John Le Carre, best-selling author of cold war thrillers, dies at 89

Le Carre upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call

John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, said on Sunday.

Before  le Carré published his best-selling 1963 novel “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” which Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read,” the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s