The spy novelist John Le Carey defined the Cold War spy thriller with its elegant and intricate stories, giving praise to a type of critics who were once ignored by critics. He is 89 years old.
Curtis Brown, the literary firm of Le Care, said Sunday he had died of a short illness in Cornwall, southwest England. The company said his death was not related to COVID-19. His family said he had died of pneumonia
In classics such as “Spy from the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Honorable School Student”, Le Carey combined harsh but lyrical lyrics with the complexity expected in literary fiction. His books are rife with betrayal, moral compromise and the psychological nuances of a secret life. In the quiet, attentive spymaster George Smiley, he created one of the iconic characters of 20th century fiction – a decent man at the center of the web of deception.
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British author John Le Carey holds a copy of his new book at the Central London Bookstore during the book signing ceremony marking the launch of the novel in London on Thursday, September 16, 2010. (AP Photo / Alastair Grant, file)
Novelist Stephen King tweeted, “John Le Carey has passed away at the age of 89. This terrible year has had a literary giant humane feel.” Margaret Atwood said: “I’m so sorry to hear that. Her smile novels are important to understand in the mid – 20th century.”
According to Le Care, the spy world is a “metaphor for the human condition.”
“I’m not part of the literary bureaucracy if you will: categorizes everyone: romantic, thriller, serious,” Le Carey told the Associated Press in 2008. “I carry what I want to write and the characters. I do not declare this to be a thriller or entertainment.
“I think it’s all very funny stuff. It’s easy for booksellers and critics, but I didn’t buy that assortment. I mean, ‘The story of two cities?’ – A thriller? ”
His other works include “People of the Smiley”, “House of Russia” and, in 2017, Smiley’s Farewell, “Legacy of the Spies”. Many novels have been adapted for film and television, especially the 1965 production of “People of Smiley” and “Tinker tailor” Alec Guinness.
Le Carey was inspired by a breeding ground that was seemingly routine but secretly turbulent.
David John Moore Cornwell, born October 19, 1931, in a pool in southwestern England, had a consistent upper middle class education: one year studying German literature at a private Sherborne school, University of Bern, Austria – where he interrogated people with disabilities at the Eastern Black Degree in modern languages. But his normal upbringing is an illusion. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man, he was an accomplice to thugs and spent time in prison for insurance fraud. His mother left the family when David was 5 years old; He never met her again until he was 21 years old.
It was a childhood of uncertainty and seriousness: one minute limousines and champagne, the next outing from the family’s latest shelter. It fostered a keen awareness of insecurity, the gap between surface and reality – and an acquaintance with the secret that would make him better in his future career.
“These are the early experiences of secret survival,” Le Carey said in 1996. “The whole world was enemy territory.”
After the university, which was hampered by his father’s bankruptcy, he taught at the prestigious boarding school in Atton before joining the Foreign Service.
Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a “subordinate” operative with the domestic intelligence service MI5 – he began as a student at Oxford – then on the cover of the Second Secretary of the British Embassy in MI6, Germany, on the front lines of the Cold War.
His first three novels were written when he was a spy, and his bosses wanted to publish him under a pseudonym. He was “Le Carey” all his life. He chose the name – square in French – simply because he liked the vaguely mysterious, European sound.
“Call of the Dead” appeared in 1961 and “A Murder of Quality” in 1962. Then came the “spy from the cold” in 1963, the story of an agent who finally forced Berlin to separate a dangerous operation. This raised one of the author’s continuing themes: the blurring of moral lines that are part and parcel of intelligence, and the difficulty in distinguishing the good from the bad. After building the Berlin Wall, Le Carey wrote that it was written in one of the darkest points of the Cold War, at a time when he and his colleagues feared that a nuclear war might ensue.
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“So I wrote a book in the heat of the moment and it said ‘a plague for both your homes,'” Le Carey told the BBC in 2000.
This immediately praised him as a classic and allowed him to leave the intelligence service to become a full-time writer.
The code name of the books for MI6 – “The Circus” is a reaction to Ian Fleming’s best action-hero James Bond’s portrayals of his life in a club, bitter, morally tainted world, and Fleming won Le Care a critical acclaim.
Smiley appeared in Le Care’s first two novels, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the trilogy “Honorable Schoolboy” and “People of Smiley.”
Le Carey said it was based on MI5 agent John Bingham and his school chaplain and later his Oxford College church historian Vivian Green, who wrote spy thrillers and promoted Le Care’s literary career. The Godfather. “More than 20 novels have touched on the bad realities of Spike Crafts, but Le Carey has always maintained a kind of nobility in the industry. He said in his day spies saw themselves as” people who call on a priest to tell the truth. “
“We didn’t design or shape it. We were there to tell the truth to the authorities, we thought.”
“A Perfect Spy” sees the creation of a spy in the character of his most autobiographical novel, Magnus Pim, the resemblance that a boy’s criminal father and unresolved foster owns to Le Carey.
His writing continued unabated even after the end of the Cold War and the change of front lines of the spy wars. Le Kerr said the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 was a relief. “For me, this is absolutely fantastic. I’m not sick of writing about the Cold War. The cheap joke is, ‘Poor old Le Carey, he’s gone without material; they have taken away his wall.’ . “
It changed everywhere. The “Tailor of Panama” was set up in Central America. “Constant Gardner”, a film starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weiss, is about 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 the dark maneuvers of Russian criminal syndicates and the financial sector.
A monument, including the novels “Pigeon Tunnel” and “A Subtle Truth” and “Agent Running in the Field” and many more to come. Finally, released in 2019, Brexit and Donald Trump brought out his fake and deceptive stories of the era.
In recent years there have been many film and television adaptations of his works of high quality. Recent examples include the TV series “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy” starring Gary Oldman as Smiley and the TV series “The Night Manager” and “The Little Drummer Girl”.
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.
He later became a voice critic of Tony Blair’s government, whose decision was based on somewhat exaggerated intelligence to go to war in Iraq. He was critical of what he saw as successive British governments betraying the post-World War II generation.
“I remember the changes promised to me from the age of 14 – when Clement Attlee (Winston) was ousted from the post-war (private) school system and monarchy when Clement Attlee was prime minister,” he said in 2008.
“How can we reach the poverty gap we have in this country? This is simply unbelievable.”
In 1954, Le Gary married Alison Sharpe, with whom he had three sons before divorcing her in 1971. In 1972 he married Jane Eustace, with whom he had a son, novelist Nick Harkway.
Although he had a home in London, Le Carey spent most of his time at a house on a cliff overlooking the sea near Lands End in the south-west of England. He said he was a humanist, but not a believer.
“Humanity – that’s what we believe. If we can see this manifested in our organizational forms, we will have confidence, ”he told Andhra. “I think humanity will always be there. I think it will always be defeated.”
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Le Care has his wife and sons, Nicholas, Timothy, Stephen and Simon.