* * *

LONDON — I came to know David Cornwell, who wrote as John le Carré, just after the United States and Britain removed Saddam Hussein from power. He was a neighbor; we met in our local pub in Hampstead in North London. We were introduced by a mutual friend who knew the genial white-haired gentleman in brown suede shoes. “Who was that?” I asked as we reached our own table.

Chance encounters followed, as we found common ground in our anger at the lies used to harness public support for war, the abuses of intelligence invoked to justify an invasion of Iraq. We bonded over our reaction to Colin Powell’s flawed Security Council presentation and Tony Blair’s mendacious “dodgy dossier.”

My interest was the law: Did the intelligence establish a threat to security that could justify the use of force? He was concerned with matters of morality and espionage. “I have a great distrust of lawyers,” he said, yet with an intense interest in criminality. We connected over stories about motive, and what made these people act as they did.

David, who wrote 25 novels and was renowned as one of the greatest thriller writers of all time, died on Saturday at the age of 89, knew the postwar world to be a messy and fraudulent place, one in which dubious or criminal means could be embraced in the name of the greater good. This was a central theme of his writings, from the Cold War Soviet threat to current challenges, from radical Islam to the rise of Western nationalisms. He allowed us to see aspects of our world as no one else could, borne from his own experiences.

David was uniquely able to draw the connections between the human and historical, the personal and political, pulling on the seamless thread that is the human condition. He adopted language and techniques that appeared simple — often reducing politically significant and complicated matters to a choice faced by an individual — but were actually rather complex. With his words, the dark recesses of our modern world, and the choices we face, touched readers in a manner they — we — felt to be deeply personal.

David got his start in the world of espionage; he would later draw on the personal experience of working for the intelligence services in Germany. His third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” was his first best seller. It was a simple tale of a British agent using dubious means to promote supposedly democratic values. “Are you a spy,” another protagonist would be asked two decades later, in “A Perfect Spy,” or “merely a criminal?”

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Mr. Sands is an international lawyer and the author of two books about the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity — with a keen interest in the escape route some Nazis took postwar. He was a friend of the renowned thriller writer John Le Carré, who died on Saturday [December 12, 2020].