Would you read that if it was a novel?

No, I wouldn't read 24 if it were a novel, not this season or any season. 24 is really the successor to the old "cliffhanger" serials, where there's a crisis at the end of each episode. It's given up any semblance of reality.

But it's exciting TV. By contrast, le Carré has worked poorly in screen adaptations, even in the BBC productions of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley's People, in part because Alec Guinness is a great actor but doesn't resemble George Smiley in the least, and in part because it's not possible to capture something like the brilliant shift in the mission in The Honourable Schoolboy on film -- the rush of action obfuscates the contemplation that you need to see what Smiley had managed to do through Westerby. Even in the slower pace of a miniseries, the idea that Smiley eventually figures out in Tinker, Tailor -- that one of Percy's foursome had to be posing as a double agent and that Smiley could use that to trap the REAL double agent -- is hard to develop without making it seem like a flash from the heavens.

And that's why you can't do le Carré-style stories in 24. Your viewing audience would rival A&E.

To digress, I like Call for the Dead. I like the picture of the Circus when "the Advisor" was running things. The story there sets up everything that comes later, from Smiley's WWII tradecraft to Peter Guillam's loyalty to him (which is certainly put to the test in Tinker, Tailor). Both characters changed little over the years. I particularly like the fact that the ending of Call for the Dead is every bit as downbeat as the endings of the later stories; right from the start, le Carré never went for the happy ending.

Did you know that Call for the Dead was optioned for a movie in the U.S. BEFORE The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was issued? -- but it wasn't shot until AFTER Spy, and the character names had to be changed because the studio that did Spy had purchased the rights to the character names in that book as well as the story and insisted on a royalty from the first studio for their use.

(The movie is called The Deadly Affair. It was directed by the great Sidney Lumet, with a screenplay by Paul Dehn (who also wrote the screenplay for Spy, as well as for Goldfinger). James Mason plays "Charles Dobbs", whose wife is still named Ann, and Peter Guillam and Mundt disappear completely.)

But I'd agree with your characterization of the second le Carré novel, A Murder of Quality, which is a standard mystery revolving around class roles. No one would have ever read it if not for what came later.

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