Kind of a hero

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A kind of hero (English original title: The Honorable Schoolboy ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1977. The sixth novel with the secret agent George Smiley belongs next to Dame, König, As, Spy ( Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , 1974) and Agent on his own behalf ( Smiley's People , 1979) for the so-called Karla trilogy ( The Quest for Karla ) about Smiley's argument with his Soviet opponent Karla.

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After the Soviet mole is exposed , the Circus , the London headquarters of the British secret service MI6 , has to be rebuilt from scratch. The task is entrusted to George Smiley, who gathers old companions like Peter Guillam, the Russia specialist Connie Sachs, the China expert Doc di Salis and the loyal ex-field agent Fawn. Without a functioning agent network and with drastically reduced funds, Smiley is faced with an almost insoluble task when he thinks about the technique of "back-finding": by studying files to find all those companies that have been sabotaged particularly thoroughly by the Soviet agent leader Karla in recent years - because they could provide indications of possible weaknesses on the Soviet side.

Hong Kong 1978

The focus is on secret money laundering operations by the Soviet Union in Hong Kong , which the local field agent Sam Collins had reported two years earlier but which were hastily called back by the London headquarters. The unusually high payments went to the Indocharter airline headed by pilots Tiny Ricardo and Charlie Marshall and their assistant Lizzie Worthington. Despite concerns about his dubious methods, Smiley is reinstating Collins. He also sends the casual agent Jerry Westerby to Hong Kong in disguise as a journalist to work alongside the circus employee Bill Craw to advance the investigation.

Westerby soon finds out the owner of the Soviet escrow account: Drake Ko, originally born in Chaozhou (English: Chiuchow), is an influential Hong Kong businessman suspected of smuggling opium into China . For this he is said to have used the Indocharter pilots until Ricardo did not return from a flight. Since then, Lizzie Worthington, now under the name "Liese Worth", has been Kos's lover. His brother Nelson Ko is also believed to have passed away, but evidence suggests that he lives in China and holds an influential position on the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party . As a staunch communist , he also passed on his information to Moscow, which Karla paid for with payments to his brother's account.

Smiley's calmly conducted investigation comes under sudden time pressure when the American drug investigation also targets Drake Ko. Despite resistance from the ministerial official Saul Enderby, who would like to bequeath the operation to his “cousins” from overseas, Smiley insists on the right of first access to the British crown colony with his American colleague Martello . Westerby is supposed to speed up the operation, make Ko nervous and force action. In fact, he succeeds in first tracking down Marshall in Cambodia , then Ricardo in Thailand . He learns that Ricardo was not supposed to smuggle opium, but rather to fly Drake's brother Nelson out of China. When the operation failed, Drake forgave him only on the condition that he ceded his lover Lizzie to him.

Shaken up by Westerby's investigations, Ko plans the early entry of his brother Nelson by junk as part of the festival of Tin Hau , using the island of Po To off Hong Kong as a meeting point. Smiley travels with his loyal followers, the British and American secret services are jointly monitoring the action in order to bring Nelson into their power as soon as he sets foot in Hong Kong. Only Westerby, who is in shock after the murder of Ko's bodyguard Tiu on his journalist colleague Luke and acts on his own, endangers the operation. He escapes Guillam and Fawn, who are escorting him to the airport, and wants to escape with Lizzie, with whom he has fallen in love. In return, he warns Drake Ko of the danger to his brother. But his mission comes too late, Nelson is kidnapped in an American helicopter and the rushing Westerby - possibly by Fawn - shot.

In the London Circus one waits in vain to reap the fruits of the operation, i.e. to interrogate Nelson Ko about his political and secret service contacts. Contrary to the agreement, he remains in American custody. Part of the deal behind the scenes is also the disempowerment of Smileys, which at the moment of his triumph will be replaced by the America-friendly Enderby, for which Westerby's arbitrariness only provides the pretext. With Smiley, Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis are fired to make room for younger, energetic hawks . Peter Guillam slips back into the second member of the foreign agent. For this, Sam Collins, who was part of the plot, takes over the position of the chief of operations. In Hong Kong, Drake Ko remains unmolested, while Lizzie Worthington is arrested and tried for drug trafficking. The disappearance of Luke and Westerby only stirs up dust in journalists' circles for a short time, until the local authorities manage to attribute a mutual affair to the two and sweep their deaths under the rug.

Awards

The novel won the British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1977 .

expenditure

  • John le Carré: The Honorable Schoolboy . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1977, ISBN 0-340-22042-2 .
  • John le Carré: Kind of a hero . Translated from the English by Rolf and Hedda Soellner. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-455-00818-6 .

literature

  • David Monaghan: Smiley's Circus. The secret world of John le Carré . Heyne, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05629-9 , pp. 28–34, 50–54, and under the respective key words.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The CWA Gold Dagger ( January 14, 2012 memento on the Internet Archive ) on the Crime Writers' Association website .
  2. ^ Fiction winners of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize .