John Le Carré  

In 2016 his 1993 novel The Night Manager was screened in New Zealand as a television series, produced by his sons, Stephen and Simon Cornwell, and receiving universal acclaim. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last film appearance was in A Most Wanted Man, and other films in recent years based on Le Carré’s novels include Our Kind of Traitor, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener. The remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy featured Gary Oldman playing the role of spy-master George Smiley, memorably brought to life by Sir Alec Guinness with his unforgettable BAFTA-winning performance in the 1979 BBC television adaptation. When his novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published in 1963, became a worldwide bestseller, Le Carré was unmasked as an employee of British Intelligence, having been recruited while he was studying in Bern, Switzerland. Le Carré went on to read modern languages at Oxford, teach at Eton, and work for both MI5 (Security Service) and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service). With the success of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, he quit his intelligence job and became a full time writer of Cold War spy thrillers.

John Le Carré writes under a pseudonym: he was born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, Dorset. His father Ronnie was an unscrupulous conman who, among many other schemes throughout his lifetime, swindled widows and pensioners out of their life savings, including his own mother. He was on friendly terms with the notorious Kray brothers. Ronnie’s property development schemes led to imprisonment for fraud. Bankrupted several times, he was a larger than life character who lived on his wits and far beyond his means, charming everyone with his natural warmth and vitality. But he also had a darker side – Le Carré’s mother left Ronnie because of his infidelities, violent behaviour and bankruptcies when Le Carré was 5 years old, leaving him and his brother in their father’s care. Le Carré did not see his mother for another “sixteen hugless years”. Ronnie sent his two sons to various boarding schools. He would visit them occasionally, with a new woman and friends (The Court) in tow, and collect the boys from the school gates, to avoid encountering the school bursar who was after Ronnie to pay the outstanding school fees. As a teenager, Le Carré was his father’s unwitting accomplice to some of his many schemes. Ronnie was a colossus who straddled his son’s young life, and characters based on him were to appear in many of Le Carré’s novels, most notably as Rick Pym in his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy. Biographer, Adam Sisman, was given access to Le Carré’s archives to write the author’s first authorised biography, which was published after 4 years of research in 2015 as John Le Carré: the Biography. In the introduction, Sisman quotes Le Carré: “I’m a liar. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.”

Within a year of the publication of Sisman’s biography, Le Carré published his long-awaited memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life (2016). It is a collection of vignettes from his long life, episodes about people and events retold with acute observation and humour, and recognisable as source material for his novels. Of course the chapter I most wanted to read was the one about Ronnie: “Son of the author's father”. The title refers to when Ronnie bought 200 copies of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, (charging them to his son's account), and signed them all “The Author's Father”. Over the years many of these copies had turned up again, their owners' requesting that Le Carré sign them as well, which he did as “Son of the Author's Father”. Attempting to come to terms with his father and his legacy, he asks if there is any real difference between being a writer and being a conman - both are fantasists and well-practised in the art of deception. As a metaphorical 'doffing his cap', Le Carré relates a final tale. After Ronnie's death at the age of 69, his estate won a settlement in a court case he had been battling for twenty-odd years. In a moment of perfect irony, a Crown barrister stepped forward to lay claim to it all for “a preferential creditor” - Her Majesty's Inland Revenue.