The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

By John le Carré, Victor Gollancz & Pan, 1963, 240 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, January 12, 2021

My favorite title – not my favorite book, mind you – was of Nan and Ivan Lyons’ 1976 novel “Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe.”

Although I’m no fan of poetry, I admire poetic sentences. Notice where the accents fall in that title: “SOME-one is KILL-ing the GREAT chefs of EUR-ope.” The words rise and descend like a ballet virtuoso leaping and landing in perfect cadence.

My second-favorite book title, for much the same reason, is: “the SPY who came IN from the COLD,” more poetry in prose. But this time, I loved the novel, something I can’t say about that “Chefs” trifle.

As a teenager in the mid-’60s still developing my reading addiction, I noticed “The Spy” was the No. 1 best-seller for weeks and weeks. I wondered why.

No way I was going to spend my meager allowance on a hardback edition, but by 1965, the Dell paperback, priced at 75 cents, had been published, so I bought it, read it, loved it and kept it all these years.

Then when the author, the justifiably renowned John Le Carré, died last month, I decided to see if I still thought it a masterpiece.

And I do, albeit not with the same youthful awe of digesting a grown-up book, one of my first.

By “grown-up,” I mean a book in which people kill and are killed, have sex, smoke cigarettes, get drunk, betray each other and their countries. Kids, in the Baltimore of my youth, almost never betrayed their countries.

I was then, as I am again, captivated by the skillful plotting, the way an author could tell a relatively short (223 pages) story, and yet color in such detail and create such I-didn’t-see-it-coming plot twists. Even to the last page, Le Carré keeps readers guessing.

Alec Leamas is “The Spy,” the top British secret agent in the then-divided-by-concrete city of Berlin. In the opening scene, he watches as his ace infiltrator of Communist East Germany is gunned down at the edge of the Soviet sector, only yards from safety.

Depressed by all the treachery he has caused and witnessed, Leamas limps back to London. His boss, known only as “Control,” makes an offer: If Leamas will agree to one final mission, Control will allow him to take shelter from “the cold,” the callous, uncaring attitude spies must live by, lest they crack from emotional attachments.

But the mission is the boldest of Leamas’ career, an elaborate scheme to kill Mundt, the East German spymaster thought responsible for wiping out so many British agents.

To start, Leamas becomes a slobbering public degenerate, so soured on the spy business, so soused on cheap booze and so impoverished that alert East German spies in London conclude he is a potential defector.

(In the movie, which is the equal of the book, Leamas is played by Richard Burton, to whom smoking, drinking and giving the middle finger to the entire civilized world are as natural as smoking, drinking and giving the middle finger. The magnificent rumble of Burton’s voice, reminiscent of a car’s belching muffler many miles overdue for replacement, bolsters the film’s grim black-and-whiteness.)

Leamas meets Liz, a pretty peon of a Communist – Claire Bloom, in the movie – who falls for him, he punches a shopkeeper and ends up in prison, the East Germans buy both his act and his defection.

His lead interrogator, Fiedler, works for, but despises, the targeted Mundt, so for a while, the plan to eliminate Mundt looks good. Beware, however, of a Le Carré plot that “looks good” halfway through.

Lots of drama intervenes. The good guys and bad guys jounce around like tropical fish when you bang on their aquarium’s glass.

Near the very end, when Leamas and Liz are on the run, taking a long-odds opportunity to escape to the warmth of an ordinary life, the two squabble because she is revolted by the meanness of his occupation. Leamas explodes at her: What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could. I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens they need him.

Tart stuff, and Leamas’ bitter manifesto captures what’s so right about “The Spy.”

And, unfortunately, it also captures what’s wrong, and what I missed in 1965 when I, an innocent, first read it. Maybe in the interim, I’ve spent too much time in “the cold” of mediocre writing, but when I read fiction these days, I dislike lengthy speeches by characters, dense quoted paragraphs of exposition. “Action,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote as a reminder to himself, “is character.” Speech, while vital in narrative writing, is no substitute for letting plot fill in blanks.

Much of “The Spy” is in the form of interrogation and speeches. Please understand, Le Carré is no slouch at dramatic, plot-advancing dialogue; but it becomes wearying, even in a short book.

Still, Le Carré’s craftsmanship – descriptions of Cold War rivals’ unsparingly brutal moves, the bleak East German backgrounds (my paperback’s tape-repaired cover is thunderstorm-gray), the unsentimental attitudes of nearly everyone except Liz – deftly shows how the spy world operates, summarized by a single adverb the author uses a few pages from the end: “pitilessly.”

I welcomed the word because I already had decided that I had to plug the adjective “pitiless” into this review.

Le Carré, ever the master, took care of that for me.