'His life was one of fantasy': How John le Carré's spy novels were shaped by his con-man father

The author's childhood was rocked by bankruptcy and deceit. In 2008, he told the BBC that his "hectic background" trained him to be an author – and a spy.

David Cornwell was steeped in secrecy throughout his life – long before he took on the nom de plume John le Carré, long before his first novel, Call for the Dead, was published in June 1961, and long before he became one of the UK's most critically acclaimed, bestselling spy novelists. He learned deception and self-reliance from an early age, later recalling one particular childhood memory with his older brother, at the start of a day out from school.

"My father told us to wait at the end of the drive at our boarding school in Berkshire. And the reason he didn't want to present himself to the school was that he hadn't paid the bill, but we didn't know that," Le Carré told the BBC in a 2008 interview. "So we waited at the lodge at the end of the school drive with our suitcases. And he never showed up."

Let down by their father Ronnie Cornwell, a con man who was in and out of prison throughout their childhood, the boys did what they could to save face in front of their schoolmates. "We just stayed away for the whole day. We had no food. We had no money. But we wouldn't go back to school. We went back in the evening and pretended we'd had a wonderful day."

It was the first time he remembered feeling disillusioned about his father – and yet it also taught him something that was to prove useful later. "It's very interesting in espionage terms: the rendezvous collapses. You work out a cover story. You come back and dissemble." 

As a child during World War Two, when other boys at his school were talking about the daring feats of their fathers, Le Carré invented a double life. "He grew up at a time when what your father did in the war was terribly important," his biographer Adam Sisman told the BBC in 2015. "He was embarrassed by his father… [who] was the most shaming of all, he was a spiv [a small-time crook who sells blackmarket goods]. He was profiteering while other boys' fathers were away fighting." To hide this, Le Carré made up stories that Ronnie was a spy.

That complicated relationship with heroics played out in the novels he wrote. His recurring protagonist, George Smiley, was the "anti-James Bond" – someone who is "bureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field… discreet to the point of self-erasure", according to The Atlantic. He "drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou". Le Carré deliberately avoided the fast-car flashiness of Bond in Smiley, telling the BBC that he "made him tubby and physically graceless and a bad dresser".

In novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Le Carré – who died in 2020 at the age of 89 – focused on the mundane reality of espionage. It was a reality that he knew firsthand, working as a British intelligence officer for MI5 and then MI6 from 1952, after running away from boarding school and ending up in Bern.

A 'psychopath' who loved his........

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