John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89

 

“John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, said on Sunday.Before Mr. le Carré published his best-selling 1963 novel ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,’ which Graham Greene called ‘the best spy story I have ever read,’ the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond — suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp. Mr. Le Carré upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are clear, justify the means. ...”

NY Times

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