Showing results by author "John le Carré" in All Categories

After an unremarkable interview, Circus agent George Smiley determines the subject of a standard security check—a civil servant in the Foreign Office named Samuel Fennan—poses no threat, nor presents any reason for suspicion of espionage. Hours later, Samuel Fennan is found dead by suicide. Suddenly finding himself under intense scrutiny, Smiley realizes the Circus intends to blame him for Fennan's death. Rather than remain idle, Smiley begins his own investigation into the nature of the man's demise.

It’s the early 1960s, and the newly built Berlin Wall looms large. British intelligence officer Alec Leamas, caught in its shadow, feels the chill all too keenly: the preceding years have seen nearly every member of his Berlin spy network either murdered or captured. To him, the prospect of a desk job feels more like solace than purgatory. When he’s summoned to London by Control, it seems as though he’s finally being called home.

Pulled out of (forced) retirement by his old protégé, Peter Guillam, George Smiley must determine who among the high command at the British Secret Intelligence Service is in fact a Soviet spy—one who’s been climbing their way up the ranks for decades. The stakes are high: the mole is behind more than one failed operation and has lain waste to some of their best informant networks.

For Alisa Brimley, editor of the small magazine Christian Voice, receiving a letter from a longtime subscriber might otherwise be a perfectly normal occasion—except Stella Rode, the reader in question, writes that her husband is planning to kill her. Brimley calls upon an old wartime friend to help her investigate: retired Circus spy, George Smiley. Before Smiley can begin, Rode is found murdered, and Brimley asks Smiley to venture to the small town of Carne, home of the elite Carne School where Rode's husband is a public school junior master.

In the late 1960s, in the town of Bonn, capital of West Germany, a British Embassy officer by the name of Leo Harting goes missing—and forty-three confidential-or-higher files with him. Dispatched from the British Foreign Office to investigate, Alan Turner arrives in Bonn to find riots, protests, and a tenuous balance of power. As if there isn’t enough pressure, the embassy’s head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, makes it clear he has no intentions of making Turner’s investigation an easy one.

Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, beguiling artist and Helen, his alluring and dazzling wife.

The most autobiographical of John le Carré’s works, A Perfect Spy follows two narratives: the manhunt for the double agent Magnus Pym, and the makings of the man in question—told in his own words.

The mole has been purged from the Circus, and George Smiley, newly made chief of the agency, has both rebuilding and revenge in his sights. To fully eradicate the threat, Smiley must trace back the treachery to its very roots. When his investigation leads him to Hong Kong—and what appears to be a dead end—Smiley enlists Jerry Westerby, an international sports journalist and “occasional” Circus asset. In the Far East, Westerby will have to untangle a web of corruption spread across a region with a reputation for testing loyalties and allegiances.

When General Vladimir, a Soviet defector, is brutally murdered in London's Hampstead Heath on his way to meet a junior Circus agent, George Smiley finds himself being pulled from retirement—again. As Vladimir's former case officer, Smiley has the privilege of cleaning up and burying the the mess. But one last message from the general, sent just before he died, hints at a major operation led by spymaster Karla, Smiley's Soviet counterpart. Thrust back into the world of Cold War espionage in pursuit of his longtime nemesis, Smiley assembles a small team of trusted operatives.

The complete collection of acclaimed BBC Radio dramas based on John le Carré's best-selling novels, starring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley. With a star cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Brian Cox, Ian MacDiarmid, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Bonneville and Lindsay Duncan, these enthralling dramatisations perfectly capture the atmosphere of le Carré's taut, thrilling spy novels.

You're not to disturb, annoy or offend. They're walking on a knife edge out there, anything could tilt the balance.' Missing: one junior diplomat and 43 of the British Embassy's most confidential files. The timing is alarmingly significant: with neo-Nazi riots and radical student demonstrations, the threat to Germany's security is all too apparent. Britain's own Alan Turner is sent in, with instructions to tread carefully at all costs. But will he find the missing man and the files before the political situation erupts?

In the era of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR, a manuscript is meant to be delivered to one Bartholomew Barley Blair, a British publisher known for his eccentricity. The manuscript, penned by Russian scientist Yakov Savelyev, contains critical information detailing the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities and the state of their missile program. Except—it doesn't reach Barley. Instead, after exchanging hands several times, it ends up in the hands of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and they're quite interested in why Barley was the intended recipient of such a document.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the creator of the iconic spy George Smiley, John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl is hailed as one of the author’s best, and the favorite of the likes of Steven King and John Grisham.

Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.

John le Carré, the legendary author of sophisticated spy thrillers, is at the top of his game in this classic novel of a world in chaos. With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable.

Tom Baker stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of John le Carré’s powerful thriller. In the third year of perestroika, London publisher Barley Blair is sent a manuscript from Moscow. Exposing Russian nuclear threats as a sham, the information - if it’s genuine - could shatter East-West relations. Jazz-loving, hard-drinking Blair is hardly the spymasters’ idea of the perfect agent, yet they are forced to send him to Moscow to make contact.

A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: To capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: An ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead.

A counter-terror operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted in Britain's most precious colony, Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, and a private defence contractor who is also his close friend. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's Private Secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.

Simon Russell Beale stars in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of John le Carré's first novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley. This dramatisation, set in London in the late 1950s, finds Smiley engaged in the humdrum job of security vetting. But when a Foreign Office civil servant commits suicide after an apparently unproblematic interview, Smiley is baffled. Refusing to believe that Fennan shot himself, Smiley decides to investigate.

'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.' The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré's memoir and his first work of nonfiction, is a thrilling journey into the worlds of his 'secret sharers' - the men and women who inspired some of his most enthralling novels - and a testament to the author's extraordinary engagement with the last half century.