Not to be like This Is My Villain Origin Story but people who have blatantly never read a le Carré novel need to stop describing spy fiction as le Carré-esque when what they actually mean is just that it’s less campy than the average Bond film. I think you can have a good spy story that isn’t le-Carré-esque! But you can’t have a le-Carré-esque spy story without a few fundamental ingredients. Not every good soup is a good chili ykwim
Non-optional ingredients in a le Carré story:
A solid grounding in geopolitics which meaningfully informs both the stakes of the plot and the moral stakes of the character arcs;
An unrelenting thematic preoccupation with betrayal-as-violence, and with the material and psychological fallout for both victims and perpetrators;
An approach to action that has as much - or more - in common with detective novels as with the rest of the spy genre. “Le Carré novels are about paperwork” is how this often gets framed, and while I can see where that shorthand comes from it’s not entirely right imo. There are chase scenes in le Carré novels. There are fight scenes in le Carré novels! But whereas the plot momentum of (eg) a Bond movie tends to drive you toward climactic action, in le Carré the action scenes tend to drive you toward climactic revelation. As in a murder mystery, the murder itself is often the least interesting part of the story and the least likely to be dramatized onscreen. What we actually care about is how the murder happened, why the murder happened, and the exact process by which the detective (/spy) discovers that information.
Technically optional I suppose but the rare exceptions really prove the rule:
5. At least one positively record-scratch-inducing instance of intense homoeroticism
(VERY SPECIFICALLY, at least 85% of that homoeroticism takes the form of the patented JLC Spiritual Threesome which is to say: there is ALWAYS a third person in the bedroom.)
