How Reality Seeps into Fiction

Before I get started on real-life influences on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I want to repeat the link from my August 4th post to the Wikipedia about the insider spy jargon from the book. That way, you don't have to scroll down.

Early Life and Fascination with Secrets

From the official website of John Le Carré (né David Cornwell): “I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird." One of his early influences that allowed him to "act like a gent" was his education at Sherborne School in Dorset, which by all accounts, he hated, but as you can see from the novel, the closed, secretive world of the British boys' boarding school, with its hierarchies, competitions, nicknames, and insider lingo,  finds an echo at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The conflict between acting like a gent and keeping the secrets of a conman father, are at the heart of his most biographical novel, A Perfect Spy, which I looked for at the library, but it was apparently checked out (I will be renting the miniseries version from Netflix shortly). I also see some echoes of the father, real life Ronnie Cornwell, with Ricki Tarr, the fictitious conman, hustler, and intelligence operative, who reignites the hunt for "Gerald," the mole. Ricki was traveling on a passport under the name of "Poole," which also happens to be the name of the town in which David Cornwell was born.

According to (undoubtedly unimpeachable) internet sources, David Cornwell's father, Ronnie, was an associate of the Krays, the subject of another movie.


Also the subject of a BBC documentary.


As a matter of fact, in other John Le Carré novels I have read, the theme of gangsters' (or spies') kids attending exclusive private schools often crops up.

The Philby Scandal

The rough template for Tinker, Tailor was provided by the Philby Scandal which unrolled over the course of more than 10 years from 1949 to 1961, when Harold Adrian Russell Philby (AKA "Kim" Philby) finally defected from the UK to the Soviet Union. Like the fictitious "Gerald the Mole," Philby had been recruited at a leading university before the war to spy for the Soviets and had risen to the highest ranks at the SIS, and like Gerald, it was some time before the service was able to prove that Philby was a double agent. The rough outlines of the story are provided by a link to a PBS "Nova" documentary "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies." Here also is a link to Kim Philby's Wiki page (subject, of course, to the usual caveats about anything you read on Wikipedia).

Below is a documentary on "The Cambridge Spies," split up into three parts for YouTube.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3