ON JANUARY 23RD 1963 Kim Philby, a British spy (and one-time contributor to The Economist) disappeared following his defection to the Soviet Union. Nine months later “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” was published. It was the third novel from John le Carré, the pseudonym for David John Moore Cornwell, an unknown 30-year-old writer who was working as an intelligence officer in Bonn. It was fiction, but the book seemed to reflect the larger reality of the cold war. It also changed the face of the thriller genre forever.



The novel starts with Alec Leamas, a British spy running the counter-intelligence unit in Berlin, waiting for one of his agents to cross the border into the West. From the very first sentence Mr le Carré’s writing is startling. Scenes are illuminated as if by flashpoint. Characters are sketched in sharp, quick phrases. Sentences are short and to the point. The plot is complex, but never over-burdened with secondary characters or unnecessary twists and turns.



Unlike the spy fiction of “James Bond”, Mr le Carré’s world was gritty and distinctly dark. Leamas drinks whisky by himself in badly-lit, barely-furnished rooms. Women are muted and downtrodden, rather unlike the Technicolour fantasies in silk stockings created by Ian Fleming. Far from being glamorous, Mr le Carré’s spies are, in the words of Leamas, “a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors…pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives”.



This starkness made Mr le Carré’s world of spooks and double-agents seem, as he writes in a new afterword to the book, credible if not authentic. His writing owes much to another master of the well-written thriller, Graham Greene, and his 1938 masterpiece “Brighton Rock”. But the grittiness of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” can be seen in other fiction that emerged at the time. Five years earlier Allan Sillitoe wrote about working-class life in Nottingham in “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning”, shocking readers with descriptions of back-street abortions and evenings spent drinking away dole money in the pub. In 1956 John Osborne wrote “Look Back in Anger”, a realist play revolving around an angry, disaffected young man. Mr Le Carré's novel spun a rather different yarn, but it reflected a larger rift in post-war Britain and tapped into a new way of writing about British life.



Soon after the novel was published, Mr le Carré gave up his work with the foreign office to concentrate on writing. Another 20 novels followed, including “A Delicate Truth”, released earlier this year, and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, his dazzling 1974 novel which was made into both a television series in 1979 and a film in 2011. All of these novels contain the same taut language and keen eye for detail. But “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” remains his finest work. Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Mr le Carré’s novel still reverberates with frustration at the impotence and deceit of the cold war. It is a reminder, if ever one was needed, of how good fiction can question the way that governments work.

Read more: Emma Hogan considers what makes John le Carré's voice distinctive for Intelligent Life