Adapted into a film featuring Anthony Hopkins as Avery. It was Le Carré's second attempt at 'Do Not Do This Cool Thing' and is even more cynical than In From the Cold. Avery reactivates Fred Leiser, a retired agent in the midst of a midlife crisis, to serve as his eyes and ears behind the Iron Curtain. The Looking Glass War (1965): The Department, the Circus's less-successful rival, receives reports of missile buildup in East Germany, and dispatch their runner, John Avery, to investigate.Le Carré wrote it as a response to Ian Fleming. Both film and book are considered classics. Adapted into a film starring Richard Burton as Leamas, with a TV adaptation by the people behind The Night Manager planned. Alec Leamas, the head of the Circus's West Berlin station, is due to be discharged after Mundt kills most of his agents, but he is instead recruited into an elaborate plot to bring Mundt down. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963): A direct sequel to Call for the Dead with a newly-promoted Mundt now the main antagonist.Adapted as a TV movie in 1991 with Denholm Elliot as Smiley. Less a spy novel than a classic British murder mystery featuring retired spies. A Murder of Quality (1962): Smiley takes a brief retirement and ends up investigating a murder at a public school.Adapted as The Deadly Affair (1966), with James Mason. Call for the Dead (1961): Introduces George Smiley and his agency, the Circus, along with future antagonist Hans-Dieter Mundt, an ex-Nazi now serving as a hitman for the Stasi.Le Carré died from pneumonia on 12 December 2020 at age 89. Has added several espionage Stock Phrases (and popularised existing ones), among both the public and, apparently, real spies. Although most of his works - and all of his best-regarded ones - are definitely Spy Fiction, he is one of the rare 'genre' authors to have seriously blurred the line between genre and Literary Fiction. Eight feature his most famous creation, George Smiley.

His novels are definitely of the Stale Beer flavour of Spy Fiction, being very dark in places. While he was in the service, he started writing novels and carried on once he'd left. He was a real-life member of MI-5 and the Secret Intelligence Service until he was blown by Kim Philby to the KGB. He is probably the English language's most respected Spy Fiction writer and certainly one of its best-known, with 14 of his 26 novels getting television or cinematic adaptations, some of them more than once. David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 - 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was an English author of thriller novels.

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