The creators of the BBC1 hit series The Night Manager are to adapt another of John Le Carré’s popular books: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The BBC1 show will be another co-production with US network AMC, following the huge success of The Night Manager, which starred Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman.



Le Carré said he was looking forward to seeing a new version of it on screen: “I’m very excited by the project, and have great confidence in the team.”

The team behind The Night Manager are now turning their attention to the author’s most famous book, which is set during the cold war, just months after the Berlin Wall was built.

Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog Millionaire and The Full Monty, has been enlisted by the BBC to adapt the series, while The Ink Factory, which worked on The Night Manager, will produce.

Beaufoy said: “It’s incredibly exciting to be working on the best cold war spy story ever written.”

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was written in 1963, follows Alec Leamas, a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose east Berlin network is in tatters.

His agents have either disappeared or are dead at the hands of the East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt, but Leamas is soon offered a chance of revenge when he is recalled to London.

The novel received critical acclaim at the time of its publication and became an international bestseller. In 1965, it was adapted into a film starring Richard Burton.

In 2010, it was selected as one of the All-Time 100 Novels by Time magazine, which described it as “a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth”.

Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, said: “Following the huge global success of The Night Manager, it’s a privilege to announce that John Le Carré will return to BBC1 with one of the best spy thrillers ever written.”