John Le Carre's Most Famous Character George Smiley To Return In New Novel, 'A Legacy Of Spies'

Although I don't subscribe to British spy novelist John le Carre's leftist worldview and rabid anti-Americanism, I am an admirer of his early novels featuring frog-like intelligence officer George Smiley, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy. 

So I look forward to a new le Carre novel that brings back George Smiley, as well as Peter Guillam.

Danuta Kean at the British newspaper the Guardian reports on the news of the new novel.

George Smiley, John le Carré’s iconic cold war spymaster, is to return for the first time in 25 years in a new novel by the beloved spy-turned-author.

A Legacy of Spies, due to be published on 7 September, will also see the return of Smiley’s colleagues from the British secret service – or the Circus, as they were known in Le Carré’s original books. The bestselling noveles famously drew on the author’s own experience of working for British intelligence in the 1950s and 60s.

Though scant details have been released by publisher Viking, a division of Penguin Random House, the new novel will feature Smiley protege Peter Guillam, who in his old age has retired from the world of spooks to a farm in southern Brittany.

Summoned back to London, Guillam and his colleagues are subject to scrutiny for past misdemeanours, committed at a time when there were fewer scruples about the methods used to win the ideological war raging between the west and the Soviets.

According to Le Carré’s agent, Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown, the book was written in “a fever” over the past 12 months. Though Geller refused to reveal details of the plot, he said that it would “close George Smiley’s story”, which began in 1961 with Le Carré’s debut novel, Call for the Dead: “When I received the draft I had to keep starting it again and pinching myself that I was in the company of all these great characters from the Circus,” he said. “It really is going to be one of his finest, if not his finest, novel.” 

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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/07/george-smiley-to-return-new-john-le-carre-novel-a-legacy-of-spies 

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

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

Dining With Death: Crime Fiction’s Long Affair With Food

Miranda Carter, the author of The Devil's Feast, offers a piece in the British newspaper the Guardian on crime writers and food.

In “The Noble Bachelor” Sherlock Holmes presents Watson with a brace of woodcock and a pâté de foie gras pie. Holmes himself was partial to curried chicken and mixed his own blend of earl grey and lapsang souchong. Inspector Maigret would make a detour for skate wings with black butter, mussels in cream and choucroute. American mystery writer Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe weighed “a seventh of a ton”, and employed a Swiss chef called Fritz who made him “Shad roe mousse Pocahontas” and “Avocado Todhunter” (a rather anaemic combination of avocado, watercress, lemon and crushed ice). Detective Van der Valk (the creation of the almost forgotten former chef Nicolas Freeling) ate his salt herring “the way the Dutch do, holding it up above his mouth like a seal in the zoo”. Even the no-nonsense Sam Spade slid into a booth at San Francisco’s famous John’s Grill in The Maltese Falcon to order his lamb chops, baked potato and sliced tomato. Crime writing has had a long – and body-strewn – affair with food.

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For of course, as the great 19th-century food chemist Frederick Accum wrote, sometimes “there is death in the pot”. In her 1930 classic Strong Poison, Dorothy L Sayers had her heroine Harriet Vane stand trial for poisoning her ex-lover with a sweet omelette. Poison was Agatha Christie’s preferred method of dispatch by far – having been a dispensing chemist she knew a lot about it. It is the instrument of murder in almost half her books, added to, among other things, marmalade, tea, cocktails (And Then There Were None), a butter sauce for fish (Sad Cypress) and a bitter chocolate cake (A Murder is Announced).

Time, if anything, has only fed crime writing’s appetite for food. Today one can hardly move for detectives intent on dinner.

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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/05/dining-death-crime-fiction-miranda-carter

William Boyd Interviews James Bond

William Boyd, the author of the new James Bond continuation novel, Solo, offers a mock interview with Ian Fleming's iconic character in the British newspaper the Guardian.

Time travel. 1969. Chelsea. There was an autumnal feel about the day as I emerged from the tube station at Sloane Square. Instinctively, I looked round over my right shoulder to see what was playing at the Royal Court. The Contractor by David Storey, directed by Lindsay Anderson. I hadn't seen that play – but then I had been a 17-year-old schoolboy in 1969, and my theatre-going life hadn't really started. It was strange being back in Chelsea in 1969, the year of the moon-landing, the year of my first summer in London. Stranger still to be going to interview James Bond. 

... Bond – now 45 years old – was wearing a dark-navy worsted suit, a pale-blue shirt and a black knitted silk tie. Lightly tanned, he was slim, about my height, six feet one inch, and had short dark hair with no trace of grey. I knew people would ask me to describe him with more precision. There was a scar on his right cheek. He was even-featured – though there was something "hard" about his looks.

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

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/28/william-boyd-james-bond-interview

You can also read Boyd's Q&A with James Bond via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/28/william-boyd-q-a-james-bond

Note: In 1969, I too was a 17-year-old Bond fan and Ian Fleming aficionado. I was a high-school drop waiting eagerly for the U.S. Navy to call me up.