Call for the Dead

I have not done it in a good while, so here is today’s reading suggestion: Call for the Dead by John Le Carré. A sort of (accidental) prequel to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. This time featuring antihero (and maybe more to the point anti James Bond) George Smiley, a spy who is more an ageing civil servant dealing with petty bureaucrats than a master secret agent. He investigates the apparent suicide of colleague Samuel Fennan after a routine security check. A rather mundane (if embarrassing for the British government and Her Majesty's Secret Service) mystery where the ghosts of World War II haunt both the protagonist and his world. It is set in dreary, utterly unexotic, unglamorous and unglamorised Cold War England between January and February, so all the more fitting to read it around this time of year.