George Smiley Books In Order

Call for the Dead

With the incomparable opening chapter of Call for the Dead, titled ‘A Brief History of George Smiley,’ John Le Carr introduces his legendary spy and immediately ensnares you in the shadowy world Smiley inhabits. Pulled back from overseas duty during World War II, Smiley was redirected to face the threats of the Cold War. He had been asked to interview Samuel Fennan of the Foreign Office after an anonymous letter accused Fennan of Communist Party membership. Smiley’s report cleared him of the allegations, so he was stunned to learn that Fennan had died the day after the interview, leaving a suicide note that claimed his career had been ruined. Investigating circumstances that make no sense to him, Smiley gradually uncovers a spy ring and in so doing is led into a lethal duel of wits with the best of his war time pupils. Call for the Dead marks the beginning of John Le Carr ‘s brilliant literary career, just as it launches the life of one of the most memorable fictional characters of the twentieth century.

A Murder of Quality

A Murder of Quality is the second novel by John le Carre’. It follows George Smiley, the most famous of le Carre’s recurring characters, in his only book set outside the espionage community.

Ex-undercover agent George Smiley emerges from retirement to solve a baffling, bloody crime. This time it is not a Cold War spy that he is hunting but the solution to the brutal murder of a harmless housewife in the seemingly peaceful setting of a prestigious British boys’ school.

It is there, at Carne School, where he becomes entangled with a woman as dangerous as she is charming and with a tottering, brilliant man haunted by a perverse secret of his past. Smiley pursues the murderer amid the hollow pomp and ceremony of the school’s establishment, where a man’s fate is decided over tea and a sentence of death can be passed out with biscuits and sherry.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realized characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap. It is 1962 the height of the Cold War and only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas is a hard working, hard drinking British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in tatters. His agents are either on the run or dead, victims of the ruthlessly efficient East German counter intelligence officer Hans Dieter Mundt. Leamas is recalled to London, where instead of being consigned to a desk he’s offered a chance to have his revenge by becoming a pawn in a brilliantly conceived plot to destroy Mundt. But in order to do so he has to stay out in the cold a little longer. Starring the award winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Brian Cox as Alec Leamas, this compelling dramatization perfectly captures the atmosphere of le Carr ‘s taut thriller.

The Looking Glass War

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realized characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin. Former spy Fred Leiser is lured back from retirement, and manages to cross the border into East Germany in a dangerous nighttime operation. But the world has changed since The Department’s glory days during the Second World War. The harsh realities of the Cold War now prevail, and there is no place for heroes. When word reaches The Department that Soviet missiles are being installed close to the West German border, it seems the perfect opportunity to show their rivals that The Department still has value. Starring the award winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Ian McDiarmid and Philip Jackson, this compelling dramatization of le Carr ‘s fourth Smiley novel perfectly captures the atmosphere of deception and betrayal.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. ‘Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary’. Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journey into his past a past filled with love, duplicity and betrayal. Starring the award winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a star cast including Anna Chancellor, Alex Jennings, Kenneth Cranham and Bill Paterson, this epic dramatisation brilliantly depicts the complicated moral dilemmas of those who practise post war espionage and illuminates the murky corners of le Carre’s classic spy thriller the first in the Karla trilogy. ‘…
a worthy audio version of the seminal spy drama, brilliantly depicting the complicated moral dilemmas of post war espionage, and allowing Beale room to shine as the character of Smiley really comes into his own’ ‘Herts Advertiser’. ‘beautifully paced in a dramatisation which captures the essence of the book whilst working supremely well in its own right in the radio medium’ ‘Chichester Observer’. ‘This period dramatisation could not be bettered’ ‘Observer’.

The Honourable Schoolboy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carre’s last tremendous success ended with the devastating unmasking of a double agent at the heart of the British Secret Service known as the Circus to le Carre’s millions of readers round the world. Now, in The Honourable Schoolboy, George Smiley who has assumed the unenviable job of restoring the health, and reputation, of his demoralized organisation goes over to the attack. Salvaging what he can of the Service’s ravaged network of spies, summoning back a few trustworthy old colleagues, working them and himself around the clock, he searches for a whisper, a hint, a clue that will lead him back to his opposite number: Karla, the Soviet officer in Moscow Centre who masterminded the infamous treachery. When he finds his opening, Smiley moves without hesitation. His battleground: the Far East. His choice of weapons: the Honourable Gerald Jerry Westerby, an Old Asia Hand, veteran of several marriages and wars, unquestioning in his readiness to answer Smiley’s summons. ‘You point me and I’ll march,’ says Jerry. Jerry’s odyssey begins: to Hong Kong and blackmail and murder; to collapsing Cambodia and Vietnam and drug traffickers, the CIA, and a huge and mystifying ‘gold seam’ spilling out of Russia. Slowly, manipulated by Smiley and his cohorts back in the Circus, Jerry thrusts himself into the centre of an intrigue of money, defection, passion and finds not only fertile ground for Smiley’s revenge, but a drama of loyalty and love that both tests his courage and spurs his belated coming of age, in tragic defiance of the voracious requirements of the trice which owns his allegiance. Here is John le Carre’s richest, most accomplished work. Suspense, excitement, the techniques of espionage as only he has been able to make them real for us together with a Towing capacity for sustained action, a grandly conceived and intricately drawn plot, and profound observation of the Far Eastern landscape. The Honourable Schoolboy is both a supreme entertainment and a major novel.

Smiley’s People

This is the third book of John le Carre’s ‘Karla trilogy’ and features British master spy George Smiley.

Spy chief George Smiley may intend to retire, but his active, intelligent mind is not so easily laid aside. So when British Secret Service asks him to go just one more round, his response is predictable–especially as it involves the brutal death of one of Smiley’s loyal cohorts in the underground world of espionage. The man was killed just when he had information of utmost importance to pass on to his spy chief.

Smiley’s opponent in this conclusive match is his mortal enemy inside the Soviet Union, the man whose code name is Karla. For several years they have battled at long range. Now they seize the chance to close. Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland are the backgrounds for this suspenseful novel, in which le Carre gives us the last chapter, the final convulsive confrontation between George Smiley and Karla.

John le Carre’s classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him–and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley–unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

The ‘Karla’ trilogy titles are: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy/ The Honourable Schoolboy/ Smiley’s People

The Secret Pilgrim

After the Berlin Wall came down and opened up new changes in eastern Europe, John le Carre’s stunning novel, The Secret Pilgrim, takes us behind the scenes into the former Cold War world. Nothing is as it was. Old enemies embrace. The dark staging grounds of the Cold War, whose shadows barely obscured the endless games of espionage, are flooded with light; the rules are rewritten, the stakes changed, the future unfathomable. John le Carre has seized this momentous turning point in history to give us the most disturbing experience we have yet had of the frail and brutal world of spydom. The man called Ned speaks to us. All his adult life he has been in British Intelligence the Circus a loyal, shrewd, wily officer of the Cold War. Now, approaching the end of his career, he revisits his own past. He invites us on a tour of his three decades in the Circus, burrowing deep into the twilight world where he ran spies ‘joes’ from Poland, Estonia, Hungary.