John le Carre: The maestro has left the field

If giving pleasure to hundreds of millions can be a yardstick for a worthwhile life, le Carre measured up perfectly

Topics
Obituary | books | English fiction

T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan 

T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan

Mobile phones have a huge downside: they give you the bad news even before you are out of bed. And so it was that this morning I saw that John le Carre was dead. He was 89.

His real name was David John Moore Cornwell. And I have read all his books, some thrice and almost all the commentaries on them. His first bestseller was ‘The Spy Who Came In from the Cold’ which I remember reading on a rainy, wintry Sunday in college. It had become a bestseller in 1963 and it introduced the anti-hero spy, Alec Lemas who was the opposite of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the ...

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First Published: Mon, December 14 2020. 10:15 IST
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