Weekend Deviation – Spies Weekend 1 – Le Carre Officially Classic

Most excellent to see that Penguin Classics have issued Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold rightfully as a classic. It’s always annoying when you see Booker and Orange lists etc that neither crime nor spy books get a nod – do the committees on these things really not think Le Carre a great writer? If so then they’re pompous sods who should feel the sharp end of a poisoned umbrella on Kensington High Street!

This is the first Le Carré to become a Penguin Classic – here’s hoping more do including the rest of the Smiley series (this is the first time he appears) and primarily, as this is an Asia themed blog, The Honourable Schoolboy.

Alex Leamas is tired. It’s the 1960s, he’s been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last – but only after one final assignment.

He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas’s mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done.

In le Carré’s breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining.