London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980. Original cloth with somewhat worn dustjacket, but unclipped. 327 pp. A hint of soiling to edges, and jacket is worn with tears to edges both front and back but is now protected in archival mylar. Inside the book is clean and overall a good solid copy of the 1st edition of this major classic

First edition, 1st impression

“When Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was published in 1974, revelations exposing the presence of Soviet double agents in Britain were still fresh in public memory. Guy Burgess, Donald Duart Maclean, and Kim Philby, later known as members of the Cambridge Five, had been exposed as KGB spies. The five had risen to very senior positions in branches of the British government. The book, based on the premise of uncovering a Soviet double agent in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), offers a novelisation of this period. It is also set against a theme of decline in British influence on the world stage after the Second World War, with the USSR and the USA emerging as the dominant superpowers during the Cold War. David Cornwell, who wrote under the pseudonym John le Carré, worked as an intelligence officer for MI5 and MI6 (SIS) in the 1950s and early 1960s. Senior SIS officer Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR in 1963, and the consequent compromising of British agents, was a factor in the 1964 termination of Cornwell’s intelligence career. In the novel, the character of Bill Haydon, with his easy charm and strong social connections, bears a close resemblance to Philby. The title alludes to the nursery rhyme and counting game Tinker Tailor. As the tension of the Cold War is peaking in 1973, George Smiley, former senior official in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (known as “the Circus” because its London office is at Cambridge Circus), is living unhappily in forced retirement, following the failure of an operation codenamed Testify in Czechoslovakia which ended in the capture and torture of agent Jim Prideaux. Control, chief of the Circus, had suspected that one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus was a Soviet mole, and had assigned them code names for Prideaux to relay back to the Circus, derived from the English children’s rhyme “Tinker, Tailor”: “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief.”