Charmian “Charlie” Ross is an insecure, hard-partying actress, so there should be plenty of people in Hollywood who could handle the part. Yet, there are reasons why this John le Carré character has been such a tricky role to cast. The author himself has stated he based Ross on his half-sister, actress Charlotte Cornwell, whom…
Books have the tendency to give you all the feels, good and bad, but there is no worse feeling than the one you get when your favorite character dies. No matter how foolish it may be, you secretly hope certain book characters you like get resurrected, just so you could have more stories about them.…
In the late 1960s, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the most popular science fiction writers in Russia, decided to write a mystery novel. The Dead Mountaineer's Inn was published in 1970, and its creation may have been motivated in part by the weariness they felt struggling with the Soviet authorities. Once writers of optimistic science fiction that…
Ned—a surname-less protagonist who first appeared in The Russia House (1989)—runs the Sarratt agent training school for The Circus (a thinly disguised MI6) and invites the retired George Smiley to speak as guest of honor at the commencement. Initially Ned is doubtful the laconic Smiley will accept his offer but the old spy seems quite…
After Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), John LeCarré had secured his nook within literature as a leading master of the espionage genre. Then, like a ballplayer who knows he can drive one more homer out of the park, he brought his greatest creation, George Smiley, out of retirement once again with Smiley’s People (1979). Oliver…
In John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the previous George Smiley adventure, the intelligence officer was surreptitiously tapped to track down a mole—a bellicose cancer—burrowed within The Circus. Smiley pinpointed and exposed the double agent as Bill Haydon. Haydon had been recruited by a Russian operative, known only as Karla, when he was a student at…
In 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we finally have an account of George Smiley as a full-fledged intelligence officer after thirteen years on the scene. In the first two novels of the series—Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962)—Smiley functioned more as detective that could have easily fit into a G.K.…
The Outsiders by Gerald Seymour is an espionage thriller featuring MI5 agent Winnie Monks who follows a Russian crime czar to Spain for revenge of a brutal murder from years ago (available February 24, 2015). If you were to ask Jonno’s parents about their son, they would describe him as ordinary, a good enough sort,…
In John Le Carré’s fourth novel, The Looking Glass War, events are definitely skewed. A spy mission has been outsourced to a commercial airline pilot whose assignment is to photograph an area near the West German border where Soviet missiles are allegedly being deployed. Later at the airport’s bar, the pilot fervently confronts the courier,…
This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a fitting time to recall a novel that came, for many, to characterize the complications and unhappy compromises of post-war Europe. It’s the early 1960s, and Alec Leamas is working for The Circus (British clandestine organization), running spies in Berlin during the…
