At the age of 32 he was made for life, financially and critically, by his brilliant third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.Īmid a rich selection of literary and political correspondences (including feuds: he publicly charged that Salman Rushdie was wrong to publish The Satanic Verses) we see his early admiration for Graham Greene, a clear and acknowledged major influence, cool into mutual rancour. He did his national service in Austria, in British army intelligence, then later worked for MI5, the domestic security service, before moving to M16, foreign intelligence. To smuggle her to safety from his enemies in Russia, Karla sends an agent to the west to find a discreet mental hospital and a convincing false identity, “a legend for a girl”.ĭavid Cornwell attended the elite Sherborne public school in his native Dorset, the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Lincoln College, Oxford. In Smiley’s People - the third act of the trilogy of masterly Cold War novels that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - le Carré's ruthless Russian spymaster, Karla, schemes to protect his only weak point, the small, broken thing at the heart of his being, his schizophrenic, secret child. If we learn one thing from A Private Spy, his selected letters, it is that Cornwell/le Carré was always, to some degree or other, playing by Moscow Rules. This is one.”ĭon’t say he didn’t warn us. From his diplomatic cover at Bonn in West Germany, he writes to a civilian friend: “I have decided to cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographers.

By then his writer alter ego, John le Carré, had already published his first spy novel, Call for the Dying, to great acclaim. Which came first, the author or the spy? In 1961 David Cornwell, a junior agent in MI6, was sent on his first overseas posting.

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