Call for the Dead

Called by Time magazine, ''the premier spy novelist of his time and perhaps of all time,'' John le Carre has raised the spy novel to a new height. Call for the Dead is his first novel and the one in which we meet the world's most famous undercover operative, George Smiley.

The cast of characters includes a bright, twisted former hero of the German underground, a once beautiful woman with a terrifying secret, a high-ranking pompous fool of a bureaucrat, and a suspect British civil servant. The protagonist, George Smiley, is bitter, weary--he has seen too much and done too much--yet he cannot refuse one last desperate call for his services. [Call for the Dead was made into a 1966 film named The Deadly Affair.]