A review by hoboken
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré

4.0

A kind of nonchronological memoir--lots of short chapters on the people and places le Carre met, saw, and used in his books and the films made from them. Having a professional grifter for a father and a stint in Her Majesty's secret service gave him a head start, and early on he decided not to write about places he didn't know firsthand, so the only thing to do was to go out and have the adventures and meet the people he turned into his long, gripping series of spy fiction. A charming, clear, entertaining first-person voice. A cast of hundreds at least from fake Mitteleuropean counts to MI6 operatives in the thick of the Cold War to Graham Greene and Alec Guinness. I haven't read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for 50 years, but it's time to do it again. For my money, if you want to know what things were like between VE Day and the day the Berlin Wall came down, you can't do better than le Carre and the great Eric Ambler.