Product Description

John le Carré classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service Agent George Smiley, who is introduced in this, his first novel -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

George smiley had liked Samuel Fennan, and now Fennan was dead from an apparent suicide. But why? Fennan, a Foreign Office man, had been under investigation for alleged Communist Party activities, but Smiley had made it clear that the investigation -- little more than a routine security check -- was over and that the file on Fennan could be closed. The very next day, Fennan was found dead with a note by his body saying his career was finished and he couldn't go on. Smiley was puzzled...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93916 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743431675
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
'Brilliant. Realistic. Constant suspense ... excellent writing' -- Observer 'Intelligent, thrilling, surprising ... makes most cloak-and-dagger stuff taste of cardboard' -- Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
John le Carré was born in 1931 and lives in Cornwall, England. His eighteen novels have been translated into thirty-seven languages and include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Single & Single, and his most recent book, The Constant Gardener, all available from Pocket Books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Brief History of George Smiley

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn't left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This remark, which enjoyed a brief season as a mot, can only be understood by those who knew Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that "Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou'wester." And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest? Where had she got him from? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann's undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard's van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday's news.

When Lady Ann followed her star to Cuba, she gave some thought to Smiley. With grudging admiration she admitted to herself that if there were an only man in her life, Smiley would be he. She was gratified in retrospect that she had demonstrated this by holy matrimony.

The effect of Lady Ann's departure upon her former husband did not interest society -- which indeed is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation. Yet it would be interesting to know what Sawley and his flock might have made of Smiley's reaction; of that fleshy, bespectacled face puckered in energetic concentration as he read so deeply among the lesser German poets, the chubby wet hands clenched beneath the tumbling sleeves. But Sawley profited by the occasion with the merest of shrugs by remarking partir c'est courir un peu, and he appeared to be unaware that though Lady Ann just ran away, a little of George Smiley had indeed died.

That part of Smiley which survived was as incongruous to his appearance as love, or a taste for unrecognized poets: it was his profession, which was that of intelligence officer. It was a profession he enjoyed, and which mercifully provided him with colleagues equally obscure in character and origin. It also provided him with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.

Some time in the twenties when Smiley had emerged from his unimpressive school and lumbered blinking into the murky cloisters of his unimpressive Oxford College, he had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But his own tutor, who knew Smiley better, guided him wisely away from the honours that would undoubtedly have been his. On a sweet July morning in 1928, a puzzled and rather pink Smiley had sat before an interviewing board of the Overseas Committee for Academic Research, an organization of which he had unaccountably never heard. Jebedee (his tutor) had been oddly vague about the introduction: "Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company." But Smiley was annoyed and said so. It worried him that Jebedee, usually so precise, was so evasive. In a slight huff he agreed to postpone his reply to All Souls until he had seen Jebedee's "mysterious people."

He wasn't introduced to the Board, but he knew half of its members by sight. There was Fielding, the French medievalist from Cambridge, Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and Steed-Asprey, who had been dining at High Table the night Smiley had been Jebedee's guest. He had to admit he was impressed. For Fielding to leave his rooms, let alone Cambridge, was in itself a miracle. Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service.

Smiley had asked for time to think. They gave him a week. No one mentioned pay.

That night he stayed in London at somewhere rather good and took himself to the theatre. He felt strangely light-headed and this worried him. He knew very well that he would accept, that he could have done so at the interview. It was only an instinctive caution, and perhaps a pardonable desire to play the coquette with Fielding, which prevented him from doing so.

Following his affirmation came training: anonymous country houses, anonymous instructors, a good deal of travel and, looming ever larger, the fantastic prospect of working completely alone.

His first operational posting was relatively pleasant: a two-year appointment as englischer Dozent at a provincial German University: lectures on Keats and vacations in Bavarian hunting lodges with groups of earnest and solemnly promiscuous German students. Towards the end of each long vacation he brought some of them back to England, having already earmarked the likely ones and conveyed his recommendations by clandestine means to an address in Bonn; during the entire two years he had no idea of whether his recommendations had been accepted or ignored. He had no means of knowing even whether his candidates were approached. Indeed he had no means of knowing whether his messages ever reached their destination; and he had no contact with the Department while in England.

His emotions in performing this work were mixed, and irreconcilable. It intrigued him to evaluate from a detached position what he had learnt to describe as "the agent potential" of a human being; to devise minuscule tests of character and behaviour which could inform him of the qualities of a candidate. This part of him was bloodless and inhuman -- Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal gratification.

Conversely it saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure. Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction. By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.

But Smiley was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of England. He fed hungrily on memories of Oxford; its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgments. He dreamt of windswept autumn holidays at Hartland Quay, of long trudges over the Cornish cliffs, his face smooth and hot against the sea wind. This was his other secret life, and he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers. He resented, too, the way in which the Faculty had tampered with his subject -- his beloved German literature. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and a host of others. And Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.

Nineteen thirty-nine saw him in Sweden, the accredited agent of a well-known Swiss small-arms manufacturer, his association with the firm conveniently backdated. Conveniently, too, his appearance had somehow altered, for Smiley had discovered in himself a talent for the part which went beyond the rudimentary change to his hair and the addition of a small moustache. For four years he had played the part, travelling back and forth between Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long. He developed a nervous irritation in his left eye which remained with him fifteen years later; the strain etched lines on his fleshy cheeks and brow. He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

Against this background he conducted his authentic commerce and his work as a spy. With the progress of time the network grew, and other countries repaired their lack of foresight and preparation. In 1943 he was recalled. Within six weeks he was yearning to return, but they never let him go.

"You're finished," Steed-Asprey said. "Train new men, take time off. Get married or something. Unwind."

Smiley proposed to Steed-Asprey's secretary, the Lady Ann Sercomb.

The war was over. They paid him off, and he took his beautiful wife to Oxford to devote himself to the obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But two years later Lady Ann was in Cuba, and the revelations of a young Russian cypher-clerk in Ottawa had created a new demand for men of Smiley's experience.

The job was new, the threat elusive and at first he enjoyed it. But younger men were coming in, perhaps with fresher minds. Smiley was no material for promotion and it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was -- in the nicest possible way -- on the shelf.

Things changed. Steed-Asprey was gone; fled from the new world to India, in search of another civilization. Jebedee was dead. He had boarded a train at Lille in 1941 with his radio operator, a young Belgian, and neither had been heard of again. Fielding was wedded to a new thesis on Roland -- only Maston remained, Maston the career man, the war-time recruit, the Ministers' Adviser on Intelligence; "the first man," Jebedee had said, "to play power tennis at Wimbledon." The NATO alliance, and the desperate measures contemplated by the Americans, altered the whole nature of Smiley's Service. Gone for ever were the days of Steed-Asprey, when as like as not you took your orders over a glass of port in his rooms at Magdalen; the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, under-paid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy, and intrigue of a large Government department -- effectively at the mercy of Maston, with his expensive clothes and his knighthood, his distinguished grey hair and silver-coloured ties; Maston, who even remembered his secretary's birthday, whose manners were a by-word among the ladies of the registry; Maston, apologetically extending his empire and regretfully moving to even larger offices; Maston, holding smart house-parties at Henley and feeding on the success of his subordinates.

They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept, his insincerity when he defended the vagaries of his subordinates, his flexibility when formulating new commitments. Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants. Ostensibly, his position was an odd one. He was not the nominal Head of Service, but the Ministers' Adviser on Intelligence, and Steed-Asprey had described him for all time as the Head Eunuch.

This was a new world for Smiley: the brilliantly lit corridors, the smart young men. He felt pedestrian and old-fashioned, homesick for the dilapidated terrace house in Knightsbridge where it had all begun. His appearance seemed to reflect this discomfort in a kind of physical recession which made him more hunched and frog-like than ever. He blinked more, and acquired the nickname of "Mole." But his débutante secretary adored him, and referred to him invariably as "My darling teddy-bear."

Smiley was now too old to go abroad. Maston had made that clear: "Anyway, my dear fellow, as like as not you're blown after all the ferreting about in the war. Better stick at home, old man, and keep the home fires burning."

Which goes some way to explaining why George Smiley sat in the back of a London taxi at two o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, on his way to Cambridge Circus.

Copyright © 2002 by by le Carré Productions
Copyright renewed © David Cornwell

Customer Reviews

Important for what came later
This is le Carre's first novel. It has the merit of brevity, and this brevity is coupled with a plot just complicated enough for the length.

It is an important book, but not for its contents. It introduces George Smiley, Peter Guillam, Mendel of Special Branch, and Mundt of East German intelligence. The latter was to play a pivotal role in The Spy WHo came in from the Cold; Mendel in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Guillam in The Karla Trilogy; and Smiley? Well, Smiley is the key figure in le Carre's fiction - probably the most famous figure in all spy fiction. And it is for Smiley's introduction that the novel is important. Here, we find some of the history of his marriage to Lady Ann, we find some of his background, his work during the war, his time as an interrogator; and - a curiosity - Smiley as protagonist, a man of (occasional) action, rather than the deskbound thinker so familiar from later books.

The plot can be summarised simply. Smiley has interviewed an individual about allegations of spying. After the interview they die, apparently at their own hand, leaving a note which suggests that Smiley's interview led to the death. Smiley investigates whether this was suicide or murder? Was the deceased a spy? He is led to a confrontation with individuals from East German intelligence.

The writing style is workmanlike, although there is some foreshadowing of later le Carre obsessions. There are musings on the nature of betrayal (personal betrayal in a relationship, and public betrayal of a country); there is the conflict which rests at the heart of Smiley, a moral man acting in a way which may be immoral to achieve a greater objective.

Characterisation is perfunctory, only Smiley being adequately realised. But throughout this book and the later A Murder of Quality the characters seem ancillary to plot, and Smiley himself seems distant, cold. This reviewer did not care about the characters.

The novel is entertaining enough, but contrasted with the high standards set by le Carre's later fiction is disappointing.

This is one for le Carre completists. If you've not read le Carre before do not start here. The Spy who came in from the cold; and the Karla trilogy are as good as any post-war English fiction.

An excellent introduction
It is unfortunate that this great little book has fallen out of print, like so many of Le Carre's books. I can't help but wonder why. It marks not only Le Carre's entrance into fiction, but George Smiley's first step into our world. Here we have our introduction to The Circus, Smiley's odd relationship with Ann and the history thereof. Such small things that are in fact so important. Not to mention that is a great little murder mystery, which is how Le Carre began his literary career. Both this and the follow-up, "A Murder of Quality", find George Smiley involved in that greatest of literary traditions: the murder mystery. It was not until Le Carre's third novel, the classic "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold", that he broke George Smiley free from his confines and dropped him into the world in which he is now such a familiar fixture.

This little book (not even two hundred pages) forms the perfect introduction to Smiley, and though it is not an essential piece of the Le Carre library, it is not to be missed if you're a George Smiley fan. I encourage everyone interested to seek out a copy (which you can in fact order from Amazon's sister site: Amazon.co.uk, but be prepared to spend the extra few dollars for importing).

Le Carre's Astonishing Debut
"Call For The Dead," was John Le Carre's first novel, and first George Smiley novel: it was an astonishing debut. In her Foreword to the 1961 reissue, P.D. James wrote,"The novel is a finely wrought and compelling mixture of three types of crime writing:...a thriller, the spy story...and the detective story...."

Much shorter than his great works to come,really novella length, the book works ingeniously on all three levels. We are, firstly, kept breathlessly guessing at what will come next. We are then fascinated by the spy craft, a subject Le Carre knows from his years in the intelligence-gathering business. We meet George Smiley, a character who will turn up in Le Carre's later, great spy stories, and also a handful of other characters who will turn up again too. We can, finally, follow the clues of the mystery well enough. The currently desk-bound, formerly assigned in Germany, British spy Smiley is sent to interview a just-promoted Foreign Service employee, Samuel Fennan, after an anonymous letter accuses the man of Communist leanings.

The interview goes pleasantly enough, spent in a London park watching the ducks and swans,and Smiley comes as close as he may to reassuring Fennan that his report will clear him. Nevertheless, Fennan apparently tells his wife that the interview was an ordeal, and commits suicide. The Foreign Service Officer supposedly leaves a note that reads, in part, "I cannot spend my remaining years under a cloud of disloyalty and suspicion. I realize that my career is ruined, that I am the victim of paid informers." Yet, many features of the crime scene, including an 8:30 wakeup call the dead man had requested for the next morning, do not ring right to Smiley: it calls out for further investigation. This investigation will, as is frequently the case, prove dangerous to many people, including Smiley, and will result in Smiley's once again crossing paths, and swords, with an extraordinary one-time German protege of his.

The book is beautifully written, long on wit, though short on the midnight mandarin meetings that will become a mainstay of Le Carre's later works. Characters are fully rounded, and treated with a compassion that will not always survive to his later books. Le Carre also here begins by flashing us his ability to open a book with a bang: a first chapter entitled "A Brief History of George Smiley" is enough to leave us hungry for more.