The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

Fifty years on, I don’t associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change onto the bar and in a gritty Irish accent ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

To the hard-liners of East and West the Second World War was a distraction. Now that it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since.

No wonder poor Leamas needed that stiff Scotch at London airport. The Service that owned his unflinching allegiance was in a state of corporate rot that would take another generation to heal. Did he know that? I think deep down he did. And I think I must have known it too, or I wouldn’t have written Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a few years down the line.

And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly trick.