The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

He's less out of his environment than you may think he is if you just come to that book cold.

Well, and that all teases, you know, I mean, you know that they have a television show kind of doing an adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, a little bit of Legacy of Spies, with, I'm sure, the thought that they hope to get to Tinker Taylor and Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's people.

And what you're saying there, it really tells you that there's a lot of seeds they can drop to prep folks for an Honorable Schoolboy adaptation, right?

Yeah, and I mean, you know, an Honourable Schoolboy adaptation is something we've all hoped for for many, many years and has been floated so many times but never quite happened, I guess, because of the cost of it and the locations involved and all the rest of it.

And they play the soundtrack in order to sort of make that difference available to you and so you can see it.

When you take something like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, it is 100% bleak and dark, rainy and gritty and rainy.

And that tells you right from the start, there's no light in this film.

You're going to have moments where we suddenly think something might work out.

imagine.

That's a kind of odd dichotomy that we have in our minds at any one time, you know, and it's the backdrop to that.

What happens I think with the realist movies that you get in the 1960s is this change to where not so much concerned about those individual spies in fact we're on their side it's more about what the state does so you have two enemies if you're a spy and you're in the field one is the enemy of course the other side the other one is your bosses because you have no idea what they're going to do behind your back and if we go back to something like the spy who came in from the cold even though um lemus thinks he's part of the operation he has no idea what they're actually doing behind his back And he's essentially a commodity out there.

And if they lose him, they might, you know, be sad for an afternoon, but that's about it.

all of that said, I'm trying to wring every last drop of it that I can.

I'm just off the back of a theatre tour I did, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the John le Carre novel adaptation for the stage.

And I had, it's one of the best jobs I've ever done.

In terms of, first of all, the guys were great, like the whole company was just fantastic.

Yeah.

I was in London recently, and Molly and I went to go see a stage adaptation of John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which is very well done, actually.

Casted maybe five or six people playing...

many different, you know, the sort of thing where they have three supporting actors that play a bunch of different roles through it.

Adam is perhaps best known for being the biographer of David Cornwell.

far better known by his pen name, John Le Carre, the former spy and writer who weaved his own experience into the characters of those wily spies, George Smiley and Jonathan Pine, characters that have held our imagination for decades and are regularly updated for movies and TV shows, like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or, more recently, The Night Manager.

In academic circles, one of Adam Sisman's best-known works is the biography of the prominent British historian and one-time MI6 sort of spy slash World War II codebreaker Hugh Trevor Roper.

I first met him when I was a very young editor working for Oxford University Press when I was probably about 21.

That's right.

Well, I was gonna say with, uh, with, with what you and I talked about early on in our podcasting, uh, days of this year, uh, talking about movies that have to do with mountains or people climbing mountains I think is rather apropos given, uh, earlier this year you and I covered an in- a, uh, what was it? What's that movie called? An Unusual and Compelling Force, is that what it's called?

Uh, Unknown Compelling Force, yeah.

Unknown Compelling Force, yeah.

So, so I was gonna say, we, we, we did a little mountain climbing movies earlier this year.

We did, uh, a documentary anyways about the Dyatlov, uh, Pass incident, and then I ended up going down a little bit of k- a, kind of a rabbit hole of like K2 and Everest, and I ended up watching some Everest movies and ended up reading some more stuff about that.

After, lit- literally after we did that, uh, that podcast.

And so when we were just talking, uh, about, you know, a week ago, and I was like, "Oh, we should do The Eiger Sanction of all things," I, uh, not that I ever get any pushback from you, but I got...

Which brings us perfectly to the book ranked number three on the list, a novel that arguably split the history of espionage fiction into before and after.

Yes, we're talking about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Published in 1963.

The premise alone is just a masterclass in deception.

It was very black and white.

Very clear cut.

But The Spy Who Came in from the Cold fundamentally rejects that premise.

It argues that the intelligence agencies of the East and the West are actually playing the exact same game, and they're operating in a complete moral void.

Yeah.

Um, by the woman who wrote The Help, and I'm also listening to, um, uh, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 'cause I was like, "I need to read a proper spy novel." So John Le Carre, and that's what I'm, that's my life right now, depending on my mood.

So audiobooks, no, no crocheting.

Baking.