Spies in The Compleat Angler

Today is an interesting date for amateurs of spy thrillers, especially fans John Le Carré. In Call for the Dead, George Smiley receives this letter on the 3rd of January: 

"Dear George, 

    It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o'clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan"

So it is on this date that was supposed to take place the meeting, but Samuel Fennan died before. The Compleat Angler is still in business and both the hotel and the town of Marlow are perfectly atmospheric places for a spy thriller. I can't be there today (don't think I could afford lunch there anyway), but I always wondered if something might happen there.

The (mysterious, iconic) Compleat Angler

I took this picture a few months ago, when one of our visit in the little town of Marlow. You can easily recognise The Compleat Angler, a posh hotel on the bank of the Thames. I have developed an obsession for it since I seen it briefly mentioned in John Le Carré's debut novel Call for the Dead. You can read the quote here, among other places in this blog. What got me obsessed about it is that I had visited the hotel a few times before I read the book. I have been wanting to revisit it since. I have seen it a couple of times, but I haven't been inside. At least I could take one snapshot. No sign of any spy, unfortunately. Maybe next time.

Spy Meeting at the Compleat Angler

 Today marks a special kind of anniversary, which I mention it every year as a sort of tradition. January is kind of an uneventful month, so this is a good excuse as any to give it a bit of atmosphere and mystery. Anyway, he following quote is from a letter you can read in John Le Carré's Call for the Dead and is addressed to George Smiley. It is dated on the 3rd of January:

"Dear George, 

    It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o'clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan" 

I have been a few times to The Compleat Angler in the past, as we live fairly close to Marlow. I don't think I can be there tomorrow, but I so wish to make a pilgrimage of sorts there on that very date, at one o'clock sharp. I'm sure nobody else would think of doing this. But maybe, just maybe, there might be spies around.

The Compleat Angler

I blogged before about at The Compleat Angler at Marlow, including this month. This is because it is mentioned (but surprisingly not featured) in John Le Carré's first novel Call for the Dead. I have been wanting to go back there and share some pictures of it. I have been unable to so far, but yesterday I found on social a picture of the place. It is right by the Thames. It is such a perfect setting for a spy thriller, especially this time of year.

Spies at The Compleat Angler

Quick post today, because I blogged on the very same topic yesterday. As you may know from John Le Carré's Call for the Dead, today is the day master spy George Smiley is supposed to meet (or was supposed to meet, as this was set in the early 60s) his colleague Samuel Fennan. As per the following letter:

"Dear George, 

    It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o'clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan" 

Of course, The Compleat Angler still exists, it is a beautiful and rather expensive hotel which I visited a few times. Any Marlowian reading this blog and visiting it today: anybody noticed anyone looking shady? Although I guess spies would look just like anybody else. Good spies would, that is. All the same, I wish I could be there today at one. Anyway, next time I go there, I will take pictures, just in case there are fans of John Le Carré among you...

Spy Meeting Tomorrow

"Dear George, 

    It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o'clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan" 

I blogged about this before, back in 2019 and again last year. This quote is taken from John Le Carré's first novel Call for the Dead. The George mentioned in the letter is of course protagonist George Smiley and the letter being dated on the 3rd of January, tomorrow is, well, tomorrow. We don't live very far from Marlow or the Compleat Angler, but I doubt we will have the chance to go there at one o'clock. Besides, we are a few decades too late, the novel having been published in 1961. All the same, having been to that hotel, I get excited at the thought that I walked in the setting of a classic spy drama. Next time I go there, I take a few pictures.

Spy Meeting in Marlow

 I blogged about this particular subject back in 2019, but thought this would be the right time to blog about it again, sadly I miss the date by one day. Anyway, for those who read John Le Carré's first novel Call for the Dead,you may remember that protagonist George Smiley was summoned by letter to a meeting. The letter goes as follow:

"Dear George, 

    It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o'clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan" 

The first funny thing is that I have been to The Compleat Angler in Marlow a couple of times. The other funny thing is that the letter by Fennan was dated on the 3rd of January, so the meeting would have been held yesterday the 4th. I wonder if The Compleat Angler was a place of pilgrimage for Le Carré's fans yesterday. Next time I go there or nearby, I will try to take a picture of the hotel.

A Thrilling Spy Cover

I blogged about Call for the Dead by John Le Carré before, here and here. One of te objectives I have this year is to read more of his work, as he is a master of spy fiction, a genre I want to properly discover. But I digress. What I wanted to blog about today is how brilliant this particular cover of the novella. Everyhting there is perfect: the cold monochrome colours, rather calming but giving an icy feel, the two men in the background, one crouching slightly as in speaking in a conspirational tone, the man reading the newspaper on the foreground. There is a sober ominous tone to the whole picture. I love it, because it shows that you don't need high spectacles, guns and a sexy vamp to create a thrilling cover.

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.

The Compleat Angler in a spy novel

I am currently reading Call for the Dead, the first novel (or rather novella) written by John Le Carré. Like for last year, I thought this was the right time for some spy thriller. So far so very good, I am really getting into Le Carré's prose, he writes genre novels like it is "proper" literature and it works. But anyway, there is a quote in the novel that really struck me. The protagonist George Smiley receives a letter from civil servant Sam Fennan, who has (apparently) just committed suicide. The letter is short, but it says: "It is essential that I lunch with you tomorrow at The Compleat Angler at Marlow." I found this very funny, as I have been to the Compleat Angler a couple of times, including one time when I had lunch there. So small English town has another claim to literary fame apart from this one. I have to say, the hotel is perfect for a meeting of secret agents in a spy thriller.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

I don't know how is your literary year so far, but I have already made a few discoveries that I have been wanting to share here. So with no further ado, here is today's reading suggestion: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré. A classic and a (if not the) Cold War spy drama that is also the anti James Bond. Disgraced spy Alec Leamas comes back to London from a catastrophic time in Berlin, after seeing the destruction of the whole network of moles he had nurtured, only to be sent himself as a fake defector to the Eastern Block to discredit the East German counter intelligence officer who kill them all, often by his own hand. But nothing is as it seems. It's dark, dreary, utterly unglamorous, completely Machiavellian and fascinating. Like a Shakespearean tragedy set during the Cold War. Which is icy cold here.