The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Cover for the Victor Gollancz first edition
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| Author | John le Carré |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | George Smiley |
| Genre | Spy novel |
| Published | September 1963 Victor Gollancz & Pan |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pages (Hardback edition) & 240 pages (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | (Hardback edition) & (Paperback edition) |
| Preceded by | A Murder of Quality |
| Followed by | The Looking-Glass War |
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by British author John le Carré. It depicts a British agent being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. With the aid of his unwitting English girlfriend, an idealistic communist, he allows himself to be recruited by the East Germans, but soon his charade unravels and he admits to still being a British agent—a revelation that perversely achieves the ultimate objective of the mission.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has become famous for its portrayal of Western espionage methods as morally inconsistent with Western democracy and values. The novel received critical acclaim at the time of its publication and became an international best-seller; it was selected as one of the All-Time 100 Novels by Time magazine.
In 1965, Martin Ritt directed the cinematic adaptation The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton as Alec Leamas.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold occurs during the heightened tensions that characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s Cold War, when a Warsaw Pact–NATO war sparked in Germany seemed likely. The story begins and concludes in East Germany, about a year after the completion of the Berlin Wall and around the time when double-agent Heinz Felfe was exposed and tried.
In Call for the Dead, le Carré's debut novel, a key character is Hans-Dieter Mundt, an assassin of the Abteilung ("the Department"), the East German Secret Service, who is working under diplomatic cover in London. When uncovered by agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam of the British intelligence service "the Circus" (which is led by "Control"), he escapes from England to East Germany before Smiley and Guillam can catch him. Two years later, at the time of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Mundt has risen from the field to the upper-echelon of the Abteilung, because of his successful counter-intelligence operations against the spy networks of the British secret services.
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Wikipedia