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John le Carré is dead. The world-famous bestselling author died at the age of 89, the publisher Penguin Books announced on Sunday evening.
Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was best known for his espionage novels.
He died on Saturday of pneumonia, as the publisher announced.
Le Carré was born on October 19, 1931 in the southern English county of Dorset.
Secrets, betrayals and lies permeated his family environment.
These were also the topics that he should deal with in his literary work.
His mother left the family when he was five years old.
His father was a con man who shuttled between fraudulent wealth and prison.
Le Carré dealt with him in many books, for example in "A blinding spy" (1986).
Le Carré studied German in Switzerland and eventually worked as an agent for the British secret service - albeit not particularly successfully.
In the meantime he began to write;
With his third novel - "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" - he made the breakthrough.
He became known for his intelligent and suspenseful spy novels, which mainly revolved around the Cold War.
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Good and bad merged, the agents weren't heroes, but people with strengths and weaknesses.
A central character was the disaffected master spy George Smiley, who was betrayed by his wife and suffered from the unscrupulous reality of his industry.
Smiley had his best-known appearance in the bestseller “Dame, König, As, Spion” (1974), which was re-filmed in 2011 with Gary Oldman.
The fall of the Iron Curtain changed le Carré's perspective: his books were now about the arms trade, the machinations of pharmaceutical companies, the war on terror or the Russian mafia.