The Little Drummer Girl

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Little Drummer Girl

FIRST EDITION

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON

1983

DESCRIPTION

Book measures 240mm x 155mm approximately.

Hardback book with dust jacket.

CONDITION

In very good condition. The book is strong and tight. The dust jacket is also in very good condition, with only a few minor creases to the upper edges. Some slight fading to spine. Some of the latter page edges show light foxing marks.

INTERESTING

David John Moore Cornwell (born 1931), better known by his pen name John le Carré, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Many of his books have been adapted for film or television.

In 1950, he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents.

Most of Le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama. The novels emphasise the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of east–west moral equivalence. The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels was written as an "antidote" to James Bond, a character Le Carré called "an international gangster" rather than a spy and whom he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature. In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.

The Little Drummer Girl title suggests a word play on the Christmas carol The Little Drummer Boy. The story follows the manipulations of Martin Kurtz, an Israeli spymaster who intends to kill Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist who is bombing Jewish-related targets in Europe, particularly Germany, and Charlie, an English actress and double agent working on behalf of the Israelis. Some reviewers described The Little Drummer Girl as transcending the spy novel genre. "The Little Drummer Girl is about spies", said William F. Buckley, writing in The New York Times, "as Madame Bovary is about adultery or Crime and Punishment about crime."