Master Spy writer John Le Carr has died at the age of 89

John Lee Carr, who became a British spy for novels that revived the Cold War for readers around the world, died Saturday at a hospital in Cornwall, England. He was 89 years old and had pneumonia, according to a statement from his family.

Mr. His best-selling books include “The Spy Who Comes From the Gold”, which depicts the dual agents and the shadow worlds of the Cold War trade, enlivened by Le Care’s sharp engraved characters and his fluid, empathetic prose. Changed a number to the screen. The British Broadcasting Corporation series, based on his novels “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy” and “Smiley’s People”, starred Alec Guinness Tour spymaster George Smiley, leaving an immortal image with the audience of the immortal and dangerous business. Spy.

John Le Carr is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, a senior British intelligence officer, for whose espionage work he must publish under a nickname. Born in Dorset’s pool, Mr. Le Carr attributed some of the gifts he received through Spycraft to his unresolved family life as a boy. His mother left when he was 5 years old, Mr. Le Carr, in his 2016 memoir, described his father as a con man and “an occasional prisoner.” In an attempt to find his balance through school, he later wrote in a memoir and followed the habits and habits of friends from stable homes.

“From a young age, I was pretending to be who I was,” Mr. Le Carr told the Wall Street Journal last year. “I was pretending to be a normal kid like the other kids in boarding school, going to an immigrant home and pretending to be a mother.”

Mr. The facility with Le Care’s observant eye and language assigned him to intelligence work. After studying languages ​​at the University of Bern in Switzerland, he joined the British Army Intelligence Corps, according to a report by his publisher Viking Penguin, part of the Penguin Random House.

John Le Carr at home with two sons in the 1960s.


Photo:

Ralph Crane / The Life Picture Collection / Getty Images

In an interview with the Journal last year, Mr. Le Carr said, “Espionage gives you an extraordinary view of people. I don’t think we know much about each other, but it gives you the habit of considering people’s possibilities. Is she this or that? If you were hired as an intelligence officer, how would I use her?” You think all the wrong possibilities, it’s a kind of thinking that never leaves you. ”

In 1961, while writing his first novel, The Call to the Dead, at MI5, Mr. Le Carr returned to fiction. He was a mentor and inspiration to Spymaster Lord Glanmoris, who was also a novelist. Mr. According to Le Care’s publisher, the author said that one of his most famous characters was George Smiley based on Lord Clanmoris.

In 1963, Mr. Le Carr has released his breakthrough novel “The Spy Who Came In From The Gold”. The book allowed him to focus on full-time fiction and was introduced as a perennial on bestseller lists for almost six decades.

John Le Carr in a study of his home in Cornwall in the 1990s.


Photo:

Pino Montic / Montadori Portfolio / Getty Images

According to the Viking Penguin, Mr. Le Carr wrote in a post for the fiftieth edition of his career-building work: “At the age of thirty I wrote The Spy, which came from the cold under intense, unshared, personal stress. In extreme privacy. From the day my novel was published, I felt the need to be branded as a spy-turned-writer, not as a writer, who, like his scores, did a job in the secret world, and wrote about it. Depending on the novel’s merit, or its guilt, where it stands, it is not real, but it is credible. ”

Mr. Lee Carr continued his new lessons long after the end of the Cold War. He published “Agent Running in the Field” last year and in 2016 he published a memoir, “The Pigeon Tunnel.”

In addition to the BBC miniseries, his novels were adapted into big screen adaptations of Sean Connery in “The House of Russia”, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weiss in “The Constant Gardner” and Gary Oldman as George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. . ”

British actor Gary Oldman, left, Swedish director Tomas Albrecht, Center, and John Le Carey at the 2011 UK film screening of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’.


Photo:

Chang Tan / Associated Press

Write Brenda Cronin at [email protected]

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