@lanodan @harbeau Le Carre was too! But they took totally different approaches. The climax of a Fleming book is when James Bond is dodging bullets while driving a speedboat recklessly through a Venetian canal. The climax of a Le Carre book is when Smiley is calmly arranging to meet a spy at the Iron Curtain for extraction, then never actually showing up so that the agent just gets caught and the secret op gets buried.