I’m surprised no one has mentioned already that one of the greatest British novelists has passed through to the other side. I’ve read most of his books, all good, some brilliant. The core Smiley ones, Tinker Tailor, Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s people (aka The Karla Trilogy) are deservedly seen as highlights but The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a classic and the others are all worth a look. I reread A Small Town in Germany numerous times decades ago on a kibbutz where the library was rather limited and it never failed to grip me.
It’s sad he’s gone but he had an excellent innings at 89 and what a legacy. RIP.
Actually I have, but it was a long way down Sniffity’s multi-hamper-winning obit thread…
Best British writer ever, IMHO.
He’s a good writer but that’s… quite a claim
Emphasis on the British. 😉
Shakespeare and Dickens have just shifted under foot.
Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Emily (and Charlotte) Bronte and George Eliot would also like to be considered.
They have been considered. They have been discarded. Rock on, JLC!
Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Emily (and Charlotte) Bronte and George Eliot – your boys took a hell of a beating!
His latest, Agent Running In The Field, was one of his best.
@bargepole
I’ve just read that, it was really really good. Not especially exciting, just really really good!
I love JLC and he deserves all the plaudits he gets.
It set me to wondering about Len Deighton. No-one will lay claim to him being the greatest ever, but the most under rated ever? Quite possibly. The Ipcress File stands up well to TSWCIFTC, and I would argue that Bomber is stone classic.
Big fan of Len Deighton, thought he had a real purple patch in the 1980s with his Bernie Samson series and Winter which I thought was exceptional. Agreed about Bomber but there was a lot of very unexceptional stuff also. His cookbook is great, more for the illustrations than the recipes though.
Am in two minds about John Le Carre. I have read his classics which I enjoyed, but the one I enjoyed the most was The Russia House, quite a sentimental read for someone who I thought was just too cold as a writer. I could admire the craft but hard to engage or care about his characters. The Russia House was an exception.
I may also be a little misinformed here, but I lost respect for him following the spat he had with Salman Rushdie, at the time of The Satanic Verses fatwa. I would have thought at ex Eton schoolmaster would understand the importance of free speech. I gather they made up subsequently so all good.
His half-sister is actress Charlotte Cornwell, whom those with long memories will recall in “Rock Follies” – she was the one that wasn’t Julie Covington or Rula Lenska.
It must have been 5 or 6 years ago, I know because I was still driving my youngest to primary school, Radio 4 did dramatisations of the Smiley books.
I was regularly late for work, having been sitting in the car park, listening to the end of each episode.
By coincidence, I’ve been rereading a few of his books over the past month or so. The Spy… still stands out his masterpiece – I’d forgotten how short it was, and how much he gets in. One of the best 20th century novels of any kind. I don’t think anything that I’ve read of his has matched it. As Joseph Heller is alleged to have replied when an interviewer said he had never written another book as good as Catch 22, that’s true, but then neither has anybody else.
Over the years I’ve probably read about half a dozen of his books, and I remember thinking that as they got longer, particularly with the Smiley books, he became more and more involved with mythologizing the characters, with their jargon and references to earlier events. I re-read Tinker Tailor, and it still works, but Smiley is a very passive character, and the problems with his wife seemed tagged on to make him interesting. It’s a good thriller, but I think he wanted it to be more. Although what seemed made up about tradecraft and so on is truer than I realised when I first read it. For example, the characters never get taxis to or from the circus but go a few streets away so they can’t be traced to it. I knew someone who had worked for one of the British intelligence monitoring branches. She spoke fluent Polish and ended up, during the cold war days, listening to endless scans of minicab radios in Warsaw so they could find who was going to the KGB buildings and where they lived.
The most recent I read was A Delicate Truth, and it was a bit disappointing. It’s set in about 2008 and the main character is 31, but everyone talks and behave as though it was the fifties. Over such a long career, sixty years, it must be difficult to keep in touch with social change. I think Graham Greene was similar, but it doesn’t detract from their earlier work, when they were bringing you news about the world.
My uncle did some business once with a David Cornwell.
Went to his house, advised on some technical stuff, got talking, really liked the guy.
He eventually asked what Mr. Cornwell did for a living, whereby Mr. Cornwell pulled a John Le Carre first edition from the shelf and signed it as a thank you.
Reminds me of a story I just heard from (producer/engineer) John Leckie on a recent podcast from “Something About The Beatles”, he worked on John and Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band albums. Two years before that he was working as a delivery boy and had to deliver some lino to a certain “Mr Cox” in an expensive part of London. He found the address, rang the bell and Yoko Ono answered the door …
… and? And? Don’t stop here, for gawd’s sake, man!
He delivered the lino.
One of my favourite authors, though a few of the more recent ones (such as The Mission Song, A Most Wanted Man) were lacklustre. I disagree with those who include Absolute Friends in the lacklustre run though. I loved it.
A Legacy Of Spies was a return to form and I haven’t tackled Agent Running In The Field yet.
One of my favourites is The Honourable Schoolboy, though I know many people don’t care for it. Conversely I intensely disliked The Tailor Of Panama, though I know it is highly rated.
I just reread Schoolboy actually. It’s even better than I remembered.
The one I really couldn’t get into was The Naïve and Sentimental Lover; accidentally left it on the plane and never replaced it. I usually reserved his books for holidays and long-haul flights so I could concentrate on them. A Legacy Of Spies was the last one I read and I really liked it.
I never even tried TNASL. I had read it was a stinker – his attempt to break out of the spy-fiction genre.
It failed and so he stuck to his strengths thereafter.