I've read Le Carre's Night Manager and the first book of the Smiley trilogy(love them but personally they're a bit exhausting to read, I find myself needing to go back to make sure I didn't miss any key details), Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle(liked it up until it became a quasi romance/adultery plot with Lucy) and a few of Mick Herron's Slough House books(I enjoy them but in a they're really easy to read and spend an afternoon on way. I think I like the humor more so than the actual spy craft in the book which feels a bit weak, which may just be the point considering the setting).What else should I read, besides the obvious(more le carre).
Watch Le Bureau.
Obviously Fleming and Graham Greene. Along with Le Carre, they are the big three of British spy novels.
Le Carre's first was "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and set the cynical tone of all of his work. -- Fleming's James Bond is a definite product of the early cold war period and haven't aged very well. Herron has been well served by Gary Oldman's acting but the stories themselves are meh. -- Surprisingly, Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series is actually pretty good if you can get past how Dean Martin camped them up so badly in the movie versions.
>>25373509I think, regarding Herron, that Jackson Lamb in the book is an infinitely more 'savage' (or more accurately less politically correct) character. In the series he's kind of a ninja bum. In the books he's more or less there to put his team down emotionally and then in a later conversation with Standish go "well of course how else would I have motivated them".I do think the books are better written than the show, mainly because the show keeps twisting events and plotlines just so they can have certain events play out in a way that can for lack of a better term serve an agenda. Not to go too deep into this because it'd turn into a tv review but a few chapters into London Rules, which is the book that season 5 was adapted into makes me weep because they butchered a bunch of characters just so they could have a bunch of girlpower scenes and >look at this baaaad political viewpointwhen the book was far more clever about framing that plot and their characters.
Level up your game, kid.
>>25372843Pic related is very clever and knowledgeable, although the surprise twist stretches credulity a bit. It's the beginning of a nine-book series, which will keep you occupied for a while.But since you've read Tinker, Tailor, you really should try The Honourable Schoolboy. It's unironically the best book in the Smiley-Karla trilogy.
>>25373838Karla is barely in Honourable Schoolboy. No idea why it’s considered the Karla trilogy
>>25373906He's barely in the other two books either.Spymasters are quite hard to pin down, for some reason ...
>>25373927He’s much more important to Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People
>>25373509>Fleming's James Bond is a definite product of the early cold war period and haven't aged very wellOnly a black, a women or fag would say something like this
>>25374259Such a scintillating comment. We applaud your attempt at an adult take on this but you do need to work harder.
>>25374366>weDefinitely a femoid
>>25373838Been reading The Honourable Schoolboy and I'm enjoying it so far. Unluckily, is the least adapted compared to smiley's people and ttss.
>>25375366Yeah, the BBC couldn't do it. Filming on location in the far east was beyond their budget at the time.And yet they managed to stage Tenko in England. It's a pity they couldn't apply the same imagination to filming Schoolboy.
>>25374366You say this as if claiming a series set in a specific time period “didnt age very well” is a substantial, intellectually sound criticism. Go ahead and explain why flemings books “didnt age well” if you would like to actually discuss the point.
Good spy novels from the american side:>The Company by Robert Littell>Damascus Station by David McCloskey>Red Sparrow Trilogy by Jason Matthews>Six Days of the Condor by James Grady>Paul Christopher Series by Charles McCarry
