Trailer - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

This looks fab, with a stellar British cast to rival Harry Potter and from the director of Let The Right One In.

"In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6's echelons."

Opens on 16 September, here's a not very spoilery (I think) trailer:

New Reviews: Bruen, Fossum, Haynes, Hilton, Kelly, le Carre, Ridpath, Tyler

July's competition: Win a set of 3 books by Armand Cabasson (UK only)

Here are this week's reviews, which visit Egypt, Iceland, Norway, Russia, USA as well as the UK:

Terry Halligan reviews the movie-tie-in release of Ken Bruen's London Boulevard;

I review Karin Fossum's latest Inspector Sejer, The Caller, tr. K E Semmel;

Amanda Gillies reviews Elizabeth Haynes debut, Into the Darkest Corner which has just been shortlisted for the "New Blood" Dagger;

Michelle Peckham reviews the fifth Joe Hunter from Matt Hilton, Blood and Ashes which is just out in paperback;

Susan White reviews the paperback release of Erin Kelly's The Poison Tree which has also been shortlisted for the "New Blood" Dagger;

I review the radio play version of John le Carre's The Russia House on the blog;

Maxine Clarke reviews Michael Ridpath's second Icelandic novel, 66 Degrees North which sounds bang up to date politically

and Lizzie Hayes reviews L C Tyler's Herring on the Nile which she says is more fun than a certain other crime book set on the Nile!

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.

Review: The Russia House by John le Carre (audio book)

The Russia House by John le Carre, BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Audio Dramatisation (AudioGo, July 2011, ISBN: 9781408410622, 4 CDs)

The play opens at the Moscow Audio (Cassette) Fair where Katya is trying to secretly get a manuscript to Barley Blair for publication. Barley has skipped the show so the manuscript travels to London with a friend of Barley's who, when he is unable to track down Barley, takes the manuscript to the authorities. It is then subsequently taken to the "Russia House" where the manuscript is found to be political dynamite. The author claims that a lot of things in Russia don't work properly and that scientific evidence has been fabricated.

To ensure that the manuscript is not a fake, the authorities (intelligence services) have to track down Barley and persuade him to go back to Russia to find the author. Will Barley agree and will he be able to do it successfully?

Set at a time when Russia was opening up, The Russia House is a tale of betrayal, sacrifice and love, both for country and for individuals. I found it fascinating and gripping and it's still quite complicated despite its running time of only just over 3 hours - compared to the 400 page book. There are a few familiar voices in the cast, the main one being Tom Baker as the likeable cad Barley. No-one says Harry quite like he does! The public-school tones of Pip Torrens are equally recognisable as Clive, a bureaucrat who excels in protecting himself.

The Russia House was published in 1989 and this radio adaptation was broadcast in 1994 and, as well as the different state of the world back then, it shows its age a little in terms of cassettes and the fact that spies have tape recorders rather than wireless eavesdropping equipment, but it does give an intriguing insight into how things were politically, not so long ago.

Though I have enjoyed books by relative newcomers to the spy writing genre such as Stella Rimington and Jon Stock, I've never read any le Carre - I've been convinced I wouldn't understand them - but this has given me a chance at least to sample the great man's writing.

In conclusion, another entertaining listen from Radio 4/AudioGO.

New Reviews: Bale, Chance, Cotterill, Evans, Hall, le Carre, MacLeod

Two competitions for March, both close 31st March:
1.Win a signed copy of Complicit by Nicci French UK only
2.Win From the Dead by Mark Billingham UK & Europe only

Here are this week's reviews:

Terry Halligan reviews the paperback release of Tom Bale's Terror's Reach;

Amanda Gillies reviews Alex Chance's Savage Blood, which she loved;

Michelle Peckham reviews the first in a new series (presumably) from Colin Cotterill, Killed at the Whim of a Hat set in Thailand;

Lizzie Hayes reviews Geraldine Evans' Deadly Reunion the latest in this "marvellous series";

Susan White reviews Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing set in India;

Geoff Jones reviews John le Carre's Our Kind of Traitor

and Maxine Clarke reviews Torquil MacLeod's Meet Me in Malmo the first in a projected series featuring Inspector Anita Sundstrom.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.

George Smiley on the Radio

BookBrunch reported today on the upcoming Radio 4 dramatisations of the George Smiley novels:

Radio 4 is dramatising John le Carré’s eight Smiley novels beginning this Saturday (23 May) with Call for the Dead. The dramatisations will run throughout 2009 and into 2010.

The transmission dates are: A Murder of Quality, Saturday Play 30 May; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Classic Serial 5, 12 and 19 July; The Looking Glass War, Classic Serial 20 and 27 September; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Classic Serial 29 November, 6 and 13 December; The Honourable Schoolboy, Classic Serial 24 and 31 January, 7 February; Smiley's People, Classic Serial April 2010; and The Secret Pilgrim, 2010.

Simon Russell Beale will play spymaster George Smiley, who first appears in Call for the Dead - published in 1961 as the Berlin Wall went up - as a security officer in The Department. In later books Smiley works for The Circus. He is described as a bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged, deceptively ordinary, constantly cuckolded, morally perplexed and steel-trap-minded man, possessing "the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin".

John le Carré said: "Simon Russell Beale is unique. No living actor can match his understanding of language, or his interpretation of character. He will make a superb Smiley, and I feel deeply honoured."

Call for the Dead is on at 2.30pm Saturday 23 May for 90 minutes. The cast also includes Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Anna Chancellor. The Radio 4 programme information is here.

There is a 2008 interview with Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre website all about books.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to be filmed

From the Guardian:

John le Carré's hit thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is to hit the big screen. The author, whose real name is David Cornwall, is at work with the scriptwriter Peter Morgan on a film adaptation of the novel, first published in 1974 as the first instalment in a trilogy about cold war spies. To be produced by Working Title - the production company behind most of the British film industry's biggest hits - it will be the first feature-film version of the novel, which was made into a television series starring Alec Guinness in 1979.

John Le Carre's next book

From the International Herald Tribune:

John le Carré, the British writer of literary spy thrillers, has returned to a previous publisher for his forthcoming novel, "A Most Wanted Man." Le Carré has signed a one-book deal with Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, for the United States rights to the novel, which will be simultaneously published in Britain (by Hodder & Stoughton) in October. Le Carré is leaving Little, Brown & Co., the publisher of his last two books, "The Mission Song" and "Absolute Friends," and returning to Scribner, which published "Single & Single" and "The Constant Gardener." The new novel is set in Germany and chronicles the fate of a Muslim man who moves to Hamburg to enroll in medical school but because of his murky background ends up being followed by both local and other Western intelligence agencies.