John le Carre - Call for the Dead

John Le Carre has defined the modern British spy novel to such an extent that it's hard to remember that his iconic creation George Smiley began as a detective. That is, Call for the Dead and the follow-up novel A Murder of Quality are classic detective novels in structure and tone, with a cast of suspects and clever twists which Smiley investigates through interviews and intuition. The books work very well on these terms: but the complexity of Smiley's character and the atmosphere of a society pinned by a fading Empire shows what was to come.