David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. His books include The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Night Manager, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor.
About John le Carré in brief
David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. His books include The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor. Each of his novels features a retired spy, George Smiley, investigating a murder. Le Carré depicted Philby as an upper-class traitor, hunted by the KGB by the end of the first volume of the series, and analysed as Philby by the British Foreign Office in the second volume, A Murder of Quality. He left the work as a full-time novelist in the 1970s and went on to become a well-known author of mystery fiction. He died in a car crash in 2007. He is survived by his wife, two children, and a stepson. He was married to the actress Charlotte Cornwell until his death in 2011. He had a son, David, with his second wife, the actress Charlotte Cornwell. He also had a daughter, Charlotte Corn well, who is now a TV presenter. He has a younger half-brother, Rupert Cornwell, who was a former Washington bureau chief for the newspaper The Independent.
His uncle was Liberal MP Alec Glassey. He did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their reacquaintance at 21 years old. His father had been jailed for insurance fraud, was an associate of the Kray twins, and was continually in debt. Rick Pym, Magnus Pym’s father, a scheming con man in A Perfect Spy, was based on Ronnie. Cornwell’s schooling began at St Andrew’s Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School. He studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn; he was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A murder of Quality and The Spy who came in from the cold. In 1964, le le Carrée came to an end as an intelligence officer because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.
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