearance of a London financier. The logical connection must be one of love, deceit or the triumph of humanity.
THE CONSTANT GARDNER
The young and beautiful Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana. Her putative African lover has disappeared, and her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.
If Eric Ambler can be called the father of the spy story, John Le Carré is the one that has made them famous. David John Moore Cornwell, was born in Poole, Dorset, and studied at Sherborne School. He attained a first class honors degree in modern languages at Oxford and even studied German for a year at the University of Berne. After having taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958, Cornwell worked for the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, first as Second Secretary to the British Embassy in Bonn and then as political counsel at Hamburg. He published his first novel in 1961, A Call for the Dead, which introduced the character of George Smiley, a sad master spy. He chose his pseudonym, John Le Carré, seemingly from a jeweler's shop. Fame arrived with his third book, The Spy that came in from the Cold, two years later. Defined by some as the best spy story ever written, the novel won the Gold Dagger in 1963 (as well as an Edgar for best novel in 1965), an award he won again for The Honorable Schoolboy in 1977. Cornwell was also given a Grand Master Award in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America and a Diamond Dagger in 1988. He currently lives in Cornwell.
