{"id":175637,"date":"2020-12-28T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=175637"},"modified":"2020-12-23T08:15:49","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T08:15:49","slug":"john-le-carre-19-oct-1931-12-dec-2020-spy-novelist-and-inside-outside-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/john-le-carre-19-oct-1931-12-dec-2020-spy-novelist-and-inside-outside-man\/","title":{"rendered":"John Le Carr\u00e9 (19 Oct 1931 \u2013 12 Dec 2020): Spy Novelist and \u201cInside-Outside\u201d Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 Dec 2020 – <\/em>David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carr\u00e9,<\/em> was a British author of espionage novels and former intelligence agent. He died of pneumonia December 12 aged 89 years. Le Carr\u00e9 leaves behind an intriguing body of literary work set against a background of some of the key political and social developments of the past half-century. In the course of his career, le Carr\u00e9 was able to draw from experiences made during and after the Cold War to attract millions of readers with his carefully researched spy novels.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John le Carr\u00e9<\/p><\/div>\n

Born in 1931, David John Moore Cornwell\u2014he adopted the name John le Carr\u00e9 as an author in the early 1960s\u2014was the son of Ronnie Cornwell, a conman with upper class airs who was permanently in debt due to his criminal business ventures. David Cornwell had a generally miserable childhood. The boy could hardly admit to his well-heeled, upper class fellow students his father was a convicted criminal. At a young age, he already felt himself to be somewhat of an interloper within the ranks of Britain\u2019s privileged elite, someone with the \u201cneed to cobble an identity for myself,\u201d as he writes in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life <\/em>(2016).<\/p>\n

In one of his finest novels, A Perfect Spy<\/em>, le Carr\u00e9 creates a picture of his father, or someone like him, in the form of conman Rick Pym. Deceit, double lives, betrayal and the conflict between personal, social and political relations, both on a small and large scale, are at the heart of virtually all of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s novels.<\/p>\n

Unhappy at the boarding school to which he had been sent by his errant father, David Cornwell fled to Europe at the age of 16 and, in his own words, managed to wangle a place at the University of Berne in Switzerland where he studied foreign languages. His years in Switzerland, Austria and later Germany were to prove formative for his development.<\/p>\n

Based on his experiences in Germany and his study of its history, le Carr\u00e9 writes that he was not surprised when a new generation of Germans reacted strongly against their forebears. Le Carr\u00e9 rejected the methods of the Baader\u2013Meinhof terrorist group, but he could sympathise with some of its arguments. Like \u201clarge sections of Germany\u2019s middle classes\u201d in the 1960s and \u201970s, \u201cI too am disgusted by the presence of former high-ranking Nazis in politics, the judiciary, the police, industry, banking and the Churches\u201d (The Pigeon Tunnel<\/em>).<\/p>\n

In 1949, at age 19, Cornwell was identified by British intelligence as a potential recruit and began working as a German-language interrogator of individuals passing over from the Stalinist countries to the West. His language skills plus his unstable past made him an ideal recruit for the secret services. He returned to England in 1952 to study at Oxford before going on to teach at Eton. During this time he continued to work covertly for the British domestic secret service, MI5, spying on left-wing groups.<\/p>\n

Cornwell was dissatisfied with the hypocrisy of the MI5 leadership and the routinism of his work. He comments: \u201cSpying on a decaying British Communist Party twenty-five thousand strong that had to be held together by MI5 informants did not meet my aspirations.\u201d The remark, however, hardly amounts to a repudiation of his dirty work as a spy. His superiors had no reason to fear the British Stalinists, but the ruling elite is always keenly attuned to the possibility of social revolution, even in relatively stable periods. For all his undoubted acuity, Cornwell-le Carr\u00e9 never understood the full significance of his own intelligence work.<\/p>\n

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, Britain\u2019s foreign-intelligence service, and was sent to Germany to work at the British Embassy in Bonn.<\/p>\n

While still in service, le Carr\u00e9 wrote his first two spy novels Call for the Dead<\/em> (1961) and A Murder of Quality<\/em> (1962), which introduced one of his most remarkable characters, the bespectacled, balding, somewhat overweight and assiduous secret service agent, George Smiley.<\/p>\n