Le Carré (1931-2020) noticed himself this manner, a bohemian prig and a priggish bohemian. His father, Ronald Cornwell, was a louche West Country con man and rake whose sins le Carré longed to expiate and dreaded repeating. Of the good German dramatists (Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, Büchner), le Carré wrote, “I related equally to their classic austerity, and their neurotic excesses. The trick, it seemed to me, was to disguise the one with the other.” And so David Cornwell of Dorset turned John le Carré, who not-so-secretly remained John the Square.

The product of this intelligent, secretive, melancholy thoughts is a physique of labor extraordinary in its breadth, consistency, generosity and wit — if not at all times its selection. Familiar characters enter and exit below new names. Crooked fathers and anguished sons abound, as do apathetic, listless wives and amorous affairs with international beauties. These often rote proceedings are elevated by his themes (loyalty, betrayal, nostalgia, belonging, fraternity and patriotism), by his plots and by his sentences.

And, in fact, by George Smiley. Le Carré’s donnish, bespectacled hero arrives in his first novel, “Call for the Dead” (1961). Brilliant and dowdy, savvy however cuckolded, Smiley is le Carré’s mordant reply to James Bond. He seems in 9 novels; he’s the star of 5. One misses him when he’s not round. But for these instances when Smiley is off the web page, studying German literature in some dank Cornish examine, different unforgettable characters fill his (ugly, sensible) footwear. My favorites — Magnus Pym, Jack Brotherhood, Richard Roper, Barley Blair — are fastened with sonorous, Dickensian names that stick in your head lengthy after you’ve completed their tales.

This is all to say that le Carré wrote many good books, and a handful of nice ones. A spy should be taught to tell apart sign from noise. Here are his greatest works.