John le Carre: A Trade Secret. Part 1

[David Flin]

@Stateless has gone undercover, and ferreted out this report on David Cornwell's better known alias.

Discuss this Here. In invisible ink, I suppose.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Writers who 'everyone knows for one thing doing another is always fascinating: Gene Roddenberry doing a military drama before Trek and making a sex comedy after is a big one. Now there's the idea of Le Carre being the old genre name used by Jean Sanglas, literary drama figure!

(It's a good thing Spy Who Came In did well enough for him to quit spying if the message is spying sucks, that would've been awkward in the office)

 

[Thande]

I do love Le Carré's espionage term coinage and the fact that real spies use a lot of the terminology now, even though he was often deliberately coming up with different terms to the reality used at the time. "Mole" is apparently older and was used centuries ago, but he either revived it or it was a parallel invention. I think my favourite one is "the lamplighters" which is used long after actual lamplighters had become obsolete. Also how he refers to combat training as "a tough-guy course".