John Le Carré, The Tailor of Panama

LynnDianne Beene (University of New Mexico)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1997

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Spy and Espionage

Resources

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In 1958, Graham Greene published

Our Man in Havana

in which he satirizes the British Secret Service for its eagerness to accept unvetted intelligence from local sources. Our man is James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Cuba who, strapped for money to support his spendthrift daughter, creates a subnetwork of fictitious agents and sells schematics to expensive vacuum models to an overly eager MI6 agent, Hawthorne. When exposed, Wormold is deported to London where MI5 sets him up in a teaching position and recommends him for the Order of the British Empire. Inspired by Greene’s novel, John le Carré, pseudonym for John David Moore Cornwell, published a far darker version of this basic plot as

The Tailor of Panama

(1996). Calling his novel “Casablanca without heroes”…

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3450 words

Citation: Beene, LynnDianne. "The Tailor of Panama". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 July 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7880, accessed 04 December 2024.]

John Le Carré, The Tailor of Panama

Dates

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