It’s the birthday of British spy novelist John le Carré (b. 1931), most famous for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and the first to write novels depicting the world of espionage realistically, in “shades of gray.” John le Carré is actually the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, necessary because Cornwell was himself a spy in the 1950s and 60s and needed to keep his two identities separate.

(Okay, it’s already clear this guy has a much cooler life than I can even imagine. You know what’s on my schedule today? Meeting someone at a shady location to get the goods. Except the location isn’t shady, it’s Starbucks, and “the goods” is peanut-free candy legally bought in Canada, and pretty much no foreign government is going to be upset by any of this. Sigh.)

Le Carré (born in Poole, Dorset, England) had a horrendous childhood complete with an abusive and criminal father who lied constantly, a mother who fled the family when le Carré  was five, and all the joys of a British boarding school. Le Carré served with the Army Intelligence Core in Vienna before studying at Oxford and then taught at Eton College for a couple of years before joining the British Foreign Service. After several years in espionage himself, he wrote his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), which introduced one of his most famous characters, George Smiley; A Murder of Quality followed in 1962. But it was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold that made his reputation internationally. Its protagonist, Alec Leamas, is far from the glamorous spies of Ian Fleming’s fiction: rather, he’s an aging, alienated field agent whose mission and morals are no more admirable than those of the East German spy he’s trying to frame.

(Remember back when you thought James Bond was amazing? Those were the days.)

Le Carré went on to write two dozen more spy novels, including Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (1974), The Constant Gardener (2001), and his latest, A Legacy of Spies (2017), which revives the characters of both Leamas and Smiley. Some (including Philip Roth) would argue that his greatest novel is A Perfect Spy (1986), which draws heavily on le Carré’s own life. Ben Macintyre, a journalist for The Times of London who has written about British espionage, said, “It’s no accident that some of our greatest writers have been spooks — Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Priestley and [Le Carré]. Spying and fiction are not entirely different processes. You try to create an artificial world. And the better and more realistic and more emotionally believable you can make that world, as either a spy or a novelist, the better you are going to be at it.” (Read the interview here.) Le Carré’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life came out in 2016 and is by all accounts both fascinating and charming.

Have a wistful but morally unambiguous day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.