The Spy Who Came in from the Cold » (Reprint)

Any spy novelist working today must contend with the legacy of John le Carré, and it's a rare author who earns comparison with the master. Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and his trilogy starring British intelligence hero George Smiley and nemesis "Karla" are classics of Cold War literature, but the closing of that era has not left le Carré at loose ends: His later novels have departed for new milieus with no sacrifice of intrigue.

"Le Carre is simply the world's greatest fictional spymaster."
NEWSWEEK
For Leamas the espionage business has become an hermetic, enclosed world, detached from outside reality. He has watched his last agent being shot, crossing from East to West Berlin, and his death marks the end of the Circus' East German network. But Control is planning an operation against the head of East German Intelligence. And Leamas is to be the instrument, set in East one last time....

Gale Research

Many of the qualities in le Carre's writing that are most praised by critics were first displayed in Spy. One of these is an authenticity and realism not usually found in espionage fiction. "Here is a book, " Anthony Boucher writes in the New York Times Book Review, "a light year removed from the sometimes entertaining trivia which have (in the guise of spy novels) cluttered the publishers' lists." A reviewer for theTimes Literary Supplement believes that, in Spy, "the technicalities of [spy] network organization carry a stamp of authenticity seldom found in stories of this nature, " although the critic decries the "basically sensational" subject matter.