"It's an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley, and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims."
— Elsa Fennan
Call for the Dead is the first novel by John le Carré, published in 1961.
George Smiley feels that he's coming to the end of his time in the Circus, Britain's secret service. After spending years undercover in Europe before and during World War II, his career is now simply bureaucracy and paperwork, routine background checks and vetting for the people being appointed to sensitive roles.
And then one of those people, civil servant Samuel Fennan, kills himself the day after they meet. The note he leaves behind blames Smiley, leading to political repercussions, and it suddenly seems that Smiley's time in the Circus will be ending very soon indeed. But it's not quite that simple.
A film adaptation, The Deadly Affair, was released in 1967 and starred James Mason as Charles Dobbs, the renamed George Smiley.
The BBC have also created two radio drama adaptations of the story. The first was broadcast in 1978 and the second, part of a full series of Smiley adaptations, was broadcast in 2009.
Call for the Dead contains the following tropes:
- Arms Dealer: During the war, Smiley spent four years travelling between Switzerland, Germany and Sweden as the accredited agent of a Swiss small-arms manufacturer, a cover identity carefully set up (and backdated) by the Secret Service.
- Book Burning: The prologue, "A brief history of George Smiley", mentions the book-burning he saw while lecturing at a German university in 1937. At that point Smiley decided that he knew his enemy, and that he hated them.
- Boom, Headshot!: Samuel Fennan types a note explaining that he was Driven to Suicide by his unfair interview with Smiley, then shoots himself in the temple. Smiley's convinced that it wasn't suicide, and the ending suggests that Fennan was actually shot dead by an East German spy, Mundt.
- Covert Group with Mundane Front: The East German Steel Mission is a "three men and a dog" presence in Hampstead, which originally tried and failed to lobby Britain's Board of Trade on steel exports. They later became moderately successful in agreements on machine tools and sharing technical information. However, their true purpose is to act as a front for Frey and Mundt's espionage, securely sending Elsa Fennan's stolen information back to Germany. The organisation vanishes entirely, emptying its office, once its cover is blown.
- Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: Samuel Fennan's suicide note blames Smiley for ruining his reputation and hounding him to his death. When that story starts to unravel, the next tactic is to frame Fennan as an East German spy, killed by his handler out of paranoia after he was spotted talking to Smiley. However, Smiley's final theory is that Samuel was actually innocent - his wife Elsa was the spy, and Samuel had started to suspect that she was copying secret documents he brought home from the Foreign Office. Samuel was killed by her handler before he could tell Smiley of his suspicions, then framed for Elsa's activities.
- Fictional Document: The penultimate chapter, "Dear Adviser", is Smiley's full report on "The Fennan Case", accompanied by the covering letter he sends Peter Guillam and Smiley's letter to Personnel, confirming that his resignation still stands.
- In-Series Nickname:
- After the war, Smiley's hunched appearance and frequent blinking earns the nickname of "Mole" from his colleagues at the Circus.
- Maston, the civil servant brought in to run the Secret Service during the war ("a man who could reduce any colour to grey"), is officially the Ministers' Advisor on Intelligence. However, Steed-Asprey once dubbed him the Head Eunuch, and the disparaging nickname endured "for all time", even if it's not used to Maston's face.
- Jurisdiction Friction: Fennan's death leads to some arguments over which police force has jurisdiction, as he lived in Surrey, just outside the London metropolitan area. Maston had to visit Scotland Yard in person to disentangle it.Peter Guillam: Maston's gone to see Sparrow at Scotland Yard. There's a squabble going on about which police department handles the case. Sparrow says Special Branch, Evelyn says CID and the Surrey police don't know what's hit them.
- Karma Houdini: Mundt seemingly kills Samuel Fennan and Adam Scarr, almost kills Smiley on two separate occasions, and then leaves the country under a false identity before the authorities can react. There are no consequences for him in this book, although it's not his last appearance in Le Carré's novels.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Car dealer Adam Scarr is found dead in the Thames. Scarr was drunk at the time, he was a known heavy drinker and there were no signs of violence. However, Smiley and Mendel already knew that Scarr was renting cars to East German agent Mundt (and Mundt had attacked Smiley at Scarr's yard), so are pretty sure that Mundt killed him - in that context it just reinforces their evidence against Mundt (and the East German Steel Mission) by acting as a Revealing Cover-Up.
- Mysterious Note: Smiley's interview with Samuel Fennan is prompted by an anonymous letter claiming that Fennan was a Community Party member when he was at Oxford. The interview is swiftly followed by Fennan's Plot-Triggering Death. The ending suggests that Fennan himself wrote the note, wanting a discreet way to contact someone in the security service. He'd started to suspect his wife was a spy, and planned to report his suspicions to Smiley at their second meeting.
- Never Found the Body: During World War II, Jebedee, the Oxford tutor who recruited Smiley to the Secret Service, boarded a train in occupied France. He was accompanied by his radio operator. Nobody knows what went wrong, but neither was ever seen again. After the war they're both presumed dead.
- Never Suicide: Smiley isn't convinced that Samuel Fennan's death was suicide, despite the note directly linking it to Smiley's interview. He's right, of course. Fennan was the husband of an East German spy, and it seems that her handler killed him to prevent him from exposing them to Smiley.
- The One That Got Away: Smiley's wife, Lady Ann Sercomb, left him for a Cuban racing driver two years after the war ended. The prologue mentions that something inside Smiley died when she left, but his professionalism endured. Subverted when she writes to him midway through the novel, asking if he'll take her back. The last chapter suggests that Smiley will at least try to reconcile with her.
- Overt Rendezvous: When Smiley tells Maston about his security interview with Fennan, he mentions that the Foreign Office was busy and they might be overheard, so they stepped outside, went to the park and talked while watching the ducks. Given the location of the real Foreign Office, this is implied to be St. James Park, later famous for its "bridge of spies".
- Plot-Triggering Death: Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan kills himself shortly after a routine interview with Smiley. He leaves a suicide note addressed to the Foreign Secretary, alleging that Smiley doubted his loyalty and ruined his career. The subsequent investigation forms the core of the plot.
- Posthumous Character: Samuel Fennan is key to the plot, but he's dead before the story starts. His suicide note blames Smiley and, along with his death, sets the plot in motion.
- A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Dieter Frey was Smiley's student before the war, then his best agent during the war. Now he's running an East German spy ring, ordering murders in London, and they're on opposite sides. Subverted a little after their confrontation ends in Dieter's death, as Smiley realises that Dieter could simply have shot him, and comes to believe that Frey remembered and honoured their friendship, whereas Smiley simply treated him as another enemy.
- Shout-Out:
- The prologue mentions that Smiley's cover for his first intelligence work abroad, at the end of the 1920s, involved lecturing on John Keats at a provincial German university.
- When Smiley witnesses a Nazi Book Burning before the war, it's specifically stated to include works by Heine, Lessing and Thomas Mann.
- Spy Fiction: Call for the Dead is the first of many spy novels written by Le Carré, and it's definitely at the sour beer end of the scale. It's much shorter and simpler than many of his later books, but still bleak and a little morally ambiguous.
