Le Carré << leh kuh RAY >>, John (1931-2020), was the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, an English novelist. Although he turned down both literary awards and state honors, Le Carré is considered by many to have been one of the most significant British novelists of the middle to late 1900’s.
Le Carré was known for his realistic and unromantic spy stories. Most of his spies are low-level British civil servants who are involved with the routine affairs and rivalries of a government bureaucracy as well as with the confusions of cloak-and-dagger intrigue. In his later novels, Le Carré shifted from the intrigues of the Cold War to the greed of multinational dealers in arms and drugs.
In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965), Le Carré created central characters who are manipulated by their superiors and partly fail. He wrote a trilogy about British secret service agent George Smiley—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974); The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); and Smiley’s People (1979). Smiley also is the main character in the suspense novels Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), and appears in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), A Legacy of Spies (2017), and Agent Running in the Field (2019).
Le Carré’s other novels include A Small Town in Germany (1963), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), Single & Single (1999), The Constant Gardener (2000), Absolute Friends (2004), The Mission Song (2006), A Most Wanted Man (2008), Our Kind of Traitor (2010), and A Delicate Truth (2013).
David John Moore Cornwell was born in Poole on Oct. 19, 1931. He served briefly as a British intelligence officer in Austria shortly after World War II ended in 1945. He was a member of MI5 and MI6, the United Kingdom’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, respectively, for a number of years from the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s. From 1961 to 1964, he also served as an officer in the British Foreign Service. Le Carré wrote a memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016). He died on Dec. 12, 2020. His short novel Silverview (2021) was published after his death.
