An expert’s guide to Mr John le Carré spy novels, featuring The Night Manager.

T_he Night Manager_, the terrific BBC-AMC miniseries thriller about intelligence work and arms dealing, has been a critical and commercial success in both the UK and the US. Many people also feel that, for the show’s star Mr Tom Hiddleston, it was a six-hour audition tape for the role of James Bond. Mr Ian Fleming’s secret agent is the inescapable pinnacle of escapist espionage adventure, but The Night Manager is a welcome reminder that spy fiction has something bigger, brainier and ultimately better than 007: the novels of Mr John le Carré.

The Night Manager, published in 1993, is the 14th of Mr le Carré’s 23 novels. His first three books were published while he (as Mr David Cornwell, before the pen name took over) worked for British intelligence in London, Bonn and Hamburg. The bestselling, award-winning success of the third novel, 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, enabled him to leave the secret service to write full time. The book set the le Carré template: realistic and tightly plotted depictions of deception and betrayal at all levels of the secret world, with dramatic exploration of the moral, ethical and political grey areas therein. Notable subsequent hits include 1974’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, which was adapted to a critically acclaimed film, starring Mr Gary Oldman, in 2011.

Now 84, Mr le Carré is writing a memoir due out at the end of 2016. The tenth movie based on his work, Our Kind Of Traitor, from the 2010 novel, is out this summer. To tide you over until then, we at MR PORTER have looked through the author’s oeuvre to select the following three titles, all of which are great reads for those new to Mr le Carré as well as particularly ripe for adaptation. Read them now and be ahead of the game the next time – and you can guarantee there will be a next time – Mr le Carré’s work appears on screen.

A PERFECT SPY

The 1986 work which Mr Philip Roth called “the best English novel since the war”, is about an agent with a con-man dad, and a great starting point for Mr le Carré newbies.

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS

Two student protesters in West Berlin become part of the apparatus that helps bring down the Wall – one of them having defected to the other side. They then turn their attentions to the military-industrial complex, which proves harder to break. A 40-year friendship set against the backdrop of world-changing events is a gangbuster miniseries, if ever there was one.

THE MISSION SONG

The leading man in Mr le Carré’s 2006 novel is an interpreter at a secret meeting of Congolese warlords and the Western backers who are encouraging them to stage a coup. Might Mr Idris Elba do his James Bond audition in the part?