It’s a Mystery: “Betrayal takes courage”
/The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My LifeBy John le CarréViking, 2016
Spying was forced on me from birth much in the way, I suppose, that the sea was forced on C.S. Forester, or India on Paul Scott. Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.…Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood. When the secret world came to claim me, it felt like coming home…. Spying and novel writing are made for each other. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal.
So it is with his thoroughly engaging memoir, which at its best moments makes you feel like you are sitting and drinking at an intimate bar (le Carré would call it a watering hole) with the world’s most accomplished raconteur. He tells true stories from memory: “Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.” By extension, he writes under a pseudonym as a matter of course. His real name is David Cornwell but he adopted John le Carré when he first began publishing because he was serving as a British agent in Germany. Carré is French for square or forthright! Ironically, after his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), became an international success, the name Cornwell afforded him more privacy than his pseudonym.As I have indicated, The Pigeon Tunnel is no ordinary memoir, but then it is from the pen of a peerless writer of spy fiction. He has written 23 thrillers, most but not all spy novels, and they are the gold standard of the genre.When le Carré was writing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the first of the superb Quest for Karla trilogy, he made what he considered an unforgivable mistake. He described a pursuit by Star Ferry across the straits between Kowloon and Hong Kong. He arrived in Hong Kong as the book was going to press and discovered that there was a tunnel between the island and the mainland. He had been working in England with an outdated guidebook. Horrified, he vowed never again to set a scene in a place he had not visited:
Whether the tunnel was really to blame, or whether I made the perception later is immaterial. What I know for sure is, from the tunnel onwards, I hoisted my backpack and, fancying myself some sort of wanderer in the German Romantic tradition, set out in search of experience: first to Cambodia and Vietnam, afterwards to Israel and the Palestinians, then to Russia, Central America, Kenya and the Eastern Congo. It’s a journey that has continued one way or another for the last forty-odd years…In every trouble spot I have cautiously visited, there has always been one watering hole where, as if by secret rite, hacks, spies, aid workers and carpetbaggers converge…If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche, its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look.
The result is an infectious, humorous, savvy, penetrating look at the writer’s world. We follow in his footsteps as he introduces us to the real life people behind his characters. The procession of antiheroes that the West German intelligence station chief Alec Leamas describes in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, still le Carré’s personal favorite: “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools…people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”In Beirut, researching The Little Drummer Girl between 1981 and 1983, he gives us an incisive portrait of Yasser Arafat, who calls him “Mr. David” and whose beard smells of Johnson’s baby powder.We meet Issa Kostoev, the Russian police officer who in 1990 artfully coaxed a confession from a Ukrainian engineer, Andrei Chikatilo, with fifty-three victims to his name. It is 1993 and le Carré is in Moscow, where Kostoev is now an outspoken member of the Russian parliament on behalf of his people, the Inguish. Under Stalin, the entire Inguish nation was forcibly deported to slave-labour camps in Kazakhstan.
“And Chikatilo?” I ask him. “What was your moment of breakthrough?”“The reek of his breath,” he replies, after a long pull at his cigarette, “Chikatilo ate the private parts of his victims. Over time it affected his digestion.”
Fifteen years later, when he came to write A Most Wanted Man (2008), he made his hero an Inguish and called him Issa.One of my favorites is The Tailor of Panama (1996), about a charismatic bespoke tailor and an MI6 officer before the handover of the Panama Canal in 1999. There is a real tailor who practices his trade in London and he and le Carré have a delightful encounter during which he is every bit as charismatic as his fictional counterpart. It’s a wickedly funny novel whose rum-soaked satirical edge produces a priceless exchange. As the tailor fits the spy for a pair of trousers, he asks, “And we dress, sir?”—The tailor adds: “Most of my gentlemen seem to favour left these days. I don’t think it’s political.”His homage to Alec Guinness begins: “Alec Guinness died with his customary discretion.” He goes on to quote from his preface to Sir Alec’s autobiography:
He is not a comfortable companion. Why should he be? The watching child inside this eighty-year old man has still found no safe harbours or easy answers…he loathes flattery and mistrusts its praise. He is as wary as children learn to be…if you are incurably fond of him, as I am, you do best to keep that fact to yourself…Day and night he studies and stores away the mannerisms of the adult enemy…when he is composing character, he steals shamelessly from those around him.
In the enormously successful television adaptations of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People, Guinness portrayed George Smiley so brilliantly, so perfectly, so absolutely on target, that le Carré was never able to see Smiley as anyone but Guinness from that point on.There is a long, eloquent chapter about his father, Ronnie, called tellingly, “Son of the Author’s Father.” Ronnie was a complete rogue, a scam-artist with no scruples. He gambled away his son’s tuition money and then complained when he wouldn’t share his book royalties. It gives you another perspective on the Ronnie who was the model for Magnus Pym in the superb novel, The Perfect Spy.There is very little in The Pigeon Tunnel that is strictly personal. It is in many ways a contemplative look at writing and globe-trotting. He loves “writing on the hoof” and admits: “Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.”The Pigeon Tunnel is an elegant addition to John le Carré’s cool moral universe introduced so stylishly decades ago in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. You’ll want to devour it.
She was maybe eleven. He [Lou] caught the little brat breaking into a Jag. Well, he’s holding her out by the collar of her jacket and she’s swinging away, little fists pounding the crap out of air. So it was take the kid home with him, or spend what’s left of his wife’s birthday hassling with Juvenile Hall…. Helen thought Kathy was a present. She wouldn’t let go of the kid for twelve years…. Helen Markowitz did teach Kathy table manners…. But the kid never really changed…. Whatever Louis needed, Kathy could get for him…. After she broke into the FBI computer, I saw him make the sign of a cross.
As we learn in that first book, Helen Markowitz worked miracles with the kid. She could now pass for a young lady in any company but theirs:
These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hard case with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.
When we meet her in Blind Sight, NYPD Detective Mallory of Special Crimes is in her mid-twenties. Like Salander, she’s a world class hacker. Among the men in her squad, including and especially her partner Riker, this skill engenders Mallory’s own brand of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Like Salander, she’s got brains and attitude. Unlike Salander, she dresses in beautifully tailored blazers and designer jeans whose cost is way above her pay scale. Nobody calls her on it. Her merciless green-eyed stare continues to cow many a hardened cop. She’s considered the squad’s “undisputed champion of retaliation.”The case begins when a young nun, Sister Michael, and a 12-year-old boy go missing. Detectives Mallory and Riker discover that the nun’s real name is Angela Quill and she is a former prostitute. The boy is Jonah Quill, her nephew, who has been blind from birth. The nun’s body turns up on the lawn of Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayor, along with three other bodies. The victims’ hearts have been surgically removed. Jonah is not one of the victims.He has been abducted by the killer, Iggy (don’t call him Ignatius) Conroy. As the very resourceful Jonah attempts to manipulate his captor and stay alive, we learn that Iggy is tormented by the fact that this is more personal than he would like to admit. He’s broken his number one rule: never kill anybody he knew. Before Angie became a nun, she lived with Iggy. Unbeknownst to Jonah, this may keep him from getting his heart cut out.Sorting out the morass of clues, a combative, tenacious Mallory and her loyal lieutenant Riker are pitted against NYPD brass, the mayor, and the Catholic Church. Mallory’s penchant for uncovering the truth at all costs coupled with a temperament that shows “just a hint of crazy” brings this thriller to a compelling climax. Blind Sight is a classy, classic, riveting read.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
