The sixties saw the emergence of a very different sort of novel about spies from those written by Ian Fleming. The writer was David Cornwell, who used the pseudonym John le Carré, since he was working at the time for MI6, the foreign branch of British Intelligence. He had previously been in MI5, which was for intelligence within Britain. This involved countering foreign plotters in the country, which led to le Carré collecting information whilst at Oxford on left-wing groups there, which were thought a threat to national security. Before that, he had taught briefly at Eton, though he had not been a schoolboy there, unlike Fleming, whose credentials as a member of the British establishment were much stronger.

Le Carré's principal hero was George Smiley, the very antithesis of James Bond. He was totally without glamour, and based in part on V. H. H. Green, the rector of Lincoln College in Oxford where le Carré had studied. Wrapped up in Smiley's successes in counter-intelligence are his personal failures, notably a disastrous marriage, with his wife being seduced by a colleague who turns out to be a Russian agent.

The unmasking of that agent was the subject of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which brought le Carré into British drawing rooms through a brilliant television series, starring Alec Guinness. Earlier, le Carré had won cinematic fame through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton as an idealistic agent who realizes that the Communist he had thought his great enemy was actually a double agent working for the West.