The spy who came in from the cold, written by John Le Carre is happen to be one of the best piece of the literary history of spies. The English writer, who is one of the best well-known figure in the spy fiction, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize for this book. The book is credible because the author himself worked in the intelligence service for a long time. In the 1950s and 1960s he had worked to the MI5 and MI6 so he had to write his novels under a pseudonym that happened to be John le Carré. The spy who came in from the cold was his third novel, published in 1963. The book became an international bestseller.
Although I am not very well experienced in spy-literature, I think that The Spy who came in from the cold is one of the best written novel about how the spies worked in the Cold War period. As far as I know, the Cold war was an intense economic, political, military, and ideological tension between the two powers, the Western Block and the Eastern Block. During the cold war, there was no actual war, there were no direct confrontations between the two superpowers. There were just indirect confrontations, proxy wars. This is the reason why it got the name Cold War. It was due to the lack of direct fights and estrangement, isolation, and the continuous monitoring of each other. The concept of intelligence and spies appeared. In a war where you can not talk about real fights, information was the biggest treasure.
In the title of the book, the word cold can refer both the cold war and the expression used by the spies that mean the process when a spy became withdrawn from the operating area and leave to a less dangerous location for some reason. The process was initiated by the spy’s own request, or it can be an instruction from the spy’s superior. The spy who came in from the cold takes place in the early 1960s, mostly in two locations in London and at the Berlin