“I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job.” That, by his own account, was the state of mind of MI6 officer David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré, when he wrote The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, a book that dominated the summer of 1964 and shaped every depiction of espionage that followed.
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MOVIES
THE RICHARD BURTON VERSION OF THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
A surprisingly faithful, uncompromising adaptation
SYRIANA
Updates Le Carré’s bleak vision for the oil age
DANIEL CRAIG’S BOND
Borrows some of Le Carré’s grit and realpolitik
Le Carré learned the craft of deception early from his father, a sometime con man
TV
THE AMERICANS
Blends personal relations and international relations
HOMELAND
Season 3’s plot is straight out of the Le Carré playbook
WRITERS
IAN RANKIN
Fond of antiheroes like Le Carré’s Leamas
HENNING MANKELL
Brought Le Carré’s psychological insights to his crime novels
ALAN FURST
Le Carré is “patrician, cold, brilliant”
ROBERT LUDLUM
Shares Le Carré’s vision of amoral bureaucracies
GRAHAM GREENE
Both influenced and learned from Le Carré
STELLA RIMINGTON
MI5 alum to author in Le Carré mode
BEN MACINTYRE
His histories of espionage echo Le Carré’s fiction
This appears in the July 07, 2014 issue of TIME.
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