THE SON WHO CAME INTO THE FOLD...

Spy writing legend John le Carré's son Nick on putting aside his own literary career to revive his father's most famous creation, George Smiley

- David Barnett

A FEW years ago, David Cornwell was walking with his son Nicholas on Hampstead Heath. The father was in his eighties, and he had something to ask his son, approaching his fifties.

"If I leave something unfinished," he said as they looked out over London, "will you complete it for me?" "I said yes," recalls Nicholas, "mostly without thinking about it, because I wanted not to be in that conversation."

Both Cornwells are somewhat better known under other names: Nicholas as Nick Harkaway, the author of five novels under that pen name, and two more as Aiden Truhen; and David Cornwell as one of the greatest proponents of spy fiction in history, John le Carré.

As Le Carré, he wrote 26 novels between 1961 and his death in 2020, many of them featuring George Smiley, and most drawing back the veil on the murky world of espionage, as well as providing us with its nomenclature moles, honeytraps, scalphunters and lamplighters to name but a few.

His work has graced cinema and TV screens and there are few people who cannot name at least one of his books, be that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Smiley's People or The Night Manager.

George Smiley and Le Carré's other recur ring characters are the shadowy antithesis to the hi-tech, glamorous world of James Bond.

Smiley's people work in the grubby sidestreets, in rooms lit by bare bulbs, under cover of darkness.

Le Carré's characters have been brought to life on screen by Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery (well past his 007 years in the 1990 adaptation of The Russia House), while Gary Oldman and, perhaps most famously, Alec Guinness, have both played Smiley himself.

The subtext of that conversation Harkaway didn't really want to have with his dad on Hampstead Heath eventually came to pass when Le Carré died in December 2020, aged 89, following a fall at his home.