Call for the Dead - Penguin Modern Classics

Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.

Dead men receive no calls. Dead men write no letters.

After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation, meeting with Fennan's widow to find out what could have led him to such desperation.

But on the very day that Smiley is ordered off the enquiry he receives an urgent letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans - and their agents - know more about this man's death than the Circus previously imagined?

Call for the Dead, John le Carres first novel, introduces one of literatures greatest fictional spies, the tenacious, retiring, sharp-witted George Smiley.

'Intelligent, thrilling, surprising . . . makes most cloak-and-dagger stuff taste of cardboard' The Sunday Telegraph