John le Carre

Call for the Dead John le Carre

Simon Russell Beale stars in this BBC Radio 4 dramatization of John le Carre s first novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley.

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realized characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged, and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.

This dramatization, set in London in the late 1950s, finds Smiley engaged in the humdrum job of security vetting. But when a Foreign Office civil servant commits suicide after an apparently unproblematic interview, Smiley is baffled. Refusing to believe that Fennan shot himself soon after making a cup of cocoa and asking the exchange to telephone him in the morning, Smiley decides to investigate only to uncover a murderous conspiracy with its roots in his own secret wartime past.

Starring the award-winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, and Anna Chancellor, this tense, thrilling dramatization perfectly captures the atmosphere of le Carre s masterful debut novel."