The British author John Le Carre (born David Cornwell, 1931) was regarded by many as the foremost spy novelist of his time because his works go beyond being mere thrillers. They recreate the gritty realism of the spy business, exploring relationships amo...

[This entry was updated by John L. Cobbs (Kutztown University) from the entry by Joan DelFattore (University of Delaware) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 212-227.] John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore...

John le Carre (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) is the author of realistic spy stories resembling those of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. His best-known novels are The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and the George Smiley trilogy: Tinker, Tai...

John Le Carré's thrillers have conveyed, as few others, the urgency of the struggle waged between East and West, between totalitarianism and democracy. The struggle is openly about human values, and its outcome will affect the lives of virtually everyone. Some aspects of it nevertheless are largely invisible, or at least concealed from public inspection, and it is upon them that Le Carré has focused. In order to depict the East-West struggle in fictional terms, he has blurred its moral ...

Apart from the rare scathing review, The Little Drummer Girl has won well-nigh universal praise. In some respects the praise is deserved, for the novel moves at a brisker pace than most Le Carré novels while retaining their characteristic virtues: it is carefully plotted, well written, has a strong sense of place, and offers a credible portrait of the mechanisms of clandestine intelligence struggle…. [However, the] novel suffers from Le Carré's weakness in characterization. He ma...

The beginning of John le Carré's new book ["The Little Drummer Girl"] is, for a spy thriller, entirely orthodox: There is a bombing, a bombing by a terrorist. Where? Near Bonn, but the location does not matter. There have been so many others, in Zurich, in Leyden, here and there. It matters only that the victim was an Israeli. Although the reader spends time in Bonn and in Tel Aviv and in Vienna, Munich, Mykonos, London, it matters hardly at all, except that the ambiance of these...