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The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
by John le Carre

Published: 2005-09-01
Hardcover : 256 pages
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A new hardcover edition of the book Graham Greene called ?the best spy story I have ever read.? On its publication in 1964, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British ...
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Introduction

A new hardcover edition of the book Graham Greene called ?the best spy story I have ever read.?
 
On its publication in 1964, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports anyone who reads it back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published, and it remains one today.


It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.

Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo

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by Heather W. (see profile) 09/29/21

 
  "Plot twists galore"by Dana B. (see profile) 11/29/09

This is a good beginning if you are unfamiliar with the spy thriller genre, as we were. The plot twists were intricate and make you think.

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