John Lee Carey, the most famous spy for Cold War thrillers Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Game In From The Gold, has died. He is 89 years old.
Le Carey died of a short illness Saturday evening in Cornwall, southwest England, his literary agent said in a statement.
Johnny Keller, CEO of Curtis Brown Group, said: “His passion will never be seen again and every book lover will feel his loss.
Le Kerr had his wife Jane and four sons. The family said in a brief statement that he had died of pneumonia.
The author, whose real name is David John Moore Cornwell, has written 25 novels and a memoir in 25 years in 60 years and has sold approximately 60 million books worldwide.
By exploring the betrayal at the heart of British intelligence in spy novels, Le Care challenged Western assumptions about the Cold War by defining to millions the moral ambiguities of the war between the Soviet Union and the West.
Unlike Ian Fleming’s unquestioned James Bond charm, Le Care’s heroes are trapped in a glass jungle inside British intelligence, escaping the betrayal of Kim Philip, who fled to Moscow in 1963.
“This is no longer a shooting war, George,” Connie Sachs, a resident of British intelligence about Soviet spies, told George Smiley, a spy in the 1979 novel Smiley’s People.
“It simply came to our notice then. Half angels fighting with half demons. No one knows where the lines are, ”says Sachs in the final novel of Le Care’s Carla trilogy.
Such a gloomy portrayal of the Cold War shaped popular Western notions of rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, which dominated the second half of the 20th century until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Cold War for Le Carreau, the title of his 1965 novel – Without Heroes, morals were sold or betrayed by spymasters in Moscow, Berlin, Washington and London.
The betrayal of families, lovers, ideology and country runs through Le Care’s novels, which use the disappointment of spies as a way to tell the story of nations, especially those who failed to see the post – imperial fall of Britain.
His influence was credited to Le Care by the introduction of spy terms such as “mole”, “honey pot” and “pavement artist” into popular English usage by the Oxford English Dictionary.
John Lee Carey served in British intelligence agencies in the 1950s and ’60s [File: Alastair Grant/ AP]
Novelist Stephen King tweeted, “John Le Carey has passed away at the age of 89. This terrible year has a literary giant humanitarian attitude.” Margaret Atwood said: “I am so sorry to hear this. His Smiley novels are important to understand in the mid-20th century. ”
Soldier, Spy
David John Moore Cornwell was born on October 19, 1931, in Dorset, England, to Ronnie and Olive, although his mother, frustrated by her husband’s betrayals and financial abuse, left the family when she was five.
Although the boy, Lu Carey, says he endured “16 years of warmth” at the behest of his father, an active businessman who worked part-time in prison, the mother and son will meet again decades later.
At the age of 17, Cornwell left Sherborne School in 1948 to study German in Bern, Switzerland, where he came to the attention of British spies. After a spell in the British Army, he studied German at Oxford, where he told his left-wing students about Britain’s MI5 Home Intelligence Service.
Le Kerr was awarded a first-class degree before teaching languages at Aden College, Britain’s most private school. He worked at MI5 in London in 1960 before moving to the Secret Intelligence Service known as MI6.
Posted to Gold, the capital of West Germany, Cornwell fought on one of the toughest ends of Cold War intelligence: Berlin in the 1960s.
As he ascends the Berlin Wall, he writes the book Le Carey The Spy Who Came In From the Gold, where a British spy is sacrificed for a Communist who has become a former Nazi.
“What do spies think?” Finally he asks Alec Limas, the British spy who was shot in the Berlin Wall. “They are seed like me, bad bastards: little men, drunkards, bizarre, chicken sucking husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians brightening up the rotten little lives.”
By portraying British spies as ruthless as every communist enemy, Le Care defined the displacement of the Cold War, which left broken men in the background of distant powers.
His other works include The People of Smiley, The Russia House, and, in 2017, Smiley Farewell, A Legacy of Spice. Many novels were adapted for film and television, especially the 1965 Smiley People and Tinker tailor-made Alec Guinness Smiley.
Great pharma for Brexit
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia’s once powerful spies in poverty, Le Carey turned his attention to the corruption of the US-dominated world order.
From corrupt pharmaceutical companies, Palestinian militants and Russian oligarchs to pseudo-American agents and, of course, bad British spies, Le Carey drew a depressing – and sometimes chemical – view of the post-Cold War world chaos.
“New American realism is nothing more than total corporate power covered in word of mouth, meaning only one thing: America will put America first in everything,” he wrote in a preface to a tailor in Panama.
He opposed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and his anger at the United States was evident in his later novels, which sold well and became popular films, but his Cold War did not match the bestsellers’ skills.
They include The Constant Gardner, which deals with the intrigues of the pharmaceutical industry in Africa. A Most Wanted Man, released in 2008, saw an extraordinary presentation and war on terror. Our kind of traitor, published in 2010, took on Russian criminal syndicates and the dark maneuvers of the financial sector.
Le Carey is said to have rejected an honor from Queen Elizabeth II – who accepted the German Goethe Medal in 2011 – but said he did not want his books to be considered for literary prizes.
In a competent Europe, he was an outspoken critic of Brexit, telling the AFP news agency that Britain should “join the protest” against Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the last 2019 general election.
“My UK will be the country recognizing its place in the European Union,” he told a US interviewer in 2017.
“This is a ginkgoist UK trying to expel us from the EU, which I do not want to know.”