John le Carré’s time in Hong Kong and the spy novelist’s ‘shame’ at a detail he got wrong about the colony
- Characters the British author met in Hong Kong made it into one of the ex-spy’s Cold War novels, and so did an error that taught him a valuable lesson
After half a dozen years working in British intelligence, David Cornwell, better known to the world as John le Carré, became a bestselling writer with his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).
It was just as well his new career was taking off because le Carré’s days as a spy were over, thanks to Kim Philby’s defection blowing his cover to the KGB.
By the 1970s, le Carré was making a decent living from his books, and he decided he wanted to move from Europe and travel Asia to research characters, and to tell the story of the Cold War in a hot climate.
Adam Sisman, le Carré’s major biographer, says the author “wanted to get his knees brown” in a mocking reference to the days when British officials wore shorts, and so with a vague idea for a new novel to be called The Honourable Schoolboy, in February 1974 le Carré boarded a plane from London to Hong Kong.
The plan was to have travelled through northeast Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, using Hong Kong as his base on both occasions.
