Fans of thriller writer David Cornwell – better known by his pen name John le Carré – may have thought they had seen the last of recurring protagonist George Smiley when the author died in 2020. Yet the beloved spy is set to return next autumn – this time penned by Cornwell’s son.
Publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced a currently untitled novel by Nicholas Cornwell, who writes as Nick Harkaway, set during the decade that passes between the end of le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the beginning of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
“As a lifelong fan of the incredible world that John le Carré created, these missing years in Smiley’s career have always intrigued me,” said Harriet Bourton, publishing director at Viking, the imprint of PRH that will publish this new title. “Nobody is better placed to capture the spirit and voice of John le Carré than Nick Harkaway. I was absolutely blown away by Nick’s storytelling.”
Smiley, a career intelligence officer with the British overseas intelligence agency, nicknamed “the Circus”, was created by le Carré as an intentional antithesis to James Bond, a character whom the author – who had worked for both MI5 and MI6 himself – believed to be an inaccurate depiction of espionage life. Quiet, polite Smiley appears in nine of le Carré’s novels, from the author’s debut Call for the Dead in 1961 to the 2017 A Legacy of Spies. Margaret Atwood has called the Smiley novels “key to understanding the 20th century”, and the character has been portrayed on screen by actors including Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman.
“Smiley is woven into my life,” Harkaway said. “Tinker Tailor was written in the two years after I was born and I grew up with the evolution of the Circus, so this is a deeply personal journey for me, and of course it’s a journey which has to feel right to the le Carré audience.”
“It also seems as if we need the Smiley stories back now because they ask us the questions of the moment,” he added. “What compassion do we owe to one another as human beings, and at what point does that compassion become more important than nation, law or duty?”
Jonny Geller, agent to the le Carré estate, said: “When I read the opening chapters of Nick’s story, I had this uncanny feeling le Carré had just delivered his new work to me. I heard David’s voice lift off the page.”
Harkaway is the author of novels including The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker, the latter of which was nominated for the 2012 Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Guardian science-fiction reviewer Lisa Tuttle described his most recent novel, Titanium Noir, as a “highly entertaining, satisfying blend of classic detective noir and inventive speculative fiction”.
Both Harkaway and le Carré will be credited on the cover of the new work. “When we first talked about it, I was – let’s call it ‘hesitant’, which is as good a word as any for ‘terrified’,” said Harkaway. “But look at the world! Vladimir Putin was born in 1952; he grew up into the peak of the Cold War. We live in the ghost of the 20th century, the absolute core of the Smiley books. This is a story about how our world happens. And it opens the door to stories which explore more of our present through that lens. It’s an amazing thing to be part of.”
Though this is the first time anyone has sought to continue le Carré’s work posthumously, Harkaway was involved in bringing his father’s book Silverview to publication in 2021 – a novel that le Carré had completed before he died. Crime writer Mick Herron, in his Guardian review of Silverview, described le Carré’s greatness as having “its roots in his mastery of spy fiction; a genre he augmented with novels notable for their craftsmanship and humanity, and writing for its stealth and sophistication”.
“With the publication of Silverview, it’s clear these virtues remained intact to the end,” he wrote.
Earlier this year, Adam Sisman, who had previously published an authorised biography of le Carré in 2015, published a second biography, The Secret Life of John le Carré, identifying 11 women with whom le Carré had affairs. In the book, Sisman described a letter the novelist wrote to him, in which he claimed his infidelities produced “a duality and a tension” that became “almost a necessary drug” for his writing.
Harkaway’s George Smiley novel will be published in hardback, ebook and audio formats in autumn 2024. It will join a growing number of “continuation novels” such as the authorised James Bond novels by authors including Sebastian Faulks, Anthony Horowitz and Kim Sherwood, and the later Millennium novels by David Lagercrantz and Karin Smirnoff, which continue Stieg Larsson’s series that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
• This article was amended on 10 November 2023. Jonny Geller is agent to the le Carré estate, not to Nick Harkaway as an earlier version said.
