John Le Carr, who created thrillers out of equal parts of adventure, moral courage and the literary player, has died at the age of 89.

Le Carr explored the gap between the rhetoric of Western freedom and the dangerous reality of defending it. Spy from the cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy And Night manager, Which earned him critical acclaim and made him one of the best sellers in the world.

On Sunday, his family confirmed he had died of pneumonia at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. “We are all deeply saddened by his death,” they wrote in a statement.

His longtime agent Johnny Keller described him as “an undeniable great man of English literature.” He defined the Cold War era and spoke the truth to power fearlessly for decades after that… I lost a mentor, an inspiration, and most importantly a friend. We will never see him again. “

His colleagues lined up to pay their respects. Stephen King wrote: “This terrible year has a literary great humanitarian attitude.” Robert Harris described the news as “extremely stressful … as one of the most memorable and unique characters in post – war British novels”. Adrian McKinty Tinker tailor Soldier Spy described it as “the greatest spy novel ever written”, while historian Simon Sebak Montebior called him “one of the greatest men of English literature … personally, charmingly and generously called by many.”

Le Carr, born David Cornwell in 1931, began working in the Secret Service while studying German in Switzerland in the late 1940s. After teaching in Eaton, he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and observing spies behind an iron curtain from a back office in the MI5 building on Curzon Street in London. Inspired by his MI5 counterpart novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym John Le Carr – though Advice from his publisher He chooses two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, such as “Chunk-Smith”.

A Pingham-style spy, “with a breathtakingly casual … short, fat, and calm mind”, surpassed an East German agent, George Smiley, in Le Care’s 1961 film Call for the Dead. The second novel, A Murder of Quality 1962, saw Smiley investigate a murder in a public school, and it was positively reviewed. (“The Observer’s conclusion is that” the most complex, high-end unit “.) But a year later, when his third thriller was released, Le Care’s life soared to a new level.

Smiley is only a small figure Spy from the cold, But this story of a journey confronting East German intelligence is filled with his world-exhausted cynicism. According to Alec Limas, a fifty-something agent sent to East Berlin, spies are “vain fools, traitors, yes, procession; Ponzi, sadists and drunkards, people playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives ”. Graham Green praised it as “the best spy story I’ve ever read”.

According to Le Care, the novel’s runaway success surprised him at first and then contradicted him. His manuscript was approved by the Secret Service because it is “pure fiction from beginning to end”, He explained in 2013, Therefore cannot indicate a security breach. “However, this was not the view taken by the world press, it was decided by one voice that the book was not merely real, but some kind of revealing message from the other side. Let me sit tight and do nothing. That fact must be taken into account. “

Smiley moved the center stage in three novels, Le Carr, published in the 1970s, about a rivalry between a British agent and his Soviet revenge carla. At Tinker tailor Soldier Spy, he unravels a mole in the highest places of the British Secret Service, while at The Honorable Schoolboy he goes after money laundering operations in Asia, before merging Carla’s Swiss contacts into Smiley Peoples. The world of “ferrets” and “lanterns”, “wranglers” and “pavement artists” was so firmly drawn that his former colleagues in MI5 and MI6 began to accept on their own the sayings of Le Carr.

When the Cold War was over, friends stopped him on the street and asked, “What are you going to write now?” Will ask. But Le Carr’s concerns were always broader than the conflict between East and West, and he had little patience for the notion that the fall of the Berlin Wall marked any end to history or to the spy who rubbed its means. He worked with The Night Manager in 1993, The Constant Gardner in 2001 with Big Drug and in 2004 with full friends in the war on terror.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of his works went from page to screen. Actors including Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman delighted the audience with the intricacies of his character while admiring his plot skills.

Le Carr finally returned to Smiley in 2017, closing his career circle The legacy of spies, Which revisits the function bodied at the heart of the novel that created his name. Writing in the Guardian, John Bonville praised his ingenuity and ingenuity, declaring that “The Spy to Car is not from using his gift as a storyteller too powerful and for such compelling effects.”

After being portrayed as a shadowy, mysterious figure for decades, mainly because he was not interested in advertising or joining the festival environment, Le Carey surprised the world by releasing a memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, in 2016. Wrong, detailing his broken relationship with Conman’s father In a lonely upbringing after his mother abandoned him at the age of five, Le Carey described the strange life of a writer who became a spy, asking for lunch from Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Le Corre, who has lived in Cornwall for four decades, married twice, and raised a son named Nicholas, who writes novels under the name Nick Hargave, said: “I was neither a model husband nor a model father, appearing that way. “

The constant love of his life was writing, “Writing like a man hiding in a boogie table.”

“Outside of the secret world I knew I was trying to create a theater for the big worlds we live in,” he wrote. “First comes the imagination, then the search for reality. Then return to the imagination, to the table where I now sit. ”