Le Carré, John

(lə kärā´), pseud. of David John Moore Cornwell, b. 1931–, English novelist, b. Poole, Dorset, grad. Oxford, 1956. He was a tutor at Eton College (1956–58), subsequently working for the British Foreign Service in Germany (1961–64). Le Carré's best-known novel is The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963, film 1965), a bleak study of cold-war espionage that emphasizes the inhumanity and amorality of international intrigue; it introduced the figure of George Smiley, who is a recurring character in his works and in the British television miniseries adapted from them. His other novels include A Call for the Dead (1961), A Small Town in Germany (1968), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), and The Russia House (1989), the last of his novels to explore cold-war subjects exclusively. Later novels have evinced le Carré's accustomed tragic moral vision while dealing with such themes as international finance in Single & Single (1999), the arms trade in The Night Manager (1999), the exploitation of the Third World by multinational corporations in The Constant Gardener (2001), espionage old and new, terrorism, and the Iraq war in Absolute Friends (2003), and the nexus of multinational corporations and government in Africa in The Mission Song (2006).

See study by P. Wolfe (1987).