History Creator / JohnLeCarre

* [[index]]''Film/TheTailorOfPanama'' (1996): A semi-comical novel about a self-serving British agent in UsefulNotes/{{Panama}} just after the transfer of sovereignty over the Canal Zone. Written as a tribute to Creator/GrahamGreeneAuthor, specifically ''Our Man in Havana''. Adapted into a film starring Creator/PierceBrosnan.

* RealLifeWritesThePlot: In his introduction to "The Honourable Schoolboy," le Carre revealed that he intended the Smiley series to run beyond three books and feature the conflict with Karla and Moscow Centre reaching multiple corners of the globe. After le Carre went to an active war zone in Cambodia to research the book, though, he was so traumatized by his experience he realized how petty and meaningless the MI6/KGB conflict had become and decided to end it with his next book, ''Smiley's People.''

In November 2023 it was [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/10/john-le-carres-son-to-write-new-george-smiley-novel announced]] that Le Carré's son Nicholas Cornwell would be writing a new George Smiley novel.

* AccidentallyCorrectWriting: He did this uncannily often. ''The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'' depicted the Stasi's inner workings so accurately that Markus Wolf, the Stasi's second-in-command, read the book obsessively for years, suspecting that Le Carré had somehow gotten insider's information about how the Stasi ran its operations.

* AmbiguousSituation: Beyond a brief introductory paragraph in the first book, virtually nothing is known of Smiley's childhood, family, or wartime service. We'll get occasional hints as to his past that are so few and far between they can be jarring and ask more questions than they answer, such as a line in Smiley's People that he spent part of his childhood in Germany's Black Forest.

** ''The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'' really plays with this. Fiedler is a ruthless spymaster with a reputation for casually killing anyone who gets in his way. He's also a Jewish Holocaust survivor who's the sole non-Aryan in the Stasi, and who constantly feels at risk from his ostensible allies. Once Leamas meets him he realizes that they're more alike than he ever realized and that Fiedler is just as much a helpless cog in the espionage machine as he is.
* ArcWelding: ''A Legacy Of Spies'' does this for the Smiley novels - [[spoiler: specifically ''The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'' and ''Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy''. It is revealed that characters from ''Tinker'', like Jim Prideaux and Connie Sachs were part of the group that planned the mission Alec Leamas was sent on in ''Cold''. Moreover, it is also revealed that after the events of ''Cold'', Hans Dieter Mundt was exposed to the Soviets as a British mole by Bill Haydon.]]
* BasedOnATrueStory: Most of his books have at least a grain of true events in there, although Le Carré always said that people overstated his books' "authenticity." (On at least one occasion claiming that his inspiration was the fantasy that the ''real'' spycraft must be being done at a level he had no access to.) Smiley is thought by some to be based on SIS chief Sir Maurice Oldfield, although Le Carré himself identified author and MI-5 officer John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, as Smiley's model.
** When ''The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'' was published, the press quickly discovered that David Cornwell was Le Carré and that he was a spy, and concluded that he had shown how intelligence really worked. [[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/john-le-carre-spy-anniversary John himself insisted that it is not authentic]], but this wasn't enough to stop some of his former colleagues from being enraged at him for writing too openly about British intelligence, and in a way that made them look bad.
** It has been repeatedly speculated that Fiedler, a high-ranking East German intelligence officer in ''The Spy Who came in from the Cold'', was based on Markus Wolf, the real-life head of the Stasi's foreign intelligence operations: both Fiedler and Wolf were Jewish, and in an early draft, Fiedler's name was "Wolf." Le Carré always denied this, insisting that he hadn't known who Wolf was and that if he had, he wouldn't have written Fiedler with any sympathy at all.

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Toby Esterhaze is a con-man who deals in counterfeit art and lives in the dry cleaning shop he owns. He's also one of the Circus' top spies and the head of their domestic surveillance unit, The Lamplighters, who themselves are made up of an array of homeless people, families, and Eastern Europeans that live in a trailer camp in a hidden car park behind Esterhaze's dry cleaners. It speaks to Esterhaze's value that despite his role in [[spoiler: the Bill Haydon debacle, he's the only one who survives termination and is brought back for the subsequent books]]. When Smiley comes back for one final job in Smiley's People, Esterhaze is one of the few people he trusts to help with the assignment, despite Esterhaze's louche nature.

* ConMan: Toby Esterhaze of the Circus. It's implied multiple times that he has a side business dealing counterfeit art, which the Circus turns a blind eye to because he's such a good agent. In ''The Secret Pilgrim'', his final appearance, he convinces the CIA that an exiled Hungarian professor - a charlatan, completely worthless agent - is an anti-Communist hero, so that the Americans take him off the British hands and put him on their own payroll.
* {{Defictionalisation}}: Some of the SpySpeak and {{Technobabble}} that le Carré just made up, such as "tradecraft", is now actually used by MI-5 and MI-6 agents in RealLife.
%%* DoubleAgent: Several.

** In ''A Small Town in Germany,'' Turner realizes that Harting [[spoiler: disappeared because he has evidence that Karlfeld, the prominent politician running for office, participated in Nazi war crimes. Turner intuits that Harting intends to assassinate Karlfeld at an upcoming rally. As Turner searches the crowd, Karlfeld delivers a pro-Nazi speech that culminates in Harting missing his shot. Karlfeld's men kill him and ostensibly retrieve the evidence, with the implication that Karlfeld will win the election]].
** In ''Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,'' Smiley exposes the mole as [[spoiler: Bill Haydon]] and intends to trade him for several spies Moscow Centre has been keeping as hostages, but [[spoiler: Jim Prideaux murders him before they can initiate the swap, with Smiley implying Moscow will now simply kill the spies in revenge]].
** In ''The Honourable Schoolboy,'' Jerry Westerby [[spoiler: betrays The Circus in order to protect Elizabeth from a potential reprisal for her involvement with the Ko Brothers, but the CIA and Circus find out and assassinate him. Westerby's warning turns out to be for naught because the CIA intercepts the Kos and abduct Nelson, then freeze the Circus out of interrogations due to Westerby's blunder.]] Possibly mildly subverted if Guillam's supposition that [[spoiler: Smiley let things go so wrong in order to get himself fired, which he is]].
** In ''Smiley's People,'' Smiley [[spoiler: finally convinces Karla to turn himself in by using Karla's mentally ill daughter as a bargaining chip in negotiations. A major threat to the West has been eliminated, but Smiley feels he lost the moral vicory by sinking as low as Karla, and takes no joy in his victory]].
** In ''The Little Drummer Girl,'' [[spoiler: Charlie survives the operation and the assassins responsible for killing civilians in Europe have all been identified and killed. Charlie has also come to see that both sides of the Israel/Palestinian conflict are just as ruthless as one another and suffers a nervous breakdown after seeing Khalil die and learning all the people she befriended in Palestine died in a bombing, sinking into alcoholism and depression.]]
%%* FeedTheMole, FakeDefector... actually, most of the serious EspionageTropes appear somewhere in le Carré's novels.

%%* KnowledgeBroker: Connie Sachs, an ex-spy.
* MandatoryUnretirement: George Smiley just can't stay retired. ''Call For The Dead'', ''The Spy Who Came In From The Cold'', ''Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'' and ''Smiley's People'' all have him pulled back into the Circus after an attempt at retirement. (And ''A Murder of Quality'' has him investigate a murder during one of those periods as a favour to an old friend.)

* {{Prequel}}: ''A Legacy of Spies'' effectively serves as one for ''The Spy Who Came in From the Cold''. [[spoiler: In addition to exploring Alec Leamas' backstory, the novel reveals how and why Hans Dieter Mundt became a British mole, and the planning of the covert operation that Leamas was sent on.]]

%%* SaidBookism

** ''A Legacy of Spies'' does this for [[spoiler: ''A Spy Who Came In From The Cold''; it is discovered that the grand deception plan that cost Alec Leamas his life at the BerlinWall was for naught as Hans-Dieter Mundt was shortly afterwards called to Moscow for a conference - and never seen again; the implication being that Bill Haydon 'blew' him to the KGB. It also reveals that Karla killed himself after his defection]].
%%* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Quite cynical.

%%* TheSpymaster: "Control" and later Smiley himself.

* TechnicalAdvisor: Is well known for this, and his acknowledgments pages are always entertaining for the presence of journalists, technical experts, diplomats, arms dealers, etc. — many of which he states he cannot name. He began traveling to the various locations in his novels, beginning with ''The Honourable Schoolboy'', which he set in Southeast Asia when virtually every country there was undergoing some kind of civil war.

%%* TruthInTelevision: Again and again.
* TheVerse: Some of his non-Smiley novels share characters in common, and some novels which don't centre around Smiley still include him as a cameo. ''The Russia House'' and ''The Night Manager'' are unambiguously in the same continuity as the [[Literature/TheQuestForKarla Smiley]] stories, for instance, through the characters of Ned and Burr. Interestingly, it was done [[{{Retcon}} retroactively]] - there's no mention of familiar characters in ''The Russia House'', but ''The Secret Pilgrim'' [[ArcWelding reveals Ned first worked under Smiley]] and revealed how "the Fall" affected the Circus, even down to changing from the slighly whimsical nickname of "The Circus" to the more plain "Service".

** A throwaway line in ''The Secret Pilgrim'' indicates [[spoiler: Percy Alleline]] has died sometime after the events of Tinker Tailor, but no further information is given.

* CommieNazis: These appear several times. Hans-Dieter Mundt, the antagonist of ''In from the Cold'', started his career in the Hitler Youth before joining East German intelligence, and the East German jailer who appears towards the end denounces Jews in language that would fit right in at a Nuremberg rally. The villain of ''A Small Town in Germany'' is a right-wing populist politician whose campaign platform calls for aa closer relationship between West Germany and the USSR, and [[spoiler:turns out to have been deeply involved in the Holocaust]]. [[spoiler: Also possibly Bill Haydon in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" if you take his sketchy MotiveRant for granted.]]