John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies shows us what happenswhen history’s unappeasable ghosts force their way into your life and demand thereckoning.  Not just a ‘late’ work but aworld in which justice is so long delayed that vengeance uncovers every secretthing, and the codes of law are no guarantee of good order but come-ons in a riggedcasino.  It is as if Orestes has sleptthrough the alarm-clock one time too many and wakes to find that his Furies areall the more vile for being unexamined. 

The title is – I assume deliberately – a very distant echoof The Discovery of Witchcraft, the Elizabethan guide to the deceptionsof the witch-hunt.  (No coincidence thatthe tainted intelligence at the centre of Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailorspy-hunt was code-named ‘Witchcraft’ (there’s no defence for it . ..)).  The historical detective aswitch-hunter, besides being a plausible predecessor of spy-master fiction, is aseriously under-explored sub-genre that awaits exploitation.  There’s another genre at work here too:  all adventures into the other world beginwith the absence of the father, and in Legacy Peter Guillam’s road toresolution leads him on a hunt for his enigmatically missing old master GeorgeSmiley.  Fun fact:  Rupert Davies, the very first celluloidincarnation of Smiley (in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) alsoappears in the cult Vince Price vehicle Witchfinder General – not as ahunter but as collateral damage of the obsessions of others.  Peter Guillam would have sympathised.