Books

London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. First edition of the le Carre's classic work, which went on to reinvigorate the spy genre. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light toning to the spine. An exceptional example. Upon publication, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced. “In the tradition of Conrad, Maugham, and Greene, John Le Carré’s realist spy novel is a form which represents a genuine modern version of tragedy… The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is still Le Carré’s cleanest job: compact in structure, deftly deceptive in the unfolding of its triple-cross, and painfully human in the characterizations of two victims of ‘our’ side’s necessary but evil mission” (Reilly, 933-34). “In a covert war…

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, tasked with one last assignment to prove a Western intelligence asset in East Germany.