Where should I begin?
For newcomers, I recommend “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963). A career-making sensation, this novel, le Carré’s third, allowed him to quit his day job as a spy under diplomatic cover in Bonn, West Germany. Graham Greene called it “the best spy story I have ever read.” It serves as an overture for le Carré’s subsequent body of work; all his themes are here, in taut, gorgeous form.
Unlike some later books, which can dawdle (charmingly) in their initial pages, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” drops right into the action, with our hero Alec Leamas, a gloomy, middle-aged alcoholic and spy, huddled at a chilly checkpoint on the Federal Republic side of the newly erected Berlin Wall. He’s sneaking nips of whiskey as he waits for his agent, Karl Riemeck, an East German bureaucrat who’s been feeding information to the West. The rest of Leamas’s network has been exposed; most of them are dead. Only Riemeck remains, and he’s supposed to cross that evening — by bicycle.
The plot that unfolds is perhaps le Carré’s most elegant, and most damning. The novel also contains some of le Carré’s most evocative writing. I’ll never forget one character’s description of being tortured by his rival, the pain “like a violinist going up the E string,” he thinks. “It rises and rises, and all that nature does is bring you on from note to note like a deaf child being taught to hear.”