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John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) (born 19 October 1931) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

The son of Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–1975) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset, England on 19 October 1931. He has a brother Tony, a retired advertising executive, who is 2 years older. The actress Charlotte Cornwell is his younger sister, and the former Washington bureau chief of the Independent newspaper, Rupert Cornwell, is his younger half-brother. Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt. According to one biography:

His father, Ronnie, made and lost his fortune a number of times due to elaborate confidence tricks and schemes which landed him in prison on at least one occasion. This was one of the factors that led to his fascination with secrets. His father was also the inspiration for the lead character in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977).

Rick Pym, father of Magnus, the central character of A Perfect Spy, is also a con-man and schemer.

He began his formal schooling at St. Andrew’s preparatory school near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School but he was unhappy there with the harsh regime typical of English public schools at that time, and dropped out. He also disliked his housemaster, Thomas, who was a strong disciplinarian. From 1948–49, he studied foreign languages at the University of Berne.

In 1950 le Carré joined the British Army’s Intelligence Corps in Austria, where his German proved useful in interrogating people who had fled westward across the Iron Curtain. In 1952 he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford where he carried out secret assignments for MI5, which included joining far-left groups in order to collect information about possible Soviet agents.

When his father went bankrupt in 1954, le Carré had to leave Oxford to teach at a boy’s prep school. However, he was able to return to Oxford a year later, where he graduated with a First Class Honours B.A. degree in 1956. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years before joining MI5 as a full-time official in 1958. His work in MI5 consisted of running agents, conducting interrogations, tapping phones, and performing authorized break-ins.

He started his first novel, Call For The Dead, while employed in the operational section of MI5, encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels under the pen-name of John Bingham). Lord Clanmorris was one of the two men—Vivian H. H. Green was the other—who inspired le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley. Green first met Cornwell as a schoolboy when he was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–1951), and then later as Rector at Lincoln’s College.

In 1960, le Carré transferred to the foreign-intelligence service, MI6, working under the diplomatic cover of the Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn. Then he was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There le Carré wrote his next 2 books: A Murder of Quality, a detective story, and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which became an all-time best-seller after its publication in 1963. Cornwell wrote under his pseudonym of John le Carré because it was not acceptable for members of the Foreign Office to publish under their own names. He left the service in 1964 to focus on writing full-time. John is Le Carré’s second forename, whilst the words “le carré” mean “the square” in French.

His work was affected by Kim Philby, a British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five), who blew the cover of dozens of British agents to the KGB, David Cornwell among them. Years later, le Carré carefully depicted and analysed Philby’s weakness and deceit in the guise of “Gerald” the mole, who is hunted by George Smiley in the central novel of le Carré’s work, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Then followed the revelation that fictional spymaster George Smiley was modeled on Vivian H. H. Green.

In 1954, he married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp; they had three sons, Simon, Stephen and Timothy. They divorced in 1971. In 1972, he married Valérie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton; this marriage produced one son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway.

In 1964 he won the Somerset Maugham Award, an award established by Maugham to enable British authors under the age of 35 to enrich their writing by spending time abroad.

Le Carré has resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than forty years where he owns a mile of cliff close to Land’s End.

Nearly all of his novels fall in the spy-thriller genre, with a particular emphasis on the Cold War. One notable exception is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, which has autobiographical elements based on the author’s relationship with James and Susan Kennaway following the breakdown of his first marriage.

Le Carré’s first two novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, closely follow the mystery fiction approach, where the emphasis is on a complex riddle that hero George Smiley must solve. In later, longer works, such as The Honourable Schoolboy and The Night Manager, Le Carré approaches his material more as novelist and less as a mystery writer, focusing on the in-depth development of his characters.

Le Carré’s work is in many ways a critical and reasoned response to the lurid sensationalism of the James Bond genre of spy writing. His heroes are three-dimensional, their engagement with the world is more realistic, and their circumstances are markedly unglamorous. There is little of the action thriller in his stories, no high-tech gadgetry and only a limited degree of violence; the drama comes primarily in the intensive mental activity of his protagonists. In some novels, such as A Small Town in Germany, almost the entire story unfolds in the form of dialogue between the major characters. Le Carré is widely hailed as writing some of the most literary and philosophically significant genre fiction of the 20th century.

His works also differ from the Bond books in that they are morally complex; there are constant reminders of the fallibility of western espionage systems and western countries in general, often with the implication that the Soviet bloc and the NATO bloc are essentially two sides of the same coin. The simplicity of the good-versus-SMERSH or SPECTRE world of Ian Fleming has no place in Le Carré’s work, where the spies seem to serve espionage more than any ideology. Le Carré is more interested in the uncertainty inherent in spycraft—the most unimpeachable information from the enemy might always prove to be bait or a trap, a logic that tends to render the information obtained far less useful. In short, his books leave behind an unmistakable air of scepticism.

A Perfect Spy, Le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, deals with the author’s peculiar relationship with his father. Lynndianne Beene, the author of a biography of le Carré, describes Richard Cornwell as “an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values”. Beene quotes le Carré’s reflection on the novel that “writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised”.

Le Carre is also the author of The Unbearable Peace, a lengthy non-fiction account of Jean-Louis Jeanmaire.

In 1965, Martin Ritt directed the first film adaptation of a John le Carré novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, featuring Richard Burton as “Alec Leamas”, the novel’s protagonist. In 1966, Sidney Lumet directed The Deadly Affair, a film of the novel Call for the Dead (George Smiley was renamed Charles Dobbs, played by James Mason). In 1969, Frank Pierson directed the film of The Looking Glass War.

In 1979, the BBC adapted the first novel in the Quest for Karla trilogy, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for television. Alec Guinness led an all-star cast as “George Smiley”, and in 1981 Guinness reprised the role in the BBC’s adaptation of Smiley’s People, the trilogy’s last novel. The trilogy’s middle novel, The Honourable Schoolboy, a story about Jerry Westerby (Joss Ackland in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), was not adapted as the BBC thought a production in South East Asia would be prohibitively expensive.

In 1984, Diane Keaton was The Little Drummer Girl. In 1987, A Perfect Spy was adapted for television starring Peter Egan and Ray McAnally. In 1990, Sean Connery was “Barley Blair” in Fred Schepisi’s film of The Russia House. In 2001, another former cinema James Bond Pierce Brosnan was the spy in The Tailor of Panama.

In 1991, A Murder of Quality was adapted by Gavin Millar for television, starring Denholm Elliott as Smiley. Joss Ackland appeared as yet another friend of Smiley’s, this time named Terence Fielding.

Tom Baker played “Barley” Blair in a BBC radio adaptation of The Russia House first broadcast in 1994.

In 2005, the film of The Constant Gardener was released, based on the novel of the same name set in slums in Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. The poverty so affected the film crew that they set up the Constant Gardener Trust to provide basic education to those villages. John le Carré is a patron of the charity.

A series of eight radio plays based on the novels featuring George Smiley, under the title The Complete Smiley, commenced on 23 May 2009 on BBC Radio 4 with Call for the Dead. Smiley is played by Simon Russell Beale, and the series runs until April 2010, finishing with The Secret Pilgrim.

Le Carré published an essay entitled “The United States has gone mad” in The Times in January 2003, protesting against the war in Iraq, saying:
“How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history.”

He has turned down a number of awards, including a knighthood. He is the author of a testimonial in The Future of the NHS (2006) (ISBN 1858113695) edited by Dr. Michelle Tempest.

Le Carré has had a long-running feud with the author Salman Rushdie, arguing that the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, as an affront to Muslim sensibilities, predictably put Rushdie and other people connected with the publication in danger. Rushdie in turn accused le Carré of misunderstanding his work and siding with those who imposed a fatwa on him, forcing him into hiding.

In an interview with Mark Lawson broadcast on 5 October 2008 on BBC 4 le Carré was asked what works he might put in a hypothetical “Best of le Carré”. His answer was:

* The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
* Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
* The Tailor of Panama
* The Constant Gardener

Novels

* Call for the Dead (1961)
* A Murder of Quality (1962)
* The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) (Edgar Award 1965, Best Novel)
* The Looking-Glass War (1965)
* A Small Town in Germany (1968)
* The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
* Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
* The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
* Smiley’s People (1979)
* The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
* A Perfect Spy (1986)
* The Russia House (1989)
* The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
* The Night Manager (1993)
* Our Game (1995)
* The Tailor of Panama (1996)
* Single & Single (1999)
* The Constant Gardener (2001)
* Absolute Friends (2003)
* The Mission Song (2006)
* A Most Wanted Man (2008)

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