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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 Saturday after a brief illness from pneumonia, his family announced. He leaves behind his wife and four children. Le Carré last lived in Cornwall.
American author Stephen King praised le Carré on Twitter as a “literary giant and humanitarian spirit.” In an interview with Sky News, novelist Robert Harris described him as “one of the great post-war British writers.”
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, such as “A Blinding Spy” (1986).
Cold War espionage
Le Carré studied German in Switzerland and ended up working 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 filmed remotely in 2011 with Gary Oldman.
Change of relationship with Great Britain
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.
His latest novel “Badminton” (Agent running in the field), which appeared in 2019, was written under the influence of the British vote to leave the EU. These are young people who no longer feel represented in their country. A sentiment that the staunch Brexit opponent, le Carré, felt himself. “I think my own ties to England have drastically loosened in recent years,” he told The Guardian.
Earlier this year, le Carré was awarded the Swedish Olof Palme Prize. At the time, the jury declared that he was being honored “for his committed and humanistic opinion formation in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and questions of human destiny.”
