Being stuck at home with a cold yesterday, I went looking for Kindle books to read; and since I’d read and enjoyed John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its immediate sequels a few months ago, Amazon suggested I try The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I started it with some trepidation; Tinker and its successors are not easy books, requiring patience and much reading between the lines. I knew Spy was worth the effort, but I wasn’t sure whether I was up to making it. As it happens, I needn’t have worried. I don’t know whether Spy is really easier to follow, or whether I’ve simply acquired a sense of how le Carre works, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

It’s the story of Alec Leamus, the head of station in Berlin prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall. As the wall goes up he sees all of his agents being killed one by one; as the book begins the last one is shot dead just a few yards shy of Checkpoint Charlie. Alec is old, and tired, and there is no longer much of a station to be head of, and he returns to London in disgrace.

It seems that his networks were rolled up by the exertions of a German named Mundt, the head of the East German counter-espionage office. Leamus has come to hate Mundt, and when Control offers him the chance to bring about Mundt’s downfall he jumps at it. The remainder of the book details the operation.

The Kindle edition I read includes a forward by le Carre, in which he explains that he wrote Spy in just six weeks while employed at the British Embassy in Bonn. It was inspired by the rise of the Wall, and by le Carre’s own bitterness and loneliness, and so it is a bleak novel of betrayal and pain…but also deeply fascinating.

If you’ve not read le Carre, and are at all interested in espionage and spy fiction, this strikes me as an excellent book to begin with.