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The Spy Who Came In from the
Cold by John le Carre (Author)
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- Paperback: 224 pages ; Dimensions
(in inches): 0.75 x 8.25 x 5.25
- Publisher: Scribner; (December 1,
2001)
- ISBN: 0743442539
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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
Inside Flap Copy
"Le Carre is simply the
world's greatest fictional spymaster."
NEWSWEEK
For Leamas the espionage business has become an hermetic, enclosed
world, detached from outside reality. He has watched his last agent
being shot, crossing from East to West Berlin, and his death marks
the end of the Circus' East German network. But Control is planning
an operation against the head of East German Intelligence. And
Leamas is to be the instrument, set in East one last time....
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