LE CARR, JOHN

born Oct. 19, 1931, Poole, Dorset, Eng. pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell English writer of suspenseful, realistic spy novels based on a wide knowledge of international espionage. Educated abroad and at the University of Oxford, Le Carr was an instructor in French and Latin at Eton College before becoming a member of the British foreign service in West Germany in 1959. He began to devote his full time to writing as a result of the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Its protagonist is an aging British intelligence agent entrusted with the destruction of an East German official. Unlike the usual glamorous spies of fiction, the agent is a lonely and alienated man, without a respectable career or a place in society; the book was adapted into a highly successful film in 1965. This novel was followed by The Looking Glass War (1965) and A Small Town in Germany (1968). Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) was the first in a trilogy of novels centred on the shrewd but self-effacing British intelligence agent George Smiley, Le Carr's best-known character. Smiley's nemesis was the Soviet master spy Karla, and their struggle was continued in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and culminated in Smiley's People (1980) with a successful attempt by Smiley to force Karla's defection to the West. The Little Drummer Girl (1983) describes a struggle between the Israeli secret service and a Palestinian terrorist. Le Carr's later novels include A Perfect Spy (1986), the story of a double agent; The Russia House (1989); The Secret Pilgrim (1991); and The Night Manager (1993).