le CarrÉ’s First spy thriller IS BROUGHT TO THRILLING LIFE IN AN exciting new bbc radio drama 

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realized characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.” 

This stunning new dramatization, set in London in the late 1950s, finds Smiley engaged in the humdrum job of security vetting. But when a Foreign Of­fice civil servant commits suicide after an apparently unproblematic interview, Smiley is baffled. Refusing to believe that Fennan shot himself soon after making a cup of cocoa and asking the exchange to telephone him in the morning, Smiley decides to investigate—only to uncover a murderous conspiracy with its roots in his own secret wartime past.

Starring the award-winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, and Anna Chancellor, this tense, thrilling dramatization perfectly captures the atmosphere of le Carré’s masterful début novel.

John le Carré was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty-one titles.

Dramatized  On Sale November 10, 2009

2 CDs          978-1-60283-637-2      $19.95