"Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people

"Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?" -The Spy Who Came In From The Cold He belongs in that small pantheon of genre writers who transcend their chosen subject and ascend into the high literary. Tolkien with Fantasy. Clarke with Sci-Fi. Chandler with Crime. Lovecraft with the Supernatural. Some of the old BBC adaptations are extant via YouTube ;)