Although Fleming’s James Bond was gaining a mass readership during this period, he was also in this older establishment mould. However, they were still excluded by an older generation who had experience in the war and were able to control both working practices and access to power. : In the late 1950s, the emergence of the anti-establishment reflected a new approach of those young men in society who had undertaken national service and been better educated than previous generations. This paper will explore the role of these novels in creating a new climate of public awareness in the post-war state through their locational specificity in London. The roles played by the leading characters in these novels are complementary - Le Carré’s desk based controllers and Deighton’s operational spies – and appeal to different audiences many of whom had experience of war or conscription. The use of specific London locations in these first ten novels – particularly in ‘Call for the Dead’, and ‘The Spy who came in from the Cold’ by Le Carré and ‘The Ipcress File’ and ‘Berlin Game’ by Deighton create a language of location and fear. Whilst the war was over, the British state was still actively defending itself from internal threats and external dangers. An examination of the fiction of Deighton and Le Carré suggests a different world where the locus of external danger was in the suburban midst of Surrey or Wood Green. The transition of Fleming’s novels into film starting with ‘Dr No’ in 1962 suggested that UK spies engaging in espionage undertook this in exotic locations which were far removed from everyday life. Although both authors and these specific works have remained popular in genre spy fiction, there has been little consideration of the works in relation to each other and in their role together in situating the potential threats of the post-war period in a UK domestic setting rather than on mainland Europe. The first five novels each written Le Carré and Deighton were published in the period 1960-1970. The British spy novel took a realist turn in the 1960s epitomising the new wave. In this essay, I analyze the themes of his cold-war novels and discuss the impact of the end of the cold war on his recent works. Until the end of the cold war, he wrote several spy novels dealing with the East-West conflict and continued to publish spy novels after the cold war ended. His literary breakthrough came in 1963 with his novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He grew up as the son of a con man who involved him in his criminal activities he taught at Eton and worked for the Foreign Office and the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6. " David John Moore Cornwell, le Carré's real name, was born on 19 Octo-ber 1931 in Poole, Dorset. Curiously, some have dismissed him as a superior thriller writer, which of course he is, but he is also much more. Michael Vestey underlines this statement in The Spectator: " I think le Carré is one of the finest of British postwar novelists. John Halperin, for instance, claims: " John le Carré is the only writer of espionage 'thrillers' today who is also a writer of literature " (17). In contrast to his literary comrades-in-arms such as Ian Fleming and Len Deighton, he has even managed to be acknowledged not only as a genre writer but also as a writer of highbrow literature. John le Carré has maintained his position as the world's premier spy writer for more than forty years.
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