It will tell you that he got the idea for Leamas, the burnt-out case in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), while watching an exhausted, dead-eyed traveller at Heathrow, who drew a handful of coins in different currencies from his pocket ‘and slammed them down on the bar, demanding a large Scotch, in … a faint Irish accent’. If you’re interested in what Sisman calls the ‘vintage period’ of le Carré’s fiction – up to Smiley’s People (1979), by my reckoning – it is a delight. For the first 350 pages, covering the period from Cornwell’s birth in 1931 to the early 1970s, this is an exemplary biography of an old-fashioned sort, and it tells a fascinating story. Perhaps the back-story explains this rather strange book. The book depicts Cornwell as a man you wouldn’t want to cross: very clever and very touchy helpful and generous to those he trusts, but unforgiving and vindictive towards those he sees as a threat or a disappointment. It’s an image that stays with the reader. One day, while examining Cornwell’s archives at his home near Land’s End, Sisman noticed ‘a shadow over my shoulder’, and looked up to see the novelist standing over him. I also agreed that he should have the opportunity to read the typescript before anyone else.’ It would be ‘disingenuous’, Sisman writes, to suggest that there had not been ‘difficulties’ between them and there were certain areas, such as his career in the intelligence services, which Cornwell refused to discuss in detail. ‘I was to have a free hand to write what I wanted, provided that I showed “due respect to the sensitivities of living third parties”. Cornwell would give him long interviews, access to his archives, and a list of introductions. In an intriguingly cagey introduction, Sisman describes the resulting deal. It was probably the worst time of my life.’Ĭornwell agreed to co-operate with Sisman after reading his last book, a Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Lord told the Daily Telegraph that he ‘had letters from lawyers arriving every day.
‘I didn’t want him gumshoeing around my children, my ex-mistresses, my everything,’ Cornwell said years later. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Y ou don’t need the detective powers of George Smiley, or a conspiratorial mindset, to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré.
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