Book review: Call for the Dead

This is John le Carre's first spy story. Though - while it is indeed a spy story - it is more in the murder mystery detective type¹: Smiley is Poirot, various people are murdered, the mystery is why Fennan wanted a wake-up call at 8:30 the next day. And the answer is that his wife dunnit, not him. This is acceptably satisfying, but I did guess it. A decent book; reasonably written, an interesting story, some characters, and a little history, of the times, of WWII, of before.

The book spans the transition period from when the secret services were run by oxbridge dons on a part time amateur basis, to a somewhat more professional version. Or at least, so it is portrayed: from before WWII, to the 50s. Life here is not so grungy as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: we have the Oxbridge tinges, the suspects are highly placed and go to the theatre, Smiley has a nice house and is married to a Lady, and so on.

Quibbles: Mundt is a ruthless killer who, when he meets Smiley in a quiet car lot after dark late at night merely roughs him up a bit, and Smiley makes a full recovery. This is implausible.

Once it becomes clear that it is Elsa the spy, we now realise that she must have been relying entirely on Fennan bringing work home. Would that really have been common? And she must have been copying it, despite a lack of any obvious facilities for such. This begins to seem odd. Also, Frey is running a single highly-placed domestic agent, so all this effort is on the off-chance that Fennan brings something useful home. Which, for the past six months, he hasn't been doing. Fennan denounces himself in order to get in contact with The Spies. But... wouldn't the F. O. have some more reasonable mechanism for "I think I'm being spied on, please can I talk to someone in confidence"?

Elsa and Mundt exchange music cases every month via cloakroom tickets. But if they have been doing this for years on end, might not the cloakroom attendant notice either that these people have identical luggage, or that they don't pick up the same luggage they put in?

Frey is a cripple. Yet he runs as fast as normal people.

I would quibble people's motivation for doing all this betrayal. And yet we have stuff like the Cambridge Five; and even today people do really stupid things in nominal opposition to fascism.

I'm not fully convinced that Mundt's adventures here are entirely compatible with the account in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Mundt runs away before anyone suspects him; or certainly before Smiley does. You need to posit an entire deeper layer in order to get Mundt being detained and turned.

At one point, Smiley says something like "we can't stop him yet, we've got no evidence, we'll have to wait until he does something". This seems quite unnatural; spy agencies must have extra-judicial powers². Towards the end, Frey flees, yet Smiley only gets the police to watch for him at all ports after Mendel has located him.

Is there another problem? How does Frey know that Fennan has been denounced and investigated? Fennan isn't going to tell Elsa: the entire point of the charade is to get round her. He can't know it just because he has seen F and S together; so by what magic has he deduced the investigation?

Trivia: my parsing of the title, before reading the book, was something like "elegy" or "despairing remembrance"; the actual meaning is disappointingly mundane.

Notes

1. Indeed the front cover that Wiki shows calls it a crime novel.

2. OTOH it would be entirely in place in a detective story.