I recall faintly talk in my home that Le Carre stayed in a house near us, in a street parallel to ours, in Germany in the late 1970s. I suppose he was in Lubeck to research for Smiley's People, which was published in 1979 and is partly set in Lubeck (where he also set his 1960s short story Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn?").
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My Dad worked in the Bonn Embassy in the 50s. A couple of years before JLC, but the link probably encouraged me towards his books as a teenager. A bit earlier, James Bond films inspired me aged 12 to study Russian at school. When Dad found out he chided me for not choosing German instead
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[M]en who see the threat to their class as synonymous with the threat to England and never wandered far enough to know the difference.
That’s true in every country, I think.Comment
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Just to say I finally read my first JLC novel over the last few weeks, TSWCIFTC (which I was told was the best place to start). Bloody hell, it's good. Which JLC novel to read next?Comment
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A Legacy of Spies? It's effectively a sequel to TSWCIFTC, 50 years on.Comment
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I read In from the Cold followed by The Looking-Glass War recently. Both really good but I thought the latter was the most complete picture of that world and its motivations and contradictions.
Struck me how comparatively short 'genre' novels used to be - in both of those the action part is only about 40 pages. Look at the size of a spy or crime novel today in comparisonComment
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