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John le Carré’s son has revealed ambitions to allow other writers free rein with his father’s greatest creation, opening the doors to what could become a never-ending George Smiley literary empire.
Nick Harkaway said Smiley’s morally ambiguous world of espionage and clandestine ops was rich and wide enough to justify allowing writers from outside the family to write novels based around the famously cuckolded spy who appeared in many of le Carré’s greatest novels.
Harkaway, who has already written one Smiley “continuation novel” and has another due out next year, said he had tried to “open the gates … so that other writers can, with due deference and due fearlessness, tell new stories into this same world”.
John le Carré on Hampstead Heath with Nick and their whippet
MONTY FRESCO/DAILY MAIL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The estate of le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell and who died in 2020, has been tapping into the late author’s canon. Harkaway’s continuation novels have been complemented by projects to adapt more of his novels for the screen.
Harkaway’s first such novel, Karla’s Choice, was released to acclaim last year. It is set in the period between his father’s breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which became the first of the Smiley trilogy. Harkaway, whose real name is Nicholas Cornwell, wrote in an essay in a book due to be published this month that his father had planned to write a series of “Smiley versus Karla [his Russian espionage counterpart] novels across the theatres of the Cold War”. He added, however, that Alec Guinness’s portrayal of Smiley in the famed BBC adaptations of the late 1970s and early 1980s had been “so overwhelming that he [le Carré] could no longer hear the character, only the actor”. Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy BBC Harkaway writes in the forthcoming Tradecraft: Writers on John le Carré that just as he had “stolen” Smiley from his creator and made him “just enough my own”, he was happy for others to also do so. “I don’t know who they might be, but the world of Smiley is richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show, for all that their creator imagined that he might write about the same period in Japan or India or Mexico, or even the United States. Once I’ve claimed the Smiley universe, the next person doesn’t have to be so afraid,” Harkaway added. Harkaway, who has also written a series of non-Smiley novels, said last year that his father had “implicitly” authorised him to write continuation novels prior to his death. He also said his father had left a letter of wishes that “envisaged a literary estate mechanism [and says] please keep my books read and try and expand my audience”. A number of literary estates have sanctioned continuation novels, including those of Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, with a rolling roster of novelists having created adventures for James Bond, who, along with Smiley, is Britain’s most famous fictional spy. • Times view: Spies like Smiley shouldn’t come in from the cold While Harkaway did not reveal potential candidates to take over the Smiley reins — nor how many continuation novels featuring the MI6 officer he planned to write — contenders could be the fellow espionage writers Charles Cumming, Mick Herron, who created the Slow Horses franchise, or even Charlotte Philby, granddaughter of the Soviet double agent Kim Philby. • My father, John le Carré: He was honest — despite his affairs While le Carré’s literary heritage has proved to be a fertile hunting ground for his three surviving sons — Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell run The Ink Factory, which holds first rights to adapt the novels for the screen and other media — his personal life has caused problems. Following le Carré’s death in 2020 Adam Sisman released a “secret annexe” to his 2015 biography of the writer which revealed the author’s serial infidelity. Sisman identified 12 lovers but said “several” others came forward to claim they had been in sexual relationships with le Carré. Harkaway said “it turns out that quite a lot of the scenery of my life was exactly that; a stage set created for my benefit as a child which, however moth-eaten it had become had never been retired. My parents’ marriage was not as unambiguous as their connection with me.” Harkaway said following the revelations his social media feed had “filled up with people noting that they really did not need or want any further detail on the scale or agility of John le Carré’s penis”. He said he had to stop himself from replying: “You and me both.”
