I started reading these books in the mid-1980s, trading my fantasy novels for Dad’s airport paperbacks with covers featuring hammers and sickles, sniper crosshairs, and silhouetted men in trench coats. Follett, Ludlum, and Clancy were relatively easy—novels with good guys and bad guys. Le Carré was different. I understood at age 11 or 12 that Dad’s copy of The Little Drummer Girl was going to give me difficulty. That his well-worn Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy paperback was a mountain to climb.
So I started with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, that 1963 masterpiece about double agents in Cold War Berlin, because it was appealingly slim. It took me two weeks and little about its twisty plot truly sunk in. Still, it cast a mood of gloom and moral compromise. I remember finishing it at a sleepover, by the light of my friend’s gurgling aquarium, and thinking that this was what a grown-up novel did. It left you transported and a little depressed.
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