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Sunday, December 13, 2020
Master of the espionage novel
Bestselling author John le Carré dies
Espionage thrillers like “The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold” gave him world fame: British writer John le Carré, who knew the world of secret services from his own professional experience, has died at the age of 89.
John le Carré is dead. The world-famous best-selling author has died at the age of 89, publisher Penguin Books announced Sunday night. Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was best known for his spy novels. He died of pneumonia on Saturday, the editor announced.
Le Carré was born on October 19, 1931 in the county of Dorset, in the south of England. Secrets, betrayals and lies permeated his family environment. These were also the themes that he had to deal with in his literary work. His mother left the family when he was five years old. His father was a con man who moved between fraudulent wealth and prison. Le Carré dealt with him in many books, for example in “A Blinding Spy” (1986).
Le Carré studied German in Switzerland and eventually worked as a British Secret Service agent, although not with much success. Meanwhile, he began to write; With his third novel, “The Spy Who Came from the Cold,” he made a breakthrough. He became known for his clever and suspenseful spy novels, which primarily revolved around the Cold War.
Good and bad merged, agents were not heroes, but people with strengths and weaknesses. A central character was disgruntled spymaster George Smiley, who was betrayed by his wife and suffered from the unscrupulous reality of his industry. Smiley had his best known appearance in the bestseller “Dame, König, As, Spion” (1974), which was remade in 2011 with Gary Oldman.
The fall of the Iron Curtain changed le Carré’s perspective: his books now dealt with the arms trade, the machinations of pharmaceutical companies, the war on terror, or the Russian mafia.
