John Le Carey, the detective-turned-novelist whose eloquent and intricate descriptive words define the Cold War espionage thriller and brought praise to the genre that was once ignored by critics, has died. He was 89 years old.
Le Carey’s literary agency, Curtis Brown, said on Sunday that he had died in Cornwall, south-west England, on Saturday after a brief illness. The agency said his death was not related to COVID-19. His family said he died of pneumonia
In classics such as “The Spy Who Called in Cold,”, “Tinker Taylor Soldier Detective” and “The Honorable Schoolboy”, Le Cray combined the lyrical prose consistent with the expected kind of complexity in literary fiction. His books were plagued by the psychological toll of betrayal, moral compromise, and secret life. In the quiet, vigilante spy master George Smiley, he created one of the iconic characters of 20th century literature – a dignified man at the center of the web of deception.
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British author John Le Carey keeps a copy of his new book, Our Kind of Traitor, at a book sign in central London during a book signing event for the novel’s launch in London on Thursday, September 16, 2010. (AP Photo / Alistair Grant, file)
Novelist Stephen King tweeted, “John Le Carey has died at the age of 89. This terrible year claims a literary giant and humanitarian spirit. Margaret Atwood said:” It was very sad to hear this. The key to understanding his comic novels is the mid-20th century. “
For Le Carre, the world of espionage was a “metaphor for the human condition.
“If you like it, it categorizes everyone. I’m not part of the literary bureaucracy,” Le Carey told the Associated Press in 2008. I just go with what I want to write and the characters. I don’t declare this as any thriller or entertainment.
“I think it’s all very stupid stuff. It’s much easier for booksellers and critics, but I don’t buy that classification. I mean, ‘A Tale Two F Two Cities?’ – A thriller? “
His other works include “Smiley’s People”, “Russia House” and, in 2017, Smiley’s Farewell, “The Legacy of Spy. Many novels were adapted for film and television, most notably the 1965 productions “Smiley People” and “Tinker Taylor” featuring Alec Guinness as a smile.
Le Carey was drawn to espionage by a breed that was superficially conventional but secretly unsettling.
Oct. David John Moore Cornwell, born in Poole, south-west England, on 19, 1931, appeared to have a standard upper-middle class education: compulsory military service in a private Sherbourne school, studying German literature for a year at the University of Bern. Ria Stria – where he interrogated Eastern block defactors – and a degree in modern languages at Oxford University. But his apparently normal upbringing was an illusion. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man who was an ally of gangsters and spent time in prison for insurance fraud. When David’s mother left the family at the age of 5; She was never seen again until she was 21 years old.
It was a childhood of uncertainty and extremes: a minute of limousine and champagne, moving forward from the family’s latest residence. It produces insecurity, a keen awareness of the distance between surface and reality – and an acquaintance with secrecy that could serve him well in his future business.
“These were very early experiences, really, of a secret existence,” Le Carey said in 1 very.
After university, which was interrupted by his father’s bankruptcy, he taught at the prestigious boarding school Eaton before joining the foreign service.
Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a “weak” operative with the local intelligence service MI5 – which he started as a student at Oxford – and then his foreign counterpart MI6, serving in Germany, on the front lines of the Cold War, the cover of another secretary at the British embassy.
Her first three novels were written while she was a spy, and her employers needed to publish her under a pseudonym. He has been a “Le Carre” for his entire career. He said he chose the name – square in French – simply because he liked its obscure, European sound.
In 1961, “Call for the Dead” and in 1962, “A Murder for Quality” appeared. Then in 1963, “The Spy Who Comes in the Cold,” split the story of an agent and forced him to carry out one last, dangerous operation in Berlin. It captures one of the author’s recurring themes: the ambiguity of moral lines that are part and parcel of espionage, and the difficulty of distinguishing good from bad. Le Carey said it was written on one of the darkest issues of the Cold War, since the construction of the Berlin Wall, when she and her colleagues feared nuclear war could be imminent.
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“So I wrote a book in the scorching heat that said ‘there’s a plague on both your houses.’ “Le Carre told the BBC in 2000.
It was immediately hailed as a classic and allowed him to leave the intelligence service to become a full-time writer.
Morally stigmatized by the “circus”, Clubby, pictures of his life in lifestyle – the code-name of the books for MI6 – was the antithesis of Ian Fleming’s save action-hero James Bond, and Le Carey received critical acclaim. Fleming.
Smiley appeared in Carrie’s first two novels and in the triangle of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honorable Schoolboy,” and “Smiley People.”
Le Carey said the character is based on John Bingham – an MI5 agent who writes spy thrillers and promotes Le Carey’s literary career – and sectarian historian Vivian Green, the pastor of his school and later his influential Oxford College College, ” Became my confessor and Godfather more than 20 novels touched on the obscure realities of espionage things but Le Carey always maintained a kind of nobility in the business. He said that in his time spies called themselves “almost to tell the truth with a priest.”
“We didn’t shape it or mold it. We were there, thought to speak the truth in power. “
Her most autobiographical novel, “A Perfect Detective”, sees the creation of a spy in the character of Magnus Pim, a boy whose criminal father and unsettled upbringing have a strong resemblance to Carina’s own.
His writing came to a halt after the end of the Cold War and without moving the front lines of espionage wars. In 1990, Le Carre said the fall of the Berlin Wall was a relief. “It simply came to our notice then. I was sick of writing about the Cold War. Cheap jokingly said, ‘Poor old Le Carre, he’s out of stuff; They have taken away his wall. “The spy story is all about packing his bag and going where the action is.”
It happened everywhere. The “Panama Tailor” was set up in Central America. “Constant Gardner”, which turned into a film starring Ralph Fines and Rachel Weisz, was about the work of the pharmaceutical industry in Africa.
“A Most Wanted Man”, published in 2008, looks at extraordinary rendition and the war on terror. Published in 2010, “Our Kind of Trafficking” betrayed Russian criminal syndicates and the financial sector.
More to come, including memoirs, “The Pigeon Tunnel” and the novels “A Delicate Truth” and “Agent Running the Field”. Finally, published in 2019, brought their fake and fraudulent stories into the era of Brexit and Donald Trump.
For many decades of his work, there have been many film and television adaptations in recent years of high quality. Recent examples include a large screen version of “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy” starring Gary Oldman as “The Night Manager” and “The Little Drummer Girl” as Smiley and Television Ministry.
Le Cray reportedly declined the honor of Queen Elizabeth II – although he accepted Germany’s Gothead Medal in 2011 – and said he did not want his books for literary prizes.
In the years that followed, he was a vocal critic of Tony Blair’s government and of the decision to go to war in Iraq based on partial hyp-hype-up intelligence. He criticized what he saw as a betrayal of the post-World War II pay generation by successive British governments.
“The changes I’ve been promised since I was about 1 year old – I remember when Clement Attlee became prime minister and (Winston) Churchill stalled after the war that it would be the end of the (private) school system and the monarchy. He said in 2008.
“How can we achieve the poverty that exists in this country? It’s just amazing. “
In 1954, Le Carre married Allison Sharp, with whom they had three sons before divorcing in 1971. In 1972, he married Jane Eustace, with whom he had a son, novelist Nick Harkawe.
Despite having his home in London, Le Carre spent most of his time in a clifftop house overlooking the sea near Lands End in the south-west of England. He was humanitarian but not optimistic, he said.
“Humanity – that’s what we trust. If we had seen it manifested in our institutional forms, we would have had hope, “he told the AP.” I think humanity will always be there. I think it will always be defeated. “
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Le Carey is survived by his wife and sons Nicholas, Timothy, Stephen and Simon.
