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.
