What is your favourite spy thriller?

From Cold War page-turners to modern masterpieces, there are countless to choose from.

The most celebrated tend to have a recurring hero anchoring the plot like Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne, Tom Clancy’s all action Jack Ryan or the most dashing of all, James Bond.

Created by Ian Fleming, Bond was a Scot by birth, educated at Edinburgh’s Fettes College, and a renowned gambler and connoisseur of fast cars and beautiful women.

While these charismatic heroes are fictitious, the real world of espionage is far more mundane.

John le Carré, the doyen of spy writers, recognised this. His most renowned character George Smiley is spectacularly ordinary.

Le Carré described Smiley as fat and balding with thick-lensed glasses and “of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

The name’s McCallum, Kenneth McCallum

Le Carre’s genius was portraying espionage as it exists in the real world. And, in our real world, Britain’s top spy is Director General of MI5 Kenneth McCallum.

Like Bond, McCallum is a Scot. Other than his sharp suits, that’s where........

© The Courier