A biography focusing on the “turbulent private life” of crime writer John le Carré is to be published, illuminating “a hidden life of secrecy, passion and betrayal”, according to the book’s author Adam Sisman.
The Secret Life of John le Carré is a follow-up to Sisman’s authorised 2015 biography, which was published by Bloomsbury.
The new book will contain, said Sisman, information that he was “obliged to withhold” from the previous book when Le Carré was “very much alive and looking over my shoulder”. It is being published with the knowledge of Le Carré’s estate and will be released in October this year by independent publisher Profile Books.
Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, died in 2020, aged 89, of pneumonia. He was famous for spy novels including those featuring the character George Smiley, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and A Legacy of Spies, the final Smiley novel, which was published in 2017.
Although Le Carré was a private person, his affair with Susan Kennaway, the wife of his friend, the novelist James Kennaway, is well documented: the relationship was portrayed by Kennaway in his novel Some Gorgeous Accident, by Le Carré in The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and in The Kennaway Papers, edited by Susan Kennaway in 1981.
Sisman spent four years writing his first biography of Le Carré, and in an article for the Guardian said that while the book was “written with my subject’s cooperation, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there was no strain between us” during that time.
Speaking about the new book, Sisman said that he came to realise that Le Carré’s “turbulent personal life, which he wanted to keep private in his lifetime, was key to an understanding of his work”. The official blurb for the book says that while Le Carré was “apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades”.
“His son Simon urged me to keep a secret annexe for publication after his father’s death,” Sisman said. “The Secret Life of John le Carré is based on that annexe. It shows how Le Carré conducted his affairs like espionage operations, running women as if they were agents. The tension involved became a necessary drug to his writing.”
Nick Humphrey, editorial director at Profile, said The Secret Life of John le Carré was a “fascinating examination of the complex relationship between a biographer and his subject”.
Reviewing John le Carré: The Biography in the Guardian, Robert McCrum said it was a “fascinating truce between candour and guile”.
Sisman’s book came out just 12 months before Le Carré released his own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, which McCrum said in the Guardian was a “rag-bag compilation of old and new material” which seemed like “vintage Le Carré”.
“Cornwell remains a magician of plot and counter-plot, a master storyteller,” said McCrum. “But look behind the smoke and mirrors and you will find a more reflective and slightly chastened figure, all passion spent, and perhaps less comfortable than hitherto in the world of cross and double-cross he has created around himself.”
• This article was amended on 2 March 2023. Owing to incorrect information supplied to us, an earlier version said that the book was published “with the approval” of John le Carré’s estate. This should have been “with the knowledge”.
