John le Carré’s Last Completed Spy Novel Crowns a Career Attuned to Moral Ambivalence
Sixty years ago, David John Moore Cornwell, a young officer in the British secret services, published his first novel. Because his employers wouldn’t let him publish under his own name, he chose the French-sounding surname le Carré, for “a bit of swank.”
Two books later, his career took flight with the best-selling “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” a draft of which he wrote in only five weeks. It remade the spy novel. A John le Carré novel invariably features a tone of knowingness, a labyrinthine plot that demands close attention and is paid out meticulously, and an intricate gambit of...…Sixty years ago, David John Moore Cornwell, a young officer in the British secret services, published his first novel. Because his employers wouldn’t let him publish under his own name, he chose the French-sounding surname le Carré, for “a bit of swank.”
Two books later, his career took flight with the best-selling “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” a draft of which he wrote in only five weeks. It remade the spy novel. A John le Carré novel invariably features a tone of knowingness, a labyrinthine plot that demands close attention and is paid out meticulously, and an intricate gambit of...WW…