biography john le carre

• Anton Corbijn

John le Carré

• Short Stories
• Hodder & Stoughton
• Penguin Group (UK)
• Curtis Brown Group Ltd

John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) was born in Dorset in 1931, and was educated at Sherborne School and the University of Berne, before reading modern languages at Oxford University. He taught at Eton from 1956-58, then spent five years in the British Foreign Service until 1964.

He started writing in 1961, and his first novel, a spy thriller, was Call for the Dead (1961), later made into the film The Deadly Affair starring James Mason. This was followed by A Murder of Quality (1962), a detective novel set in a boy's school, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the novel which brought him worldwide public attention, which tells the story of the last assignment of an agent who wants to end his espionage career.

Since then, John le Carré has written many novels, including a series which feature the character George Smiley: Call for the Dead (1961), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Smiley's People (1980) and The Secret Pilgrim (1991). Other novels, all of which have been made into successful films, are: The Looking Glass War (1965);  The Little Drummer Girl (1983); The Russia House (1989); The Tailor of Panama (1996); and The Constant Gardener (2001). In 2005 the film of  The Constant Gardner , starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, opened the London Film Festival. The book won the 2006 British Book Awards TV and Film Book of the Year.

John le Carré's latest novel is A Delicate Truth   (2013). He worked with screenwriter Peter Morgan on a film adaptation of Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Sp y, which was released in September 2011, starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley. Eight of his 'Smiley' novels have been dramatised for BBC Radio 4 and were broadcast during 2009 and 2010. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011.

Critical perspective

David cornwell, better known by his nom-de-plume john le carré, is, quite simply, a natural storyteller, a master..

In the enviable position of being a critically acclaimed writer who tops international bestseller lists he is, like Graham Greene, without whom there may never have been a Le Carré, able to combine complex, thrilling plots with a measured, formal narrative style.

Le Carré has always had an alchemical ability to make fictional gold out of his real life experience working in intelligence, creating some of the best spy fiction ever written. In his work, MI6 becomes the 'Circus'. That name alone informs us that Le Carré’s world is not that of Ian Fleming. 'What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?' Leamas asks Liz in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), the novel which established Le Carré’s reputation: 'they’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs?' The Spy Who Came In From The Cold has had extraordinary cultural resonance. Greene described it as 'the best spy story I have ever read'. Even those who haven’t read it are aware of its presence; it has become part of the culture. The tale of Leamas, forced to play the role of a lost, aimless, drifting ex-agent so as to be able to destroy the East German Mundt, someone whom the Circus have long wished to apprehend, is, from its stunning opening, full of a lingering sadness, both moral and intellectual. Terse, suspenseful, and powerfully gripping, it has an atmosphere of chilly, end of days darkness, and is arguably the best of Le Carré. Many consider what is often known as  The Karla Trilogy, to be Le Carré’s finest achievement, but, whilst its range and impact is undeniable, I do not think that any of the three novels has the black punch which makes The Spy Who Came In From The Cold a near flawless piece of work.

The Karla Trilogy gives centre stage to the iconic George Smiley, who appears in a minor role in the early novels. Out of retirement and acting head of the Circus, we follow his battle with Karla, his Russian nemesis, across continents and within his own establishment. The novels are engrossing and full of brilliant flashes - the relationship between Smiley and his team in all three and particularly in Smiley’s People (1980), the descriptions of an Asian continent ravaged by war in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), the manner in which Smiley goes after the Russian mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) - but the novels work best when George Smiley is present. When he is not there, they somehow fade. Described in Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy as 'small, podgy and at best middle-aged … one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth', it is Smiley’s insularity, his meticulousness, his lack of physical grace and his undoubted brilliance as both a field man and head of the Circus, that draws us in; it is never less than fascinating to watch him operate. Smiley is a master spy, but a man with a personal life in free fall. Unlike Bond, who is of course a fantasy object, George Smiley is real and flawed; he elicits sympathy and awe. With no hint of exaggeration he is amongst the most memorable fictional characters of the 20th century.

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Le Carré has written 19 novels. The majority concern themselves mostly with espionage but there has also been a love story, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), which was poorly received, a semi-autobiographical study of his troubled relationship with his father; A Perfect Spy (1986), considered by many to be his masterpiece; and an attack on Western greed in Africa, The Constant Gardener (2001), recently made into an Oscar winning film.

One book stands out in Le Carré’s oeuvre, in the way in which it demonstrates the author’s natural flair for comic narrative, a facility Le Carré has perhaps never fully exploited. Whilst his sardonic humour is never absent from any of his novels, it is in The Tailor of Panama (1996), inspired by Greene’s Our Man in Havana , that he gives it a freer reign. Andrew Osnard, a young, headstrong agent, whose mission it is to keep an eye on the political manoeuvrings leading up to the handover of the Panama Canal on 31 December 1999, hires Harry Pendel, proprietor of Braithwaite Limitada. Osnard wants Pendel to supply him with vital information on the Panamanian underground and keep him abreast of the talk around town. Pendel, tailor to the great and the good, is a deliciously drawn protagonist, whose lies and betrayals eventually begin to get the better of him. Satirical and at times farcical, The Tailor of Panama is, like the novel it is a hymn to, full of a sense of impending political chaos; it amuses and entertains yet it also provokes and unsettles.

This last point is key to Le Carré. He is the most politically aware of authors. His fiction engages fully and passionately with the times. He enters charged arenas like the Arab/Israeli conflict in The Little Drummer Girl (1983), and offers not only a thrilling entertainment, but also a considered study of the situation. He gives warning while providing pleasure; his storytelling is fuelled with a need to take the world to task, to unearth failures of justice and abuses of power and privilege, to offer insights into the minds of those who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

This is particularly evident in Le Carré’s most recent novel, Absolute Friends (2004), as angry, passionate and complex a book as he has ever written. Absolute Friends is a deliberately provocative analysis of the current 'War on Terror', something which could have unseated a lesser writer. It is cogent, witty, tender, touching and, at its end, devastating both in what transpires and in the sudden brutal economy of the narrative. The story of Ted Mundy and Sasha, who first become friends in the Berlin of the late 60s, meet again as agents in the Cold War, then come together once more in the present day world of terror and lies, it is fuelled by a deeply engaged, moral sensibility. Whatever our politics we must answer the questions Le Carré poses. Allied to the bitter rage, there is a sober, rational, precise intelligence that cannot be ignored. This novel belongs at high table, with the very best of Le Carré’s work; it proves, if nothing else, that there’s not only life in the old dog yet, but new direction.  John Le Carré has, like, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene, transcended a genre, and made literature. His work is notable for its meticulous construction and its immensely detailed, rich, elegant style. Le Carré has a gift for deep and subtle characterization. This from the opening of Absolute Friends : 'a failure at something – a professional English bloody fool in a bowler and a Union Jack, all things to all men and nothing to himself, 50 in the shade, nice enough chap, wouldn’t necessarily trust him with my daughter. And those vertical wrinkles above the eyebrows like fine slashes of a scalpel, could be anger, could be nightmare, Ted Mundy, tour guide'. In one paragraph - strangely reminiscent in its beat and rhythm to the opening of Nabakov’s Lolita - we have a full flavour of the character. Le Carré is to be cherished. He is, as The Observer says, 'a literary master for a generation'.

Garan Holcombe, 2006 

Bibliography

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• http://www.johnlecarre.com

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‘John le Carré: The Biography,’ and Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Outsider’

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By Joseph Kanon

• Oct. 26, 2015

David Cornwell, known to us as John le Carré, spent five and a half years in Britain’s secret services — two years in MI5 (domestic security, roughly equivalent to the F.B.I.), a “dead-end sort of place” from which he then transferred to the more glamorous MI6 (overseas intelligence). He had also done some intelligence work at Oxford and, earlier, Bern (tracking students attending left-wing meetings). Few writers have made better use of on-the-job training. The secret service has been source material for a long line of novelists, but it was le Carré who made it a permanent part of the literary landscape, giving us a fictional world so convincingly imagined that even its real-life inhabitants began to confuse the two, adopting his invented argot — “the Cousins,” “scalp­hunters,” “lamplighters,” “mole,” etc. — as their own. So blurred did these lines become that the Oxford English Dictionary had to conduct a lengthy usage search before deciding that “mole” had indeed been popularized in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” His 23 books have sold millions of copies, and 10 have been filmed. Anyone writing about espionage is invariably compared with him. The debate, often fueled by commercial envy and mandarin snobbery, about whether he is a genre writer who “transcends” the genre or a serious writer of distinction is by now so tired as to be pointless. He is by any standard one of the important literary figures of the postwar period.

And now we have his biography — prematurely, perhaps, but no less welcome for that. Adam Sisman, biographer of Trevor-Roper and Boswell, among others, had le Carré’s blessing and cooperation (but was not subject to his approval on the final cut), and the result is the biography one imagines le Carré wanted: admiring without being toadying, detailed without being overstuffed, highly readable and, above all, knowledgeable about the work. There is always the suspicion when a biographical subject is still alive (le Carré is 84 and, one hopes, still going strong) that the biographer is forced to pull his ­punches, leave out damaging material and paper over bad behavior. But Sisman is the kind of thorough, serious writer who inspires trust — one feels that if he has been discreet, he doesn’t compromise our understanding of the life. We are told, for instance, that le Carré has had many impulsive, short-lived affairs but rarely given any names. But does it matter? Instead, we hear how le Carré felt about the affairs (guilty, stimulated by the secrecy), how his two wives felt, how the nuances of personal betrayal inform his work. And when the affair is truly significant — the Kennaway affair, a “Jules et Jim” triangle with his close friend’s wife that inspired “The Naïve and Sentimental Lover” — we’re given the story in full, intimate detail. Biography is a balancing act, and mostly Sisman gets the proportions right.

There is one no-go area, however, that frustrates even him: le Carré’s reluctance to discuss his secret service work. Pleading old loyalties and the Official Secrets Act, he keeps an enigmatic (and possibly self-serving) silence, leaving Sisman to draw on other sources to recreate those crucial years. This may not matter much either — certainly Sisman’s descriptions of MI6 office life are vividly done — but we’ll never know. On le Carré’s time in Bonn: “David prefers to remain silent on his covert role in Germany, though he is the first to admit that it was negligible.” But he would say that, wouldn’t he? This reticence will disappoint readers looking for the “real” stories behind the books, as if novels are not inventions but rewritten diaries. But it’s possible there are no smoking gun revelations, that in his negligible role, le Carré simply kept his eyes and ears open, alert to the moral ambiguities of the work going on around him, and created a parallel world. In later life he would brood about the ethics of his early student informing, but no such soul-searching is applied to the MI6 years — any feelings of guilt or ambivalence are confined to the books themselves.

But le Carré would draw on much more than the secret world for his art, and the rest of his life we are given in full, even the emotional wounds where the scar tissue is still thin. Most biographies have to slog through an only marginally interesting youth until the real story kicks in. Not here. This is a childhood worthy of Dickens, filled with pathos and callous adult indifference, but also a swirl of ­topsy-turvy scenes all dominated by a larger-than-life father so colorful and outsize he might have been sketched by Phiz. Ronnie Cornwell was a born charmer and con man who could, le Carré’s brother says, “put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere. He could rob you and love you at the same time.” A serial philanderer, natty dresser (“Son, all you really need in life is a clean shirt and a good suit”) and incorrigible fantasist, he fleeced his way through a long line of more or less willing victims, swindling widows and pensioners, stealing from his in-laws and shamelessly “borrowing” from his children. His primary business was property speculation (which earned him a prison sentence for fraud), but any opportunity would do — the wartime black market, medicinal products, currency trading, gun running in Indonesia, a football-betting scheme in Singapore. In Vienna he told a rich woman he’d have her paintings cleaned and sold them instead. When things were good, there were chauffeured limousines, racehorses and parties hosting cricket teams, evenings spent in louche clubs with showgirls, bookmakers and raffish underworld figures. When they were bad, there was the humiliation of bankruptcy court. They lived, le Carré recalled, either like “millionaires or paupers.”

This instability proved too much for le Carré’s mother, Olive, who decamped early, running off with another man and abandoning her sons (le Carré was 5). They would not see her again until they were adults. (She, however, still besotted with Ronnie, occasionally met him for trysts in London.) Instead, there were temporary stepmothers and years of bounced checks and unpaid hotel bills. The usual horrors of English boarding school (the headmaster’s riding whip, the bullying) were made even worse by the embarrassment of overdue school fees and no-show visiting days.

Ronnie may have been a bad husband and a worse father, but he makes wonderful copy, an unrepentant life force who dominates this book as he dominated le Carré’s life, even after his great adult success. Ronnie was given to signing copies of “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” as “the Father of the Author,” and once even threatened a libel suit because a le Carré character resembled him closely (le Carré paid him $14,000 to drop the suit). After his death in 1975, Ronnie would appear again in several composite characters, most notably as Rick in “A Perfect Spy,” le Carré’s most autobiographical work. “How I got out from under Ronnie,” le Carré said, “if I ever did, is the story of my life.”

It’s also the story of this life. Sisman believes flight from his father drove le Carré into early marriage and respectability and then into patriotic service to “expiate Ronnie’s misdeeds,” and le Carré’s own books seem to support this. But if in his final flight, into the world of fiction, he brought a lot of Ronnie with him — a gift for story­telling and personal reinvention — the talent and enormous success were all his own. This is very much (and rightly) a writer’s biography, with telling glimpses of the writing process (the discarded, often clunky titles, the last-minute revisions) and irresistible trivia (it was the publisher Victor Gollancz who came up with the title “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold”). There are the expected celebrity cameos — the Burtons behaving badly, Alec Guinness impeccably. We learn that le Carré is still sensitive about bad reviews and can be prickly and demanding with his publishers (that queue forms on the right). But most important, Sisman shows us le Carré’s almost monastic devotion to his craft, a man for whom writing is life.

Over so long a career there is inevitably a “then he wrote and then he wrote” quality as the years go by, but Sisman makes us look again at what he wrote, and not with ponderous analysis. Instead the book offers a knowing refresher course, and what we take away is a new appreciation of le Carré’s full range. Biographers often play cat-and-mouse with their subjects, and Sisman sometimes catches le Carré in a misremembering contradiction and duly notes whenever he’s embroidering an old story, a lingering trace of Ronnie perhaps. But whatever the wellspring of his gift, le Carré has managed to turn the embroidery into a remarkable body of work. A reporter and traveling companion once complained that what le Carré said at a dinner party “wasn’t the way it happened.” “Your job is to get things right,” le Carré replied; “mine is to turn them into good stories.” And so he has.

Like le Carré, Frederick Forsyth had an early breakthrough success (“The Day of the Jackal”), went on to entertain millions of readers (through 17 books) and carried out assignments for MI6, using novel research as a cover for “enhanced tourism.” But his is a blither spirit; there are no demons or dark nights of the soul here. Although not without a certain gravitas — he is still angry about Britain’s role in the Nigerian civil war — his memoir, “The Outsider,” is the story of a happy boy who wanted an adventurous life and got it. Not even the obligatory grim English school (he estimates 74 strokes of the cane over three years) dampened his spirits. He took off instead for bullfight training in Spain and an affair with a 35-year-old German countess who “taught me many things a lad should know as he steps out on life’s bumpy road. She had the quaint habit of singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ during coitus.”

Forsyth passed up a chance at university to enlist, at 17, in the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot, then tried his hand at journalism. Reuters sent him to Paris at the height of the Algerian crisis (the basis later for “Jackal”), then to East Berlin, which he fled once he discovered he had been sleeping with the mistress of the East German defense minister. The BBC assigned him to Nigeria, where he witnessed the Biafran famine and became an MI6 asset. After the Nigerians put a price on his head, he was bundled out of the country back to London, now broke and without a job. “I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts.” In 35 days he banged out “The Day of the Jackal.” He was 31.

More books, more escapades and more assignments from the Firm would follow, and “The Outsider” gives us a generous sampling of them. This is a raconteur’s book. One chapter actually begins: “With hindsight, it was probably a mistake to go researching cocaine shipments through Guinea-Bissau, and I certainly never intended to land in the middle of a coup d’état.” As with any raconteur’s tales, some are better than others, and some may have grown taller over the years, but they are all told with such enthusiasm that a little embellishment seems part of their charm. Reading “The Outsider” is like finding yourself trapped in a pub with an insistent storyteller. You know you have better, worthier things to do, but your host is so genial and so quick to refill your glass that before you know it, you’ve whiled away a very pleasant evening.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The biography.

By Adam Sisman

Illustrated. 652 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $28.99.

THE OUTSIDER

My life in intrigue.

By Frederick Forsyth

Illustrated. 332 pp. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. $28.

Joseph Kanon’s most recent novel is “Leaving Berlin.”

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John le Carre: The Biography Hardcover – November 3, 2015

The definitive biography of the internationally adored author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and A Perfect Spy —arguably one of the most important and influential writers of the post-World War II period—by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer Adam Sisman.

In this definitive biography—blessed by John le Carré himself—Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré , Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight—“born to lying,” he wrote in 2002, “bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”

Of course, the pseudonym “John le Carré” has helped to keep the public at a distance. Sisman probes Cornwell’s unusual upbringing, abandoned by his mother at the age of only five and raised by his con man father (when not in prison), and explores his background in British intelligence, as well as his struggle to become a writer, and his personal life. Sisman has benefited from unfettered access to le Carré’s private archive, talked to the most important people in his life, and interviewed the man himself at length.

Who is John le Carré? Intriguing, thorough, and packed with entertaining detail, this biography will be a treat for the legions of le Carré fans.

• Print length 672 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date November 3, 2015
• Dimensions 2 x 6 x 9.1 inches
• ISBN-10 0062106279
• ISBN-13 978-0062106278
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“What could have been a cloying hagiography or a lurid warts-and-all exposé is instead a balanced, focused and compelling study of a man of depth and individuality… This biography expertly shows how distance, distrust and even disillusionment have informed Mr le Carré and influenced his bestselling fiction.” — The Economist

“In John le Carré: The Biography, Mr. Sisman creates an insightful and highly readable portrait of a writer and a man who has often been as elusive and enigmatic as his fictional heroes.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“Loose threads are what fascinate most about Adam Sisman’s biography of David Cornwell, who at 84 still writes and publishes knotty, brainy thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré…Best of all, Sisman provides aficionados of le Carré‘s fiction with canny assessments of, and inside information on all his written work.” — USA Today

“The major themes of Adam Sisman’s meticulously researched John le Carré: The Biography are twofold: the desperate search for love and artful self-invention through spying and writing fiction . . . . [the book] is unfailingly engrossing.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A candid and enthralling account of heartache, betrayal and adventure, and how hard facts helped create great fiction.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Admiring without being toadying, detailed without being overstuffed, highly readable and, above all, knowledgeable about the work. . . . Sisman is the kind of thorough, serious writer who inspires trust...and what we take away is a new appreciation of le Carré‘s full range.” — Joseph Kanon for The New York Times Book Review

“It is a disappointment to reach the end of John le Carré which is admirably scholarly.” — Wall Street Journal

“Sisman has written an admirable biography. It’s at its best when recounting...David’s struggles to escape from his father’s malign influence and find purpose in life, which he did when the worldwide success of his third novel...liberated him to write full time.” — The Financial Times

“John le Carré shows us that the novelist’s real life is just as fascinating as those le Carré depicts in his novels…There’s a con-artist, larger-than-life father; a destructive, blockbuster affair with a good friend’s wife; dust-ups with publishers; and tetchy relationships with various movie stars.” — The Oregonian (Portland)

“A fascinating [and] superb biography, bristling with fresh insights.” — BBC.com

“A talented biographer brings the great spy novelist in from the cold.” — Washington Independent Review of Books

“The definitive [authorized!] biography of the internationally adored author of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”-arguably one of the most important and influential writers of the post-World War II period-by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer Adam Sisman.” — My Edmonds News (Seattle, WA)

About the Author

Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the biographer of John le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among his other works are two volumes of letters by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Universy of St. Andrews.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First Edition (November 3, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 672 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062106279
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062106278
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.97 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 2 x 6 x 9.1 inches
• #2,167 in Rich & Famous Biographies
• #3,376 in Author Biographies
• #6,045 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

About the author

Adam sisman.

Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, living in Bristol, England. His second book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, won a National Books Critics Circle award. "Mr. Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe," Dwight Garner wrote of Sisman's life of Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times: "I’d read him on anyone.”

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Spy Novelist John Le Carré Dies At 89

Petra Mayer

Rachel Treisman

English writer and spy novelist John le Carré, pictured in March 1965. He died Saturday at age 89. Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images hide caption

English writer and spy novelist John le Carré, pictured in March 1965. He died Saturday at age 89.

John le Carré, the British spy novelist behind dozens of works including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has died at 89 in Cornwall, England.

Le Carré, who was born David Cornwell, died of pneumonia on the evening of Dec. 12, according to a statement from his publisher .

"John le Carré was an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the Cold War era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in the decades that followed," said Jonny Geller, CEO of The Curtis Brown Group and le Carré's agent. "I have lost a mentor, an inspiration and most important, a friend. We will not see his like again."

Le Carré worked as a British intelligence officer himself before penning the espionage novels that dominated global bestseller lists for decades — and led to multiple movie and TV adaptations.

Author Interviews

Novelist john le carré reflects on his own 'legacy' of spying.

John Le Carré Fears For The Future In 'Agent Running In The Field'

He wrote his first three books while working for Britain's MI5 and MI6, and became a full-time author after catapulting onto the global scene with the publication of his third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold , in 1963.

"From the day my novel was published, I realised that now and for ever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it," le Carré wrote in a postscript to the 50th anniversary edition of the book. "The novel's merit, then — or its offence, depending on where you stood — was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible."

Le Carré himself seemed shocked by how credible people found the book. Writing in the Guardian in 2013 , he recalled that the British government had vetted the book and approved it as "sheer fiction from start to finish," and therefore not a security breach.

"This was not, however, the view taken by the world's press," he wrote, "which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing." One of those was another novelist, Graham Greene, who called it "the best spy story I have ever read."

Perhaps what made le Carré's characters so memorable was their very ordinariness — George Smiley, his best-known creation, was famously short, dumpy, badly dressed, and constantly fretting that his wife was unfaithful. He wasn't James Bond, battling clearly defined bad guys with flair, sexy gadgets and well-placed quips. No, Smiley was brilliant, but slow and methodical, and well aware that he was operating in shades of grey.

That reflects Le Carré's own experience as a spy. As he told Fresh Air' s Terry Gross in 2017, "Back then, we had a clear philosophy which we thought we were protecting, and it was a notion of the West — it was a notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance. All of that we called anti-communism. That was really a broad brush, because there were many decent people who lived in communist territories who weren't as bad as one might suppose."

The other formative figure in le Carré's life was his father, a flamboyant con man and criminal who was in and out of jail, leaving his son to be raised in boarding schools (his mother left the family when le Carré was five years old.) "He filled my head with a great lot of truthless material, which I found it necessary to check out as a child, with time," he told Terry Gross. "Yes, in that sense, these were the early makings of a spy."

Le Carré wrote 25 novels and one memoir, and sold more than 60 million copies of his work worldwide. His last novel, Agent Running in the Field , was published in October 2019.

In early 2020, he won the Olof Palme Prize for what organizers called his "engaging and humanistic opinion making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind." He donated the $100,000 prize to Médecins Sans Frontières.

In that 2017 interview, Terry Gross asked le Carré if he looked back on his life as being "extraordinarily interesting."

"I do sometimes," he answered. "I'm scared of being a bore about it, but it does seem to be a wonderful life in retrospect, or an extraordinarily varied one."

Le Carré is survived by his wife, four sons, 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

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John le Carré, the great deceiver

The duplicity that defined his spy novels also enabled his relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure.

By John Banville

When they die, many writers, even some of the great ones, suffer a steep decline in reputation, or even disappear, if only for a time. The novels of Henry James, especially the late ones, sank into near oblivion after his death in 1916, until a superb essay by Raymond Mortimer published in Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon in 1943 instantly recalled the attention to them of critics and, more importantly, readers. As to giants of a later generation, who now reads Rebecca West or Norman Mailer? And when was the last time you picked up a Saul Bellow?

None of this applies to John le Carré. He died in 2020 at the age of 89, and now, nearly three years on, interest in him shows not the least sign of waning. A tell-all, or nearly all, memoir by one of his numerous lovers, the pseudonymous Suleika Dawson, was published last autumn. Now, in The Secret Life of John le Carré , Adam Sisman has given us an addendum to his 2015 biography, and in it tells all he was not allowed to tell while his subject was still living. And a long interview with Le Carré by the documentary film-maker Errol Morris, produced by Le Carré’s sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell, will soon be coming to a screen near you. David Cornwell – Le Carré’s real name, as everybody knows – would be delighted. He was no shrinking violet.

[See also: The darkness of the secret world: Mick Herron and John Gray in conversation ]

Nor should he have been. He was an immodest man with much to be immodest about. He derived a shameless delight from his success as a writer, enjoyed the money, the travel, the champagne, which he called “shampoo”, and, of course, the women. He was involved with lots of women – lots and lots and lots, as we long suspected and as Sisman now confirms.

The instant and enormous success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , published in 1963, brought John le Carré to worldwide fame, and as a celebrity he immediately began making up for lost time. Just how many mistresses, casual lovers and one-night stands he notched up is incalculable. Sisman makes no claim to comprehensiveness, though he tells how one of Le Carré’s friends, the writer Derek Tangye, “would jokingly keep a tally of women that David had taken to bed: ‘51, 52, 53…’”. The Secret Life of John le Carré , therefore, is not for the faint-hearted. Le Carré was relentless in the pursuit of his pleasures.

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With David – this is how Sisman refers to him throughout – everything, really everything, referred back to his father. Ronnie Cornwell, who died in 1975, was one of the most ingenious, daring and ruthless con men of his day, or of any day, for that matter. He owned racehorses, drank “shampoo” by the case, was a friend to the stars, and also to the Kray twins and their underworld associates.

Ronnie’s successes were impressive, but there were also failures, and spells in prison. In 1954 he went bankrupt, with liabilities, according to a Daily Express report, of £1,359, 570, which Professor Google calculates as about £476m in today’s money. He came out of court chuckling. “Disaster? Not a bit of it,” he was quoted as telling a reporter, “just the beginning of a fight after a temporary setback.”

Anyone who met David Cornwell will tell you that inevitably and within minutes of the start of any conversation he would bring up the subject of his father. After Ronnie’s death he declared: “I never mourned him, never missed him, I rejoiced at his death.” He even held him responsible for his tireless philandering. “When I was faithless, I blamed him, when I promised love all over town, it was his fault…” This expresses real pain, but it is hard not to see Ronnie as, at least to some degree, a handy excuse.

Like father, like son? It might be said that David himself, on the strength of Sisman’s new book and other sources, was an amatory, or maybe just a sexual, con man. In the Morris film, The Pigeon Tunnel – the title Le Carré gave to his distinctly scrappy 2016 memoir – David describes his writing as “a home for my larceny”. He says this with a twinkle, but it is a telling metaphor. It is significant, in this context, that a discarded title for what is perhaps his finest novel, A Perfect Spy , was The Love Thief .

Sisman’s book will be a shock for those who loved and admired David Cornwell, and for the millions who read and loved John le Carré’s books. Yet keep in mind that he suffered many betrayals in his life, especially in childhood and, as WH Auden might have said, those who suffer betrayal will likely betray in their turn.

One night Ronnie’s wife walked out of their marriage, without even saying goodbye to five-year-old David and his brother. When he encountered her in later life David found her as heartless as ever, and peevishly self-justifying. Would it be too cheaply Freudian to see in David’s almost obsessive pursuit of women a hopeless quest for the mater absconditus ? He mentioned the possibility himself on a number of occasions.

Although Sisman’s book is horribly fascinating, at times the reader will look up from the pages haggard-eyed after being splashed in the face with yet another revelation of yet another of David’s serial infidelities. But to be fair to the man’s memory, it should be said that he was no beady-eyed roué preying on the weak and the lonely. His lovers were in the main strong, independent women who knew more or less what they were letting themselves in for when they let him into their beds. He conducted each affair, at least at the outset, in what seems to have been a romantic rapture. There were lavish endearments, expensive gifts, stays at fancy foreign hotels, repeated promises to leave his wife, and sex, sex, sex.

[See also: John le Carré’s acts of deception ]

Who could have resisted? He was handsome, charming, funny, a wonderful mimic and a compelling storyteller; what a good time they must have had, all those women, a good time spiced with a hint of danger, and more than a hint, sometimes, of violence. Dawson recounts how one day she walked out of the room when David was on the phone to his wife, Jane, who heard her footsteps and knew he was with a woman. Sisman writes: “[Dawson] was sitting on the sofa in another room when David stormed in a few minutes later. He leaped on top of her, pinning her down, his forearm against her throat. ‘You did that deliberately, didn’t you?’ he seethed.”

In the filmed interview with Morris, David makes a telling comparison between his worked-at charm and “a wrecker’s light”. Did at least some of his women feel they had been lured under false pretences on to the rocks of betrayal and heartbreak?

He was in his early twenties when in 1954 he married for the first time. David and Ann Sharp “were a childlike couple”, Sisman writes: “He called her ‘mother’ and they communicated with each other in baby talk.” As far as is known, he was faithful for the first eight years of the marriage; then, in Bonn, where he was working at the British embassy, the wife of a diplomatic colleague made a pass at him. “It was a tormented love affair,” Sisman tells us, “consummated only once, but it was the precursor of things to come.”

By that time he was working for MI6, running agents and conducting interrogations and all the other things that secret agents get up to. His career in spying had started much earlier. When he was still at Oxford he was recruited to monitor fellow students with left-wing leanings, and joined the university Communist Club in order to do so. He never apologised for this: on the contrary, to the end of his life he insisted that it had been the right thing to do, since the communists were working for the downfall of the realm, and had to be stopped. All the same, his betrayal of people who imagined themselves to be his friends does leave a whiff of brimstone.

What Sisman describes as “perhaps the most tempestuous” of his early affairs was with Susan Kennaway, the wife of his friend the writer James Kennaway, with whom “arguably he was just as much emotionally involved – and possibly more so”. When the affair ended, Sisman reveals, David’s wife, Ann, accused him of having had a homosexual liaison with his lover’s husband, “the man David wanted to be: adventurous, virile, uninhibited”. We cannot know if there was a homosexual aspect to the friendship. Sisman, although he toys with the notion of a gay side to David’s character, leaves the matter in abeyance.

There is no doubt that David’s power to attract was overwhelming, when he put his mind to it. His friend Nicholas Shakespeare, Sisman tells us, compared him to Bruce Chatwin, of whom a friend had said: “He’s out to seduce everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.” And those who are seduced more often than not end up rejected. In the Morris film, David describes Kim Philby –the real-life British spy who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 – as having been addicted to deceit, and speaks of the “voluptuous” joy of the double agent, glorying in his “self-imposed schizophrenia”.

Did David love the women whom he seduced? A simple question, to which there is no easy answer. He treasured them, in his way, and certainly showed them a good time, while the going was good. But he could be dismissive of them, too. Janet Stevens was an American journalist and human rights activist with whom he had an affair in Lebanon in the early 1980s. After she was killed in the terrorist bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, David said of her, with offhand though uncharacteristic brutality, “She was just a little plain bit of a thing, but she was a wonderful lover.” 

In The Pigeon Tunnel David shows himself as undeceived as to the nature of the self, whether loving or indifferent. There is no “inmost room”, he assures his interviewer, no chapel in the heart where a sanctuary lamp burns forever undimmed. “Truth,” he says, “is subjective” – yes, as every spy knows, one cannot help adding – a sentiment that is as useful for the philanderer as it is for the secret agent. To be successful, both must, as Nietzsche said, be able to impersonate themselves, and never for a moment let the mask slip.

The details of a writer’s private life may help to flesh out his character but they have no bearing on his work. John le Carré’s books stand apart from David Cornwell the womaniser. In the figure of the spy he found the perfect representative of our low, dishonest age, yet as a writer he was truthful in the way that an artist can only be – for art, if it is art, does not lie. Errol Morris, in a nice formulation, puts it to David that he is an “exquisite poet of self-hatred”, to which David responds with the simple affirmation: “I am an artist.”

John Banville’s latest crime novel is “The Lock-Up” (Faber & Faber) “The Pigeon Tunnel” is available to stream on Apple TV+

The Secret Life of John le Carré Adam Sisman Profile, 208, £16.99

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[See also: John Le Carré and the spectre of British decline ]

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This article appears in the 25 Oct 2023 issue of the New Statesman, Fog of War

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The Double Life of John le Carré

How a con-artist father and treason in MI6 created the bard of the Cold War

E very writer is a kind of spy, ghosting through life in the service of an alien power. He lurks, he snoops, he eavesdrops, he jots his jottings, he thinks his treacherous thoughts. But not every spy is a writer. Kim Philby, for example, the Soviet double agent who spent a perfidiously productive decade in the highest echelons of Cold War British intelligence, was also responsible for some appalling prose. “Her political views are Socialistic, but like the majority of the wealthy class, she has an almost ineradicable tendency towards a definite form of philistinism.” This is Philby, secret totalitarian, summarizing for his Moscow controllers the ideological impurities of his (at this point) unsuspecting wife, Aileen. “She believes in upbringing, the British navy, personal freedom, democracy, the constitutional system, honor, etc.” The single literary touch here is an accident: that supremely horrible and languid etc. , following the word honor and trailing off into an abyss of contempt.

Philby is one of the two enormous, duplicitous presences—or anti-presences—hanging over Adam Sisman’s new John le Carré: The Biography . The other is its subject’s father, Ronnie. Philby was a snake, whereas with Ronnie you reach for adjectives like Falstaffian or Rabelaisian , his monstrous vitality seeming to emanate from some artistic over-realm. But both men were double-sided, truth-inverting, charismatic, untainted by empathy, profoundly destructive, and finally incomprehensible. Between them, they form the reason you will find le Carré’s novels in the mystery section of your local bookstore.

John le Carré, one of England’s greatest novelists, author of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and creator of the character George Smiley, was born David Cornwell in 1931 in Poole, England. He was 2 when his father—who was always either booming or busting, expanding and contracting to the rhythm of his own dodginess—got 15 months for fraud and other charges. “He could put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere,” David’s brother Tony once said. He also molested his own children. “When he came home sozzled,” we read in John le Carré , “Ronnie would sometimes climb on to David’s bed, pawing and fondling him, while David feigned sleep.” (Sisman, perhaps taking his cue from le Carré himself, passes swiftly on from this fact, which might have been the cornerstone of another kind of biography.)

In the manner of many a sociopath, Ronnie was a sentimentalist, too, lachrymose and Kipling-quoting. “Love your old man?” he would ask. Away at boarding school during the Second World War, David felt that his father—who at the time was down in London skimming the cream off the black market—was in need of a cover story. “David quietly let it be known,” writes Sisman, “that Ronnie had joined the secret service, was being trained for an important mission and would soon be parachuted into Germany. Unknown to him, his father was peddling similar stories to his cronies in London.”

The boys’ mother had left, so there was just Ronnie, with his huge, fragrantly oiled head and his well-groomed hands and his alternating waves of neglect and stifling overinvolvement. It’s not an unfamiliar story, almost a writerly genesis myth: that of the boy who cultivates extrasensory powers of observation and interpretation, who sharpens his surveillance skills while watching, in fright, his unpredictable father. John le Carré leaves us in no doubt that it was Ronnie — enlarged chaotic patriarch, drunken groper, devourer — who primordially displaced his son from life’s center and pushed him out into the flickering zones of the novelist and the spy.

School, in the best English tradition, was hell. Many years later, le Carré remembered his headmaster at St. Andrews thusly: “I always knew when he was going to beat me because he became dreadfully slow in his movements, like a man moving through water. He would stand up, put down his pipe and stare at me in dull confusion.” Is it the clogged, distorted energy of the sadist with the pipe that so shocks us, or the traumatic deceleration of the memory itself? To relieve the pressure, David faked sickness, impressively counterfeiting first an epileptic seizure and then the symptoms of a hernia—so precisely that he actually underwent an operation. (An eerie parallel arises here to the tragic story of Aileen Philby, who, as her husband’s crimes deepened, began to seriously injure herself and make herself ill.) Le Carré writes of his school days with undiminished boyish loathing—so much so that it feels not reductive but oddly satisfying, like justice, to imagine his Cold War novels as a prolonged and incredibly sophisticated act of vengeance upon the Establishment that had tormented him.

David Cornwell, who would one day join MI6 (foreign intelligence), seems to have started working in earnest for MI5 (domestic intelligence) around 1953, while studying at Oxford. The British double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had recently defected to Moscow, and although their friend and fellow traitor Kim Philby was not yet officially exposed, it was, in le Carré’s words, “witch-hunt time.” We might call this the Philby Effect: Still at large, although under suspicion, he had unzipped the psyche of British intelligence. The Americans had been duped, too—Philby and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s future head of counterintelligence, were regular lunch buddies in Washington, D.C.–—but it was the English upon whom he wreaked real havoc, because it was his Englishness that had enabled and preserved him. * Philby was clubbable and perfectly mannered; he had a sense of humor, that useful English substitute for emotion. The idea of his being crooked was simply impossible, and friends in the service rallied round to debunk it.

With Philby you were in negativeland, the silvery counterworld of the thing that you know but don’t want to know that you know—in other words, you were in what would later become the fictional atmosphere of John le Carré. When Smiley reflects upon the treachery—personal and professional—of his colleague Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , le Carré writes, “He knew, of course. He had always known … All of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which was like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.”

Taking the pen name John le Carré (he doesn’t remember where from), Cornwell began to write while still working in intelligence. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold , in 1963, was the breakthrough: a thriller with the purity of an existential fable, and a best seller. (Its success enabled him to retire from the service.)The cold in the book is actual—October winds and chilly rooms—but it is also metaphysical, infernal: It kills love. The British spy Alec Leamas returns to London from Berlin, his network of agents on the other side of the Wall having been destroyed by his opposite number, Mundt. He is summoned into the aura of his superior, the man known only as Control, a desiccated omniscience fussing over an electric heater. Control shakes Leamas’s hand “rather carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones,” and then tells him, “I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer.” A trap is being set for Mundt. Leamas is instructed to drift, detach, descend, burn out, become useless, until Moscow—convinced at last of his disaffection—makes its inevitable approach to turn him. He is to become a double agent. His cover will be no cover at all: total exposure to the slow wrath of society, and its cold war upon the lonely.

The Berlin Wall of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, le Carré would later write, was somehow his own wall: his burden, his blockage. “Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself, and it touched an anger in me … A disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself.” But of course it was no coincidence: Although le Carré has written plenty of excellent novels post-perestroika, it was his particular genius as a novelist — what Kipling would have called his “daemon” — that transformed the theater of the Cold War into his own beautifully resonating symbolic structure. The muffled violence, the bleak streets, the human data so refined as to be almost beyond perception—hypervigilance is part of the psychology of the abuse victim, as is dissociation. Standard spy stuff. Control discusses with Leamas the sensation of seeing one’s agent get shot: “a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body.”

And in the middle of it all is the spymaster Smiley, as much priest as agent, dense with subterranean knowledge, blinking, suffering, doughily pliable and razor-sharp. His wife cheats on him; his colleagues at the Circus, le Carré’s fictional version of British intelligence, corral him with a bruising, bullying affability. Quietly goes Smiley: memory spy, an artist of recollection, traveling back into the files, back into the memory banks of frazzled ex-Circus types such as Connie Sachs, back into his own mind, to find the truth of what is happening around him.

This backwards movement, in its own way a therapeutic operation, is a le Carré signature. “I strain and stretch … I shove with every muscle of my imagination as deep as I dare into the heavy shadows of my own pre-history.” Thus reflects Magnus Pym, the Philby-like double man at the heart of 1986’s A Perfect Spy . Pym’s father, Rick, is Ronnie-like—tremendous, larcenous, overflowing all boundaries. And as resistant to the truth as to a drug: “His face … acquired the dreamy expression that overcame it at the approach of a direct question.” It’s le Carré’s lodestone novel: his two great liars, in one book.

We learn from John le Carré that the Quest for Karla trilogy—the sequence of novels covering the almost mystical battle between Smiley and his KGB nemesis, Karla—was originally conceived as a much larger, Balzacian cycle. It’s easy to see how this might have been done: The lore and liturgy of the Circus feels limitless, and the character of Smiley is nearly prophetic. Smiley’s Britain is on the wane, “a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.” In Smiley’s People he orders a taxi from a private firm—not because he needs a taxi, but because he wants to quiz the driver about a fare he picked up the day before. After concluding the interview, Smiley blandly directs the cabbie, “You can tell your firm I didn’t turn up.” “Tell ’em what I bloody like, can’t I?” comes the response. A snarl, a micro-wobble of the class system: This is 1970s London, with punk rock around the corner, and the deference of the proletariat can no longer be assumed.

“I have sometimes reflected,” Sisman writes a bit ruefully in his introduction to the biography, “that my unintended role has been to spoil a fund of good stories.” And indeed his investigations—conducted with the cooperation of le Carré himself, who is 84—take on now and again the character of a punctilious field officer’s debriefing of a wayward agent. At one point, querying the location of a le Carré anecdote from the early 1950s, he proudly out-fact-checks the fact-checkers at The New Yorker. The anecdote concerns a rendezvous, in an Austrian saloon, with a Czech airman who has information to sell. Le Carré and a colleague enter the bar and order a couple of beers. When le Carré picks up a pool cue and leans over to make a shot, his gun falls out of his waistband with a clang. “Abort,” says his colleague, between sips of his pint. (Le Carré was a great writer but a mediocre spy—Philby through the looking glass.)

Writing involves betrayal, and le Carré—after his fashion and to our lasting benefit—double-crossed his own people. His Cold War novels were psychic microfilms of an Establishment hollowed out by deceit, denial, and inadequacy. They outraged his fellow spies. “I deplore and hate everything he has done and said against the intelligence services” was the verdict of one former colleague, late in life, on the le Carré opus. And Sisman also gives us this: “ ‘You bastard !’ a middle-aged intelligence officer, once his colleague, yelled down the room at him, as they assembled for a diplomatic dinner in Washington. ‘You utter bastard.’ ” But what else could he have done, this damaged son, this malingering schoolboy, this doubtful servant of a shrinking empire—this spiritual exile, onto whose numb body the blows had fallen—what else could he have done but make his report?

* This article originally identified James Jesus Angleton as the head of the CIA. We regret the error.

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John le Carré

• Born October 19 , 1931 · Poole, Dorset, England, UK
• Died December 12 , 2020 · Truro, Cornwall, England, UK (Pneumonia)
• Birth name David John Moore Cornwell
• Height 5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
• John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset in England on 19 October, 1931. He went to Sherborne School and, later, studied German literature for one year at University of Bern. Later, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford and graduated in Modern Languages. From 1956 to 1958, he taught at Eton and from 1959 to 1964, he was a member of the British Foreign Service as second secretary at British Embassy in Bonn, and then, as Politician Consul in Hamburg. His first novel was written in 1961 and, by the time of his death in December 2020, he had published nearly 30. His books took many prizes, and inspired numerous films. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Flávio S. Armony
• Spouses Jane Cornwell (1972 - December 12, 2020) (his death, 1 child) Alison Anne Martin (1954 - 1971) (divorced, 3 children)
• Children Simon Cornwell Stephen Cornwell Nick Harkaway
• Relatives Samuel Cornwell (Grandchild) Charlotte Cornwell (Half Sibling)
• Was one of the closest friends of esteemed director Stanley Kubrick .
• Soviet double-agent Kim Philby , who was a big fan, invited him to have dinner at the Kremlin. He rejected Philby's offer, saying he could never sit at the same table with a traitor.
• Being a member of MI6 when he wrote his first novel, "Call for the Dead" (1961) in Hamburg, it necessitated the use of a nom de plume, by which he is now commonly known.
• British double agent and defector Kim Philby blew the cover of many British agents in the Communist bloc after his defection to the Soviet Union, with Le Carre (under his real name of David Cornwell) being one of them.
• Generally credited with creating the word "mole" to refer to a deep-cover intelligence agent.
• [describing how the spies he writes about are different than the "super-hero" secret agent in the James Bond mold] A mostly aging, weary, unromantic lot, prone to distressing stomach ailments and having troubles with their wives.
• Writers are two-home men--they want a place outside and a place within.
• [describing a particularly loathsome character in 'A Delicate Truth'] Jay Crispin was your normal, rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless where he got them from.
• There's probably nobody more redundant in the film world than a writer of origin hanging around the set of his movie, as I've learned to my cost. Alec Guinness actually did me the favor of having me shown off the set of the BBC's TV adaptation of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." All I was wanting to do was radiate my admiration, but Alec said my glare was too intense.
• 15 years ago this was a great Country in which to have a heart attack in the street.

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The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman review – the constant philanderer

Three years after le Carré’s death, his official biographer reveals the adultery that was off limits during his lifetime. Does it further our appreciation of his work?

S oon after the deaths of John le Carré, AKA David Cornwell, and his wife, Jane, weeks apart in 2020 and 2021, a long silence came to an end. In The Secret Heart , a memoir published last autumn, le Carré’s sometime research assistant, Sue “Suleika” Dawson, outed herself as one of more than a dozen women to have had an affair with the former intelligence agent after the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) encouraged him to give up the day job and, seemingly, monogamy.

The gory details of le Carré’s affairs had been ruled a no-go zone in the otherwise diligent 2015 biography by Adam Sisman, who hadn’t previously written about a living subject. Dealing with le Carré, he soon found, was different. Not long after speaking to his lovers, including Dawson, the novelist began meddling, seemingly warning off possible interviewees, suggesting that he would nullify Sisman by bringing out his own memoir first, not to mention hinting that he might kill himself if Sisman persisted in researching his infidelities.

This new book collects what le Carré wanted kept out. We see that his philandering began during his first marriage to Ann, the mother of three of his four sons, with an MI6 colleague’s wife in Bonn while writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . Under pressure to match that hit – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was 10 years away – le Carré then walked out on his family and into what he later called a “galaxy of inappropriate affairs”, which continued into his second marriage, from other novelists’ wives to aid workers on research trips. Moving to Hampstead in the 70s, he gets a cleaner – a drama student from the US – and pays her return fare after she miscarries his child. He sleeps with his secretary then drops her only to resume contact 30 years later to make sure she doesn’t spill the beans to a would-be biographer, Graham Lord, whose book proposal he duly lawyered into oblivion.

No one is a peeping tom for reading (or writing) about this, Sisman says. “The more we can understand this complex, driven, unhappy man, the more we can appreciate his work.” Was le Carré’s hectic adultery “an ersatz form of spycraft”? Method writing for his bestselling tales of double-cross? Fallout from being abandoned by his mother and molested by his conman father? All of the above, Sisman speculates, adding that “the literature of early German romanticism… took a grip on him at an early age”. No doubt, but as he also points out, with almost risible solemnity, his lovers were mostly younger women, “some of them much younger. One was the au pair looking after his youngest son.” We can probably keep Goethe out of it.

I wish I could say different, but I’m not sure the books survive quite the level of daylight Sisman lets in on his subject’s writing process. Not for him the second cup of coffee or sly KitKat to fire the synapses; le Carré required nothing less than the prospect of extramarital sex in exotic locales (or failing that, Heathrow while en route to one). His jet-set research, already dubiously self-important – war-torn Cambodia, Chechnya, Congo – can’t help but be diminished by its dual purpose. Sisman learns that in the early 90s, “looking for another affair”, le Carré answered a fan letter from a woman in Baton Rouge and soon “concocted a reason for a research trip to Louisiana”; Sisman leaves the dots unjoined, but that’s presumably why a few pages of The Night Manager (1993) are set there (in addition to its other settings in Lisbon, Washington DC, Quebec, Switzerland, the Bahamas…).

One lover tells Sisman she heard Jane ask why le Carré couldn’t “just stay at home and ‘make it up’”. I bet. While The Honourable Schoolboy , The Little Drummer Girl , The Russia House and others had heroines modelled on his pan-continental hook-ups, Jane was instead the trusty helpmeet who typed and retyped every draft – to say nothing of handling the sort of logistical admin that fills the in-tray of a globally bestselling author whose novels are routinely adapted for the screen. It’s morbidly fascinating to contemplate Jane’s line-by-line midwifery of these cherished books, tales of deceit that were also products of it. Hard now, too, not to view le Carré’s oeuvre as the bittersweet fruit of a psychosexual pathology that held him in a relentless cycle, creating the opportunity to stray as well as the means, oiling a lifestyle of clandestine trips and gifts (jewellery, a Saab).

Jane made her choices, as did Sisman. Robert Harris did warn him off, but nobody ever got into bed with a player thinking they’ll be the one who gets played. In the end, this book isn’t about le Carré and his women but le Carré and his biographer. The most shocking part, I think, is a facsimile of a typescript page from the 2015 biography, showing how le Carré revised phrases about “significant” affairs. Look at the published text and it’s clear he got his way.

No wonder Sisman wants to take back control with this coda, a jigsaw of offcuts and previously thwarted lines of inquiry. Not all of it is revealing – just because le Carré vetoed something doesn’t mean we need to read it – but it’s useful to know he offered to broker a deal for Sisman to write the biography of his friend Tom Stoppard. The job went to Hermione Lee and was surely never in his gift; hard not to hear an echo of le Carré telling Dawson that if she wanted a baby, he – then aged 67 – would leave Jane and look after it.

It’s Dawson’s book that hangs over proceedings here. Sisman’s title is over-juiced; as he says himself, “the cat is out of the bag” since The Secret Heart . He and Dawson first met in 2013 when he was tipped off by an agent unable to sell her book because of legal threat. Both puppets of le Carré in their way, they “became, as she put it, chums”. But when Sisman says The Secret Heart “makes it possible to provide a detailed narrative of their affair”, surely Dawson’s own book is the “detailed narrative of their affair”? We don’t need his summary, not least because Dawson – in laying on so graphically what she and le Carré got up to – gives a more vivid sense of the emotional stakes involved, slightly lost in Sisman’s comparatively zestless account (not an ice cube or stupendous ejaculation in sight).

Ultimately, he’s reasserting ownership of the narrative. I feel for Sisman: out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. Not the secret life of John le Carré , then, so much as the secret life of John le Carré , the 2015 biography whose blind spots – we now know – can’t be pinned on its beleaguered author.

• John le Carré
• Observer book of the week
• Biography books

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