Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer: A Look Back At Ian Fleming and John le Carre

I recently read Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an excellent biography of the late, great thriller writer. 

(My On Crime column on the biography will soon appear in the Washington Times).   

And last year I read Adam Sisman’s interesting book on the secret life of the late John le Carre (I covered Mr. Sisman’s earlier biography of le Carre in my 2019 On Crime column for the Washington Times). 

Although both spy novelists have passed on, there is still much interest in the lives and works of both men. Both served in British intelligence prior to becoming writers. Ian Fleming served as a commander in British naval intelligence during WWII, and John le Carre served briefly in MI5 and MI6 after WWII.

Although the two were very different writers and men, the two are often compared. And John le Carre often criticized Ian Fleming, who was not then alive to respond.   

I wrote about the two writers in my Crime Beat column in 2010. You can read the column below: 

Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer: John le Carre Calls 

Ian Fleming's Iconic James Bond Character A Neo-Fascist Gangster

Regarding John le Carre’s recent critical remarks about fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond, the author of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is right about one thing.

Le Carre is correct in stating that the Bond films have overtaken the books. It is true that the general public’s image of the fictional secret agent is that of the often silly, superman-like film character, rather than the darker, more complex and more realistic Bond character in the novels.

Le Carre is wrong about everything else.

Le Carre, aka former British intelligence officer David Cornwell, upon reviewing a 1966 BBC broadcast in which he was highly critical of Ian Fleming, calling his character James Bond “a neo-fascist gangster,” noted that he would be “much kinder” in his remarks today.

The 78-year-old, bitter leftist spy novelist then went on to state that Bond “would have gone through the same antics for any country if the girls had been so pretty and the martinis so dry.”

So much for being kinder.

“I dislike Bond,” le Carre told the BBC in 1966. “I’m not sure that Bond is a spy. I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in that category.

“It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States or the Union of Soviet Republics.”

It was a pity that Fleming, who died in August of 1964, was not alive to respond.

I suggest that le Carre, like millions of thriller readers around the world, re-read the Fleming stories.

Although Fleming stated that his James Bond thrillers were highly romanticized and he wrote them unabashedly for entertainment (the public’s as well as his own), the novels portray a character based on the secret agents and military commandos Fleming met while serving as a British naval commander attached to naval intelligence in World War II. He also added a good bit of his own likes, dislikes and personality to the character.

The Bond character was driven primarily by a love of adventure and a strong sense of patriotism. He was all Queen and Country. He fought the good fight against communists, terrorists and criminals. He was a modern-day knight.

As for le Carre’s comment that Bond was not truly a spy, if he were to re-read the novels, he would discover that the character was a senior intelligence officer in the British Secret Service - the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), often referred to as MI6. 

Although he did not perform traditional intelligence officer duties, such as recruiting and controlling agents, Bond was sent out on missions to “spy” on and take out enemies of the Crown. Bond was a special operator.

Although the double-00 license to kill was a fictional device, there are in reality special operatives in the intelligence services of both the U.S. and the U.K who have special operations backgrounds and have skills in guns, knives, unarmed combat and explosives. These men, and some women, are hunting al Qaeda today.

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming said.

Although his thrillers had fantastic elements, many of his plots and characters were inspired by true events. A case in point is the plot of Goldfinger, in which a gold-crazed criminal mastermind plans to rob Fort Knox.

Ben Macintyre recently wrote a good piece for The London Times, in which he informs us that a German spy in WWII named Gustav Steinhauer planned to blow up the gold reserves of the Bank of England. Macintyre wrote that Fleming liked the interplay between truth and fiction.

In 1966, when le Carre recorded his disparaging remarks, Fleming was dead, but Bond-mania was in full bloom. Although le Carre’s novels sold well and he was critically acclaimed, Fleming’s thrillers were well on their way to selling 100 million copies world-wide. James Bond was a house-hold name around the world.

As for le Carre’s realism, I’ve interviewed a good number of former and current CIA and military intelligence officers who object strongly to the moral ambiguity found in his novels. Most Cold War intelligence officers were, like Bond, patriots who were dedicated to fighting communism.

British, American and other Western intelligence officers were certainly not like their utterly ruthless KGB and Eastern bloc counterparts who were defending a totalitarian, evil empire. There was a moral distinction between the Cold Warriors that you will not find in a le Carre novel.

And it should be noted that John Bingham, le Carre's boss and mentor at MI5, and reportedly the man le Carre based George Smiley on, despised le Carre's portrayal of British spies.

William F. Buckley Jr, the late conservative author, columnist and political talk show host, noted that films and novels in the 1960s and 1970s often portrayed CIA officers as no better than the KGB.

Having served briefly as a CIA officer, he objected.

Buckley said the CIA pushed little old ladies out of the way of moving cars, while the KGB pushed little old ladies into the path of the moving cars. People like le Carre say both the CIA and the KGB push around little old ladies.

Buckley, who wrote his own series of spy thrillers, believed the CIA and the Western intelligence services were a force for good in the Cold War. 

I agree.

Despite the moral ambiguity, I used to like le Carre’s novels. But his most recent novels have been marred by his increasing anti-Americanism and leftist opinions.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a first-rate spy thriller, and in the novel le Carre offers a James Bond type of character with Peter Guillam, the tough guy head of the "Scalphunters." The Scalphunters were in le Carre's novels a group that performs the rough stuff one associates with James Bond.

And Peter Guillam was played in the TV mini-series by actor Michael Jayston, who was also considered for the role of James Bond at one point.

Yes, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a great Cold War thriller, but so is From Russia With Love.

Lastly, it should be noted that Fleming lost his father in combat in World War I and his younger brother in World War II. Ian Fleming was a British patriot, as was his creation, James Bond.

Note: You can read my Washington Times On Crime column on Ian Fleming via the below link: 

 Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At Ian Fleming, The Man Who Created James Bond: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Why The Bond Character Continues To Resonate

And you can read my Washington Time On Crime column on John le Carre via the below link:   

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of 'John Le Carre: The Biography'

And you can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of William Buckley's spy thriller Last Call for Blackford Oakes via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Philadelphia Inquirer Review Of William F. Buckley's 'Last Call For Blackford Oakes'

Foreign Devil: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Richard Hughes, The Far East Correspondent Who Inspired Ian Fleming And John le Carre

Back in 2020 I wrote about an interesting man named Richard Hughes (seen in the above photo), a Far East correspondent for the Sunday Times who inspired both Ian Fleming and John le Carre. Both spy thriller writers modeled a character after Hughes.

 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:  

The foreign correspondent who inspired Ian Fleming and John le Carre - Washington Times

 

Later this year Casemate will publish Edward Abel Smith’s “Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books.”

 

“James Bond is possibly the most well-known fictional character in history,” Casemate Publishing notes. “What most people don’t know is that almost all of the characters, plots and gadgets come from the real-life experiences of Bond’s creator — Commander Ian Fleming.

 

“In this book, we go through the plots of Fleming’s novels explaining the real-life experiences that inspired them. The reader is taken on a journey through Fleming’s direct involvement in World War II intelligence and how this translated through his typewriter into James Bond’s world, as well as the many other factors of Fleming’s life which were also taken as inspiration.”

 One friend who inspired Fleming was the late Richard Hughes, who was a foreign correspondent for the British Sunday Times. He was the inspiration for the fictional character Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s 1964 James Bond novel “You Only Live Twice.” 

 “He is a giant Australian with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world,” the late Ian Fleming said of Richard Hughes. In 1959, Fleming, then the foreign manager of the Sunday Times, was asked by the newspaper's editor to travel to foreign cities and write about them, as Fleming notes, "through a thriller-writer's eye." The newspaper articles were compiled into a book called "Thrilling Cities" in 1963. 

While visiting Hong Kong and Tokyo, Fleming’s guide was Richard Hughes, whom Fleming called “Our Man in the Orient.”       

 

Ian Fleming later wrote “You Only Live Twice,” which featured a character named Richard Lovelace Henderson. Henderson, based on Hughes, was the British intelligence chief in Japan. He was a big, boisterous and profane Australian who understood the way of the Japanese. Fleming described him as looking like a middle-aged prize-fighter who retired and had taken to the bottle.

Richard Hughes was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1906. He served as a war correspondent in North Africa in WWII and after the war he worked primarily in Japan. In 1956 he filed an exclusive interview in Moscow with the British spies, traitors and defectors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Hughes went on to write several books, including his 1972 autobiography, “Foreign Devil: Thirty Years Reporting in the Far East.”

 

“I had the honor of accompanying my friend, the late Ian Fleming, on his second and last tour of Japan. He was seeking local color, factual detail spiritual inspiration and carnal folklore for his twelfth — and alas, penultimate — James Bond volume, “You Only Live Twice,” Hughes wrote. “I filled the humble role of valet-comrade to Fleming-san. Our odyssey was the most instructive, enjoyable, crowded, leisurely, lively and hilarious trip I ever made in thirteen long and happy years.”

 

Hughes wrote that he discovered what he called “Fleming’s technique of precise and meticulous investigation for the background and action of a James Bond adventure.”

 In the late 1970s, John le Carre visited Hong Kong while doing research for his novel “The Honorable Schoolboy,” the sequel to his novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Mr. le Carre met Richard Hughes, and like Ian Fleming, he based a character on him.

 In the novel, the assembled journalists at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Hong Kong were discussing the closing of the local branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Mr. le Carre wrote that William Craw, like Hughes, was the doyen of Asia’s foreign press corps.

 

“In the tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would walk over; and they were right,” le Carre wrote. “In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place.”

 

Mr. le Carre thanked Richard Hughes in the foreword of the spy novel. “And then there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw.

 

“Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruelest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.”

 

Richard Hughes, who died in 1984 at the age of 77, led a robust and fascinating life, and he fascinated two world-famous thriller writers.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers. 

The Cooling Of John le Carré

 As I noted in my Washington Times review of a biography of the John le Carre, I’ve been a reader and admirer of Mr. le Carre since the 1960s, although I don’t subscribe to his leftist views and his anti-Americanism. 

His later novels are not as good as his earlier ones, in my view, as they are marred by his political shrillness. Yet I continue to read Mr. le Carre because he is, after all, a fine writer. 

Michael J. Lewis at the New Criterion offers a piece on the late spy novelist. 

John le Carré died at the age of eighty-nine last December, a good thirty years after the end of the Cold War that his spy novels chronicled. He certainly knew whereof he wrote. As a British intelligence agent stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, he had an insider’s view of two of its key crises: the shocking creation of the Berlin Wall on a single day in August 1961, and the defection to Moscow of Kim Philby in early 1963. Those events provided the raw material for his best books. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) begins and ends with the shooting of agents trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) was the story of a Philby-like “mole” who successfully burrowed himself into the topmost echelons of the secret service. 

Despite le Carré’s political turn, which became painfully anti-English and anti-American, I continued to read every new novel the week it came out. What made these and le Carré’s other dozen-odd Cold War novels so remarkable is their distinctive point of view, which is not that of a glamorous jet-setting spy like Ian Fleming’s James Bond (introduced in 1953 with Casino Royale) but that of the colorless bureaucrat working behind a desk. 

Le Carré’s rejoinder to Bond was the laughably unglamorous George Smiley. Short, pudgy, and nearsighted, he was a devotee of seventeenth-century German poetry and the perpetual dupe of his lovely but straying wife. But he was not lacking in courage, having worked undercover in Nazi Germany. A Murder of Quality, le Carré’s second novel, gives a deft sketch: “Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I’d give my eyes for. Had a very nasty war. Very nasty indeed.” 

Smiley’s bureaucratic world—that of tiresome interviews and equally tiresome debriefings, of battered iron desks and shabby damp raincoats—is essentially that of le Carré himself, who did his spying under diplomatic cover, first in the British embassy in Bonn and later as Consul in Hamburg. He did his writing undercover as well; protocol required him to conceal his real name, David Cornwell, under a penname, for which he chose the French for “the square.” For much of his career he maintained the polite fiction that he had been a minor diplomatic functionary; not until 1993 did he formally concede that he had indeed been an intelligence officer, something that had been obvious to the whole world from the beginning. 

… Some were affronted by the new and strident note of anti-Americanism of books like Absolute Friends, whose “politicised ranting” startled even the left-wing Guardian: “in the scheme of this novel there is no other villain in the modern world than America.” Others were dismayed by what seemed to be an increasingly flat and schematic characterization. 

… Le Carré seemed to have lost what had been his strong suit, his gift for suggesting the unspoken transactions that take place beneath an intimate conversation—the resentments, manipulations, tacit understandings—the conversation that is at once negotiation, interrogation, and seduction. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

The cooling of John le Carré by Michael J. Lewis | The New Criterion 

You can also read my Washington Times reviews of John le Carre’s books via the below links:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of 'John Le Carre: The Biography'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of John le Carre's 'Agent Running In The Field'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of John Le Carre's 'A Legacy Of Spies'

William Boyd: The Spies Who Lived Here: How I Found James Bond’s Precise Address

British novelist William Boyd, who wrote the James Bond continuation novel, Solo, tracked down what may been the London addresses of Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent James Bond, as well as the London address of John le Carre’s fictional spymaster George Smiley, in a piece in the London Times Literary Supplement, TLS.

I am in London. In Chelsea to be precise, at the entrance to Wellington Square off the King’s Road, where I am being interviewed for the French radio station RTL – à distance sociale – about James Bond. The reason why we’re at Wellington Square is because this is where James Bond lived. Obviously, James Bond is a fictional character and didn’t actually live anywhere. However, it is strange how in the case of some fictional characters a kind of reality begins to take over their lives, as if they really did live and breathe, had an actual address and a mortgage.

I point out to the interviewer that, a few yards across the King’s Road from where we’re standing, almost directly opposite, is the entrance to Bywater Street. Believe it or not, I tell him, another famous fictional spy, John le Carré’s George Smiley, lived in Bywater Street. This extraordinary coincidence causes some excited consternation and we stop recording and cross the road. In Bywater Street, we start recording again. “George Smiley lived here? Amazing. What number?” the interviewer asks. Number 9, I say. You see what I mean.

I suppose the most famous fictional abode for a character is Sherlock Holmes’s 221b, Baker Street. James Bond’s address and George Smiley’s have yet to achieve the same legendary status, but give them time. When I came to write my James Bond continuation novel, Solo (2013), I set myself the task of re-reading all of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels in chronological order, pen in hand, making notes, with the idea that all the texture and detail in the new novel would be classic Bondiana, sourced in Fleming..

There is another significant reason why Wellington Square might have proposed itself as a suitable address for Bond. In the late 1940s and early 50s Fleming was the Foreign Manager for the Sunday Times, a person of power and influence at the newspaper. During this period, the chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times was Desmond MacCarthy, a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. As it happened, MacCarthy and his wife Molly lived in Wellington Square. They were legendary entertainers and their home became a kind of salon. Cyril Connolly was one of MacCarthy’s young protégés and a regular at the soirées – and, what’s more, Connolly and Fleming were close friends. All three were Old Etonians, incidentally.

The circumstantial evidence is compelling. It is highly probable that Fleming went to one or more of the MacCarthys’ parties in Wellington Square, either through his own connections with MacCarthy via the Sunday Times or as a friend of Connolly. MacCarthy died in 1952, the year before Casino Royale was published, though it wasn’t until Moonraker, three years later, that Bond’s Chelsea flat received its first mention.

…The MacCarthy house is to be found in the eastern corner of Wellington Square. Bond’s flat, according to Fleming, was on the ground floor and was described in From Russia, with Love (1957) as having “a long big-windowed sitting room”. The ground-floor window of the MacCarthy house fits that description perfectly. One other sliver of circumstantial evidence I would offer is that, in the same novel, Bond’s sitting room is described as “book-lined”. Most readers wouldn’t think of James Bond as an intellectual but books would certainly be the most prominent aspect of the MacCarthy house’s decor. In fact, Fleming took pains to stress Bond’s wide reading, despite the fact that Bond (Eton and Fettes) had no tertiary education. Bond makes reference to many books and writers in the novels: Eric Ambler, Lafcadio Hearn, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu and Rupert Brooke among others. Bond is a very well-read spy.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-spies-who-lived-here-essay-william-boyd/?fbclid=IwAR3sf31UgtV4jQQYnlzVu3H0oOi-nkDwtpxyWgOiy-uCv7Cq1uAdV8_wkHM 

My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Richard Hughes, The Foreign Correspondent Who Inspired Ian Fleming And John le Carre

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on the late Richard Hughes (seen in the above photo), a foreign correspondent and the author of Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East. Both Ian Fleming and John le Carre based fictional characters on him in their novels. 

Later this year Casemate will publish Edward Abel Smith’s “Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books.”

“James Bond is possibly the most well-known fictional character in history,” Casemate Publishing notes. “What most people don’t know is that almost all of the characters, plots and gadgets come from the real-life experiences of Bond’s creator — Commander Ian Fleming.

“In this book, we go through the plots of Fleming’s novels explaining the real-life experiences that inspired them. The reader is taken on a journey through Fleming’s direct involvement in World War II intelligence and how this translated through his typewriter into James Bond’s world, as well as the many other factors of Fleming’s life which were also taken as inspiration.”

One friend who inspired Fleming was the late Richard Hughes, who was a foreign correspondent for the British Sunday Times. He was the inspiration for the fictional character Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s 1964 James Bond novel “You Only Live Twice.” 

“He is a giant Australian with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world,” the late Ian Fleming said of Richard Hughes. 

In 1959, Fleming, then the foreign manager of the Sunday Times, was asked by the newspaper’s editor to travel to foreign cities and write about them, as Fleming notes, “through a thriller-writer’s eye.” The newspaper articles were compiled into a book called “Thrilling Cities” in 1963. 

While visiting Hong Kong and Tokyo, Fleming’s guide was Richard Hughes, whom Fleming called “Our Man in the Orient.”   

Ian Fleming later wrote “You Only Live Twice,” which featured a character named Richard Lovelace Henderson. Henderson, based on Hughes, was the British intelligence chief in Japan. He was a big, boisterous and profane Australian who understood the way of the Japanese. Fleming described him as looking like a middle-aged prize-fighter who retired and had taken to the bottle.

… In the late 1970s, John le Carre visited Hong Kong while doing research for his novel “The Honorable Schoolboy,” the sequel to his novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Mr. le Carre met Richard Hughes, and like Ian Fleming, he based a character on him.

In the novel, the assembled journalists at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Hong Kong were discussing the closing of the local branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Mr. le Carre wrote that William Craw, like Hughes, was the doyen of Asia’s foreign press corps.

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/23/the-foreign-correspondent-who-inspired-ian-fleming/

My Washington Times Review Of John le Carre's 'Agent Running In The Field'

The Washington Times ran my review of John le Carre’s new spy novel, Agent Running in the Field.

On the eve of John le Carre publishing his latest spy novel, “Agent Running in the Field,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more popularly known as MI6, said that British intelligence officers are displeased with the otherwise well-regarded and popular espionage novelist.

Speaking at the Cliveden Literary Festival, the former spymaster said that John le Carre portrayed the SIS in a negative light. He said that the novels are exclusively about betrayal and they portray the dedicated SIS officers as untrustworthy. Trust between officers is at the heart of the SIS, he explained.

The former director said they have all enjoyed enormously John le Carre’s George Smiley novels, and he admitted that the author did in fact capture some of the essence of what it was like in the Cold War. But he added that John le Carre was so corrosive in his view of SIS that the author angered most professional SIS officers. Sir Richard Dearlove stated that the author, who worked for MI5 and SIS in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was “obsessed” with his relatively brief time as a “spy.”

The late John Bingham, John le Carre’s boss and mentor at MI5, and the man some say inspired the character of George Smiley, also disliked how his protege portrayed the secret services.

In my years performing security work for the U.S. Navy and the Defense Department, and later as a writer, I’ve spoken to many intelligence officers who also dislike John le Carre’s portrayal of intelligence officers, especially his dim view of American intelligence officers. Yet, like me, nearly all of the intelligence officers I know read John le Carre’s novels.

Although I disagree with his leftist worldview, I find Carre’s novels to be interesting and compelling, especially my two favorites: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and “The Honorable Schoolboy.” His novels are worth wading through his bouts of anti-Americanism and his dark view of the world of intelligence.  

In “Agent Running in the Field” the 88-year-old author’s narrator is a 47-year-old named Nat.

“I was christened Anatoly, later anglicized to Nathaniel, Nat for short. I am five feet ten inches tall, clean-shaven, tufty hair running to gray, married to Prudence, partner for general legal matters of a compassionate nature at an old-established firm of City of London solicitors, but primarily pro bono cases,” Nat says. 

“In build I am slim, Prue prefers wiry. I love all sport. In addition to badminton, I jog, run and work out once a week in a gymnasium not open to the general public. I possess a rugged charm and the accessible personality of a man of the world. 

“I am in appearance and manner a British archetype, capable of fluent and persuasive argument in the short term. I adapt to circumstance and have no insuperable moral scruples. I am not by any means immune to female charms. I am not naturally suited to deskwork or the sedentary life, which is the understatement of all time. I can be headstrong and do not respond naturally to discipline. This can be both a defect and a virtue.

“I am quoting from my late employers’ confidential reports on my performance and general allure over the last twenty-five years.”

Nat, a veteran British SIS officer and agent-runner, has returned to the United Kingdom after serving overseas and he expects to be forced into retirement. Instead, he is offered the job as head of a run-down London sub-station called the Haven. Supervising a misfit group of officers, Nat discovers a young woman in the Haven named Florence. Nat’s bosses have described her as talented but immature.

Florence is obsessed with a Ukrainian oligarch and London-based criminal code-named “Orson.” Nat likes the operation she has authored and he takes it to his bosses, who take their time in deciding to approve or disapprove.

In the meantime, Nat, a dedicated badminton (racquet ball) player and champion of his club, enters into a series of matches with a young man named Ed. After the matches, the two players have a drink at the athletic club’s bar, where Ed passionately decries President Trump, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Brexit, the British move to leave the European Union. Nat, who agrees generally with his younger friend’s view of Brexit, the American president and Putin, hardly gets in a word in as Ed pontificates over his lager.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/1/book-review-agent-running-in-the-field/

Former MI6 Boss Sir Richard Dearlove Hits Out At Author John Le Carré Over His 'Corrosive' Spy Books And Accuses Him Of Being 'Obsessed' With His Life In The Secret Service

Jake Hurfurt offers a piece at the Daily Mail on the former head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, who said that SIS intelligence officers are not fans of spy novelist John le Carre. Le Carre was a British intelligence officer for three years.

Spooks are not fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy author John le Carré because his novels portray them as untrustworthy, according to the former head of MI6.

Sir Richard Dearlove (seen in the below photo), 74, said Mr le Carré's espionage thrillers portrayed Britain's intelligence services in a negative light.

Mr le Carré, 87, worked for both MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s before leaving and becoming an author.


The writer was 'obsessed' with his time as a spy, said Sir Richard.

Spooks are not fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy author John le Carré (right) because his novels portray them as untrustworthy, according to the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove.

Speaking at the Cliveden Literary Festival, the former spymaster said: 'We've all enjoyed enormously reading the Smiley books... and he does capture some of the essence of what it was like in the Cold War.

'However, he is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) officers are pretty angry with him.'

Trust between co-workers is at the heart of Britain's intelligence agencies but Mr le Carré's books are 'exclusively about betrayal', said Sir Richard.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7518851/Real-life-007s-stand-reading-legendary-spy-author-John-le-Carr-s-books-says-former-MI6-boss.html

  

You can also read my Washington Times review of a biography of John le Carre via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/12/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html

And you can read my Crime Beat column, Spy Writer vs Spy Writer, which covers John le Carre’s other obsession – the late Ian Fleming (seen in the above photo) and James Bond – via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html 

David Ignatius' 'The Quantum Spy' Is About Quantum Computing, The Chinese/American Technology Race And Espionage

I interviewed Washington Post columnist and best-selling spy novelist David Ignatius (seen in the above photo) yesterday morning. 

We discussed his latest thriller, The Quantum Spy, and quantum computing, espionage and the technology race between China and America.

My Q&A with David Ignatius will appear in the upcoming Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, a quarterly magazine for government, law enforcement and military people worldwide. 

I’ll post the piece here when it comes out. (I’m also reviewing The Quantum Spy for the Washington Times).  

In addition to covering quantum computing, The Quantum Spy also takes the reader into the headquarters of Communist China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), an adversarial intelligence agency mush less known than the Russian SVR and the old Soviet KGB. 

His realistic, well-researched and well-written novel is informative, suspenseful and entertaining.      

Below is a description of the novel from www.davidignatius.com:  

From the best-selling author of The Director and Body of Lies comes a thrilling tale of global espionage, state-of-the-art technology, and unthinkable betrayal.

The Quantum Spy is a hyper-fast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb; whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. The winner of the race to build the world’s first quantum machine will attain global dominance for generations to come. The question is, who will cross the finish line first: the U.S. or China?

In this gripping cyber thriller, the United States’ top-secret quantum research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, inciting a mole hunt of history-altering proportions. CIA officer Harris Chang leads the charge, pursuing his target from the towering cityscape of Singapore to the lush hills of the Pacific Northwest, the mountains of Mexico, and beyond. The investigation is obsessive, destructive, and—above all—uncertain. Do the leaks expose real secrets, or are they false trails meant to deceive the Chinese? The answer forces Chang to question everything he thought he knew about loyalty, morality, and the primacy of truth.

Grounded in the real-world technological arms race, The Quantum Spy presents a sophisticated game of cat and mouse cloaked in an exhilarating and visionary thriller.

You can also read David Ignatius’ review of John le Carre’s spy novel, A Legacy of Spies, in the Atlantic via the below link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/le-carre-goes-back-into-the-cold/534189/

And you can read my Washington Times review of A Legacy of Spies via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/31/book-review-a-legacy-of-spies/ 

On This Day In History Spy Novelist John le Carre Was Born

As History.com notes, John le Carre, author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was born on this day in 1931.

You can read about John le Carre via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-le-carre-is-born?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2017-1019-10192017&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=254700158&kx_EmailCampaignID=15174&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2017-1019-10192017&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa

You can also read my Washington Times review of John le Carre’s latest novel, A Legacy of Spies via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/09/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html

  

And you can also read my Washington Times review of John le Carre: The Biography via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/12/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html