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 Glasgow), 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

Save to Bookshelf

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”…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3513 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 19 April 2024.]

Save this article