Born in October 1931, John le Carré passed away on 12 December. In mufti, le Carré was David Cornwell, beginning his professional life as a British intelligence officer who parlayed his experiences into a body of literary work that has few parallels in post-war British fiction.
Though le Carré’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent post-war British novelists is now secure, the distinction too often made between “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction has led, unconscionably, to his pigeon-holing as an espionage novelist. He was clearly much more than that.
As an “espionage” novelist, le Carré broke what may be called the Ian
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