Smiley's People is one of John le Carre's classic Cold War novels and George Smiley one of his most acclaimed characters. Into a shadowy, violent and intricate world steeped in moral ambivalence steps George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus, as the Secret Service is known. His brief is to bury crime, not solve it, as he fights his own private battle from London to Paris and to Hamburg for his last duel with his Russian opposite number, codnamed Karla.