tinker tailor soldier spy a george smiley novel

Bond needs no introduction: Fleming’s original version of the character, appearing in 14 books between 19, is a suave brute with a “comma of black hair,” a killer, a lover, a globe-trotting adventurer, the archetypal pulp hero with a twist of nastiness. Unsurprisingly, they both always fascinated me. My dad wasn’t a great fiction reader - he preferred encyclopedias and radio manuals - but he enjoyed Fleming’s escapism, and praised Le Carré’s realism. Later in life, he contacted MI6 to ask if he was owed a pension for his years of service, but they claimed to have no record of him.īut there were two sets of novels on our bookshelves that caught the eye of 12-year-old me: some James Bond books, by Ian Fleming, and a few works by the great chronicler of the secret world of international intelligence, John Le Carré. He eventually left the Service for a job in industry, and finally became a math and science teacher. He couldn’t even tell his parents what he was really doing he barely knew himself. He traveled and played tennis, he worked little and was paid a lot, but it was boring and alienating. He would live on expenses somewhere like South Africa or Pakistan, and occasionally drive his Land Rover up a mountain to intercept encrypted Soviet radio signals, then send them back to the codebreakers in London.

He worked for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s.

Tinker tailor soldier spy a george smiley novel