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A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | 4 | |
| Little Drummer Girl | 1 | |
| The Perfect Spy | 1 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
John le Carre
added by SJRozan
Comments
Please consider recommending where to begin reading this author, or where not to. A few words about your experiences reading this author and why you make the recommendations you do will be helpful to other users. If you are the author or have studied this author extensively, please say so.
Yes to "Tinker Tailor" but also "The Lookingglass War". Not "Spy Who Came in from the Cold", and certainly not the sequels to Tinker except in the proper order.
Marian March 28th, 2006 09:34 AM PST
I started with TINKER, TAILOR, then went back and read EVERYTHING by Le Carre in the order they were written. But that was in the 80s. Today, I recommend starting with THE CONSTANT GARDNER. After that, you may want to sink your teeth into the Karla trilogy and read forward from there.
Biography
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From the RANDOM HOUSE website, http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lecarre/author.html :
John le Carr? was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. He divides his time between England and the Continent.
On the same website, "LeCarre Breaks His Silence" by saying:
L"et me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me a s a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.
"I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird. Read A Perfect Spy. [Read also LeCarre's memoir of his con artist father, in the ??? issue of THE NEW YORKER.]
"I hate the telephone. I can't type. Like the tailor in my new novel, I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don't see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.
"Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer's instructions, taught children in a special school.
"I have four sons and ten grandchildren. It is well over thirty years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next thirteen after I was at large.
"A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press.
"The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks. I am regarded as a sage on every spy case from the double-agent Judas to your wretched Mr. Aldrich Ames.
"And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception."
jorn January 29th, 2006 04:49 AM PST