John Le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwell. He was born in Poole, Dorset in 1931, as the son of Ronnie Cornwell, who engaged in swindles and was imprisoned for fraud. According to the author, this has been one of the factors of his fascination with secrets. Ronnie Cornwell also participated in politics. His father's chameleonic character inspired the novel A PERFECT SPY (1986). Le Carré's mother left the family when he was five. "I have no memory of mourning my mother at all," le Carré has confessed, but her absence was another secret, which shaped his early years. Le Carré did not meet his mother till he was 21.

Dissatisfied with Sherborne School, le Carré persuaded his father to send him to school in Switzerland. At Sherbone his relationship the rigid housemaster was not good and le Carré started to view institutions with growing suspicion. He studied at Berne University (1948-49), and after military service, which he did in Austria, le Carré returned to England. In Switzerland le Carré met an English diplomat, who possibly was attached to intelligence work, and he become fascinated by espionage - it was the call for le Carré. He studied modern languages at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating in 1956. At Oxford he kept a very low profile. Later it has been claimed, that le Carré was already a spy. He was two years as a tutor at Eton, teaching French and German, and then joined the Foreign Service.

In 1959 le Carré became a member of the British Foreign Service in West Germany, where he made friends of German politicians. Later he was consul in Hamburg. The most famous double agent of the Cold War, "Kim" Philby (1912-1988), betrayed le Carré, and gave his name among others to the Russians. During his years at the operational section of MI5 le Carré met John Bingham, who encouraged him to write and read the manuscript of his first novel. Bingham, the pen-name and family name of Lord Clanmorris, was one of the two men who inspired le Carré's famous character, George Smiley: "Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes..." Bingham, who had published crime novels, never accepted the picture of the Intelligence Services that le Carré gave in his books. "As far as John was concerned - and many others too - claims of good intent were guff. I was a shit, consigned to the ranks of other shits like Compton McKenzie, Malcolm Muggeridge and J.C. Masterman, all of whom had betrayed the Service by writing about it." (Le Carré in his introduction to Bingham's Five Roundabouts to Heaven, Pan Classic Crime, 2001)

For decades Le Carré denied that his work in Germany had any element of espionage, but he has gradually broken his silence and talked about this and other sides of his life in the BBC documentary The Secret Service (prod. 2000). At Lincoln College he apparently kept his eyes open for possible agents recruited by the Soviet Union. Later le Carré moved from MI5 to MI6, and he was in Berlin when the wall was erected - "the fun had started". His own experiences inspired him to write a big novel which became CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961), his first spy thriller. Graham Greene called it the best spy story he has ever read. The book introduced George Smiley, but was followed by a completely different kind of work, A MURDER OF QUALITY (1962), a detective novel set in a boys' school.

After the success of his third novel, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1963), le Carré began to devote himself full-time to writing. His aim was to portray the intelligence world from a new standpoint - "When I first began writing, Ian Fleming was riding high and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could have affairs with women, drive a fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry to escape." With his breakthrough novel le Carré established an alternative form to the James Bond cult and a new type of hero. Graham Greene considered it the best spy story he had ever read and J.B. Priestley wrote that the book was "superbly constructed with an atmosphere of chilly hell." The novel won le Carré the Somerset Maugham Award.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the story of a frustrated British agent, Alec Leamas, whose life is far from the glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely, unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model. After his sub-agents in East Germany have been killed, Leamas travels behind the Iron Curtain to destroy the head of the East German Intelligence, who has directed the killings. Soon he finds out that his own people had framed him in order to frame Fiedler, an East German. In the world of double-crossing, Leamas has no way out - he is used and destroyed by his superiors. "We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean... one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold... d'you see what I mean?" (from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) The novel was filmed in 1966. The harshly photographed black and white film was directed by Martin Ritt, starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Oskar Werner.

LOOKING GLASS WAR (1965) continued the exploration of the intrigues of the Intelligence Service. It began with the death of a courier, who had been sent to Finland, one of the spy centers of Europe, to collect films taken by a commercial pilot, who had flown off course while over East Germany. Orders are given for the planting of an agent in this territory where, it is suspected, a new type of rocket site is being set up.

A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY (1968) was set in the same town, Bonn, where le Carré had worked. In this novel Second Secretary in Chancery, Leo Hartling, has disappeared. The story deals with topical issues, student riots and rising neo-Fascism, with an ambiguous message about what might happen in the near future in Federal Germany. In TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (1974) le Carré re-introduced George Smiley. His character was based more or less on two true life persons: Lord Clanmorris, who wrote novels under the name John Bingham and who worked for MI5, and Vivian Green, who was Le Carre's teacher at Oxford.In this story a Soviet double agent has revealed some of the best agents in the English spy network. The mole is one of them - but which one? It was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy and SMILEY'S PEOPLE (1979), sometimes known as the 'Search for Karla trilogy', because the central theme is the struggle between Smiley and the Soviet spymaster Karla. The first two were made into hugely successful television dramatizations.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL (1983) was narrated in the second person, and was about the cause of Palestinian liberation. The central character is an American actress in Britain, who is persuaded by an Israeli agent to lose her Arab sympathies and spy for them. The book was made into a film in 1984, losing in the process le Carré's intricate plotting. "Nothing went right", said the author later. Before the last or latest Smiley novel, THE SECRET PILGRIM (1991), le Carré published A PERFECT SPY (1986), drawing on his own relations with his domineering father, and THE RUSSIAN HOUSE (1989), a response to the end of the Cold War, where a British publisher becomes involved in espionage by a Soviet woman, who acts as emissary for a volatile friend. The novel was adapted for screen, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer.

"This gun is not a gun. This apple is not an apple. Winser was recalling the wise words of his law tutor of forty years ago as the great man spirited a green apple from the depths of his frayed sports coat and brandished it aloft for the inspection of his mostly female audience: 'It may look like an apple, ladies, it may smell like an apple, feel like an apple' - innuendo - 'but does it rattle like an apple? - shakes it - 'cut like an apple?' - hauls an antique breadknife from a drawer of his desk, strikes. Apple translates into a shower of plaster."
- Single&Single, 1999

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