Born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931 to a con man father who ended up in jail — “when he cheated others, he cheated himself” — and an absentee mother, the future John le Carré became a diligent student of nineteenth-century German literature. He was recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service while at Oxford and ended up laboring in obscure counterespionage endeavors during the years of the Cold War. His superficial chroniclers — in the absence of any good biography on hand aside from his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel — speak vaguely about interrogations of German and Soviet deserters, his time in Vienna, and the omnipresence of Berlin, that gray city fragmented by interminable plots. The work, confessed le Carré, was conducted in an “inexact manner.”

Being a spy was not enough. He wrote a novel — in longhand, as he always did — which he was forced to publish under a pseudonym because of the official secrets law, obliging him to disguise his anecdotes. His signatures on a nondisclosure agreement forced him to bury his past in anonymity, a circumstance which, in 1961, gave birth to “John le Carré” and Call for the Dead. The action in his first novel played out between British spy George Smiley and his Soviet counterpart, Dieter Frey, two former comrades in arms in the war against Nazism who now found themselves on opposite sides of the Cold War. The book produced the Smiley character — his last name clashing with a profoundly somber personality — who would become inseparable from his creator over the years.

In an opening chapter called “A Brief History of George Smiley,” his exceedingly beautiful wife, Lady Ann, describes him as “tremendously vulgar” and then takes off with a Cuban race-car driver. In ten masterful pages, le Carré deploys a mix of innuendo and the most outlandish commentary to detail the odd lot who surround his protagonist, painting a picture of Smiley as a “sentimental” and impassioned lover of England (owing to his extended time abroad), a man who flees from the “temptations of friendship,” a son of Oxford recruited by his emeritus professors, and an instructor who taught in Germany — rounded up by the secret service at the end of the war.