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 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.