I mentioned last month that I'd be finishing up John le Carre's third novel, and his first big hit both with literary critics and in theaters when the story was adapted as a Richard Burton-starring vehicle a few years after. This is about my third or fourth time to read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
While not an official trilogy, it is the third novel to include his most well-known character, George Smiley, however, in this book he is very much a minor supporting character. While Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality both featured Smiley in stories that were more murder-mystery than spy-themed, this novel focuses on a man named Alec Leamas and it is very much a spy story. Set primarily in Berlin and London, it follows Leamas as he becomes involved in one last mission to sow disinformation to the Communists and bring an end to an East German intelligence officer.
I mentioned before that these three le Carre novels are not a trilogy, per se. However, there are callbacks to the events from Call for the Dead in this novel that I never realized in my first readings. I just figured it was historical characterization for this novel's villain. Yet, after reading le Carre's first novel, I realized what is being referenced directly were the exact events of that novel. Obviously I didn't have to read Call for the Dead to understand the plot of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, however, those references now are much clearer on my re-read.
This novel is pretty much the quintessential spy novel of the Cold War era. Featuring a night-time crossing of the Berlin Wall, clandestine meetings between agents, interrogations of our hero by East German agents, and a convoluted plot that is all explained in the final chapters to sort out the good guys from the bad and clear up any twists that might not have been fully understood, this is the spy novel to which others would be compared when it comes to a realistic spy world. While Ian Fleming and James Bond is the gold standard in fantastical spy adventures, le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is what most readers think of when citing a realistic spy novel.
Another common element of today's spy thrillers is the burnt-out agent, which is fantastically rendered in this novel. This novel gets better every time I read it and le Carre has become one of my favorite writers of the genre, but that shouldn't really be too surprising considering he is pretty much at the top of the list when it comes to spy authors.