Call for the Dead - Softcover

Le Carre, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553266233 ISBN 13: 9780553266238

Publisher: Bantam Books, 1982

Synopsis

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised 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 dramatisation, 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 dramatisation perfectly captures the atmosphere of le Carré's masterful début novel.

2 CDs. 1 hr 30 mins.

About this title

Review:

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

'Brilliant. Realistic. Constant suspense. Excellent writing' (THE OBSERVER)

Book Description:

Simon Russell Beale stars in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of John le Carré's first novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0553266233
• ISBN 13: 9780553266238
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback