John Lee Kerry, who created thrills with equal parts of adventure, moral courage and literary flair, has died at the age of 89.
Le Carey explored the gap between the West’s freedom-flying rhetoric and the reality of the hatred of freedom, in novels such as The Spy Who Comes in Cold, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and Night Manager, which garnered him critical acclaim. Made it the best seller in the world.
His family confirmed on Sunday that he had died of pneumonia at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night. “We are deeply saddened by his death,” he wrote in a statement.
His longtime agent Johnny Galler described him as “the undisputed giant of English literature”. He defined the Cold War era and in the decades that followed fearlessly spoke the truth about power… I have lost a mentor, a motivator, and most importantly, a friend. We will never see him again. ”
Standing in line to pay tribute to his comrades, Stephen King wrote: “This terrible year claims a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit.” Robert Harris said the news “saddened him … a great post-war British novelist, and an unforgettable, unique character.” Adrian McKinty described the Tinker Taylor Soldier Detective as “the greatest spy novel ever written simply,” while historian Simon Sebag Montefier described him as “the titan of English literature with great people there ત્યાં personally, captivating and very kind to me.” Was. Many others. ”
Born in 1931 as David Cornwell, Le Carre began working for the Secret Service in the late 1940s while studying German in Switzerland. After studying in Eaton, he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and caring for spies behind the Iron Curtain from the office fees behind the MI5 building on Curzon Street in London. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, novelist John Binham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym John Lee Carey – despite his publisher’s advice that he chose two Anglo-Saxon monocylables, such as “Chunk-Smith”.
A detective based on Binham, who was “breathtakingly normal… short, fat, and quiet”, was the first appearance of Le Carrie’s 1961 ex-German agent, Call for the Dead, his most enduring character, George Smiley. . In the second novel, 1962’s A Murder in Quality, Smiley was spotted investigating a public school homicide and received a positive review. (“Very complex, the best woodnunite,” was the Observer’s conclusion.) But a year later, when his third thriller was published, Lee Kerry’s career reached a whole new level.
The Spy Who Comes in Cold in Smile is a small man, but the story of a mission to confront East German intelligence is full of his world-fed condemnation. According to Alec Limas, the five-zooming agent sent to East Berlin, the spies were not only “vain fools, traitors, but yes, yes; Pennies, sad distests and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives ”. Graham Greene called it “the best spy story I’ve ever read.”
According to Le Care, the novel’s runaway success stunned him first and then contradicted him. He had his manuscript cleared by the Secret Service because it was a “sharp idea to start from scratch,” he explained in 2013, and therefore could not represent a possible breach in security. “This, however, was not the opinion taken by the world press, who unanimously decided that the book was not only authentic, but some kind of nuisance message from the other side. As, because it got on the bestseller list and stuck there, while Pandit called it the real thing.
The smiling central stage was moved in three novels by Le Carrie, published in the 1970s, drawing attention to the rivalry between the British agent and his Soviet nemesis, Carla. In Tinker Taylor Soldier Detective, he casts a mole at the top medals of the British Secret Service, while at Hon Near Schoolboy he goes after a money laundering operation in Asia, before putting Carla’s Swiss connections together in Smiley People. The world of “ferrets” and “lamplighters”, “wranglers” and “pavement artists” was drawn so convincingly that his former colleagues on the MI5 and MI6 began to adopt Le Carre’s invented horoscope as their own.
As the Cold War approached, friends stopped him on the street and asked: “What are you going to write now?” But Le Kerry’s concern was always wider than the confrontation between East and West, and he had little patience for the idea that the fall of Berlin and the Wall signaled an end to any kind of history or espionage that greased his methods. He handled the arms trade with The Knight Manager in 1993, The Constant Gardner in 2001, Moto Pharma in 2004, and Absolute Friends in 2004, and the War on Terror in 2004.
Meanwhile, a constant stream of his creations is going from page to screen. Artists including Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Ralph Finance and Gary Oldman also applauded the ingenuity of their intrigue but removed the subtlety of its characteristic.
Le Kerry last returned to Smiley in 2017, closing the circle of his career in A Legacy Sp f Spies, reviewing the boxed operation at the heart of the novel that made his name. Writing in the Guardian, John Bville Neville praised his ingenuity and skill, saying “Spy Le Carre never used his gift as a narrator so powerful and as such a thrilling effect”.
After decades of being portrayed as a shady, mysterious figure, mainly for his uncertainty in publicity or for joining the festive circuit, Lé Carey surprised the world by releasing a memoir called The Pigeon Tunnel in 2016. Insulting, Commonman’s father and his mother leave him at the age of five, giving details of his loneliness relationship. After spending four decades in Cornwall, twice married and raising a son Nicholas, who himself was writing a novel under the name Nick Harkawe, Le Carre admitted: “I am neither a model husband, nor a model father, and I am not interested in it. It looks that way. ”
The constant love of his life was writing, “Pokie was strolling like a man hiding on a desk”.
He wrote, “From the secret world, I once knew that I had tried to create a theater for the big world where we lived. “Imagination comes first, then reality is discovered. Then imagine back, and at the desk where I am now sitting. “
