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This page lists novels that feature the intelligence officer George Smiley.

By John le Carré
- novels
- non-fiction

About John le Carré
- biographical / critical

Call for the Dead

John le Carré

1961

A George Smiley novel.

"After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation, meeting with Fennan's widow to find out what could have led him to such desperation. But on the very day that Smiley is ordered off the enquiry he receives an urgent letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans - and their agents - know more about this man's death than the Circus previously imagined?"

A Murder of Quality

John le Carré

1962

A George Smiley novel.

"Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doilies and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered. George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. Smiley knows that Stella feared her husband would murder her, but as he probes further beneath Carne's respectable veneer, he uncovers far more than a simple crime of passion. In his second George Smiley novel, le Carré moves outside the world of espionage to reveal the secrets at the heart of another particularly English institution. The result is a pitch-perfect murder mystery, with Smiley as master detective."

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John le Carré

1963

George Smiley appears in this novel.

"Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. He has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment. He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas's mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done. In le Carré's breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining."

The Looking Glass War

John le Carré

1965

George Smiley appears in this novel.

"When the Department - faded since the war and busy only with bureaucratic battles - hears rumour of a missile base near the West German border, it seems like the perfect opportunity to regain some political standing in the Intelligence market place. The Cold War is at its height and the Department is dying for a piece of the action. Swiftly becoming carried away by fear and pride, the Department and her officers send deactivated agent Fred Leiser back into East Germany, armed only with some schoolboy training and his memories of the war. In the land of eloquent silence that is Communist East Germany, Leiser's fate becomes inseparable from the Department's."

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

John le Carré

1974

A George Smiley novel.

"In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy we meet Smiley in short-lived retirement, deserted by his beautiful wife, wrestling with idleness and disillusionment. And haunted by the secret fear that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand a reckoning. At the dead of night, in the house of a member of the Cabinet Office, a mission is put to George Smiley. ‘You’ll take the job, clean the stables? Go backwards, go forwards, do whatever is necessary?’ As Smiley retraces path after path into his own past there is no longer any difference between the two: forwards or backwards, George Smiley has embarked on a blind night walk with God knows how many bodies at the end. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a world of hoods and lamplighters, scalphunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock; a world of moles, legmen, listeners and watchers."

The Honourable Schoolboy

John le Carré

1977

A George Smiley novel.

"George Smiley has become acting Chief of the Circus, or rather what remains of it. For the credibility of the British Secret Service has been shattered by his unmasking of a traitor within. It is being starved of funds by Whitehall, and sidelined by its American cousins. Smiley’s appointment, therefore, seems more like retribution than promotion. Yet from the first he goes onto the attack. His adversary is Karla, workname of the Soviet case officer who masterminded the Circus’s ruin. His battleground is Hong Kong, and his choice of weapons is the Honourable Gerald Westerby, Eastern hand and Fleet Street hack. Westerby’s odyssey takes him to collapsing Cambodia and Vietnam, to the insurgency area of North East Thailand and finally to the southernmost tip of the Hong Kong archipelago, to the very edge of the China Sea. His belated coming of age, his bounding humanity striving to get out, his courage and his recognition of love, are set in mounting dramatic contrast to the ever-growing needs of the service that claims his allegiance."

Smiley's People

John le Carré

1979

A George Smiley novel.

"A Russian émigré woman is accosted in Paris in broad daylight by a Soviet intelligence officer. A scared Estonian boy plays courier in Hamburg. In London at the dead of night, George Smiley is summoned from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. His brief is to bury the crime, not solve it. His dilemma is the number of ghosts from the past who clamour to him from the shadows. Through scenes of mounting revelation, and a cast of superbly drawn characters, through Switzerland, Hamburg, Paris and the fens of Schleswig-Holstein, le Carré rallies us irresistibly to the chase, till we find ourselves at Smiley’s very side on the Berlin border, where Smiley’s people – the ‘no-men of no-man’s land’ – conduct their grimy commerce."

The Secret Pilgrim

John le Carré

1990

George Smiley appears in this novel.

"The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this final Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers."

A Legacy of Spies

John le Carré

2017

George Smiley appears in this novel.

"Peter Guillam, former disciple of George Smiley in the British Secret Service, has long retired to Brittany when a letter arrives, summoning him to London. The reason? Cold War ghosts have come back to haunt him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of the Service are to be dissected by a generation with no memory of the Berlin Wall. Somebody must pay for innocent blood spilt in the name of the greater good."