Review: The British Spy Novelist Beloved by Fellow Spies

John le Carré’s characters were the opposite of James Bond. Like Bond creator Ian Fleming, le Carré was a veteran British intelligence officer who wrote spy novels. But unlike Fleming’s action hero, le Carré’s protagonists were morally dubious actors caught up in forces they didn’t understand. After all, le Carré started his own intelligence career steeped in treason, interrogating Soviet bloc defectors and snitching on communist classmates at Oxford University.

Tradecraft was published to accompany an Oxford museum exhibit of the same name, open until April 2026. It reconstructs le Carré’s career through his personal papers, expert commentary, and memories from his collaborators, including journalist Michela Wrong and filmmaker Errol Morris. They take readers on a journey from Cornwall to the Congo, from Phnom Penh to Perm, Russia.

Le Carré, who died in 2020, soured on British foreign policy and concluded that espionage didn’t make a difference in winning the Cold War. Despite that, his work was quite popular with other spies. The very word tradecraft (covert techniques) is one of the many spy terms the author either invented or popularized, along with mole (infiltrator) and honeytrap (sexual blackmailer). Life imitates art, sometimes consciously.