John Bingham
Personal Information
Description
John Michael Ward Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, was an engineer, former MI5 spy, and an English novelist who published thrillers, detective novels, spy novels, and screen plays. - Wikipedia Following a spell as a journalist, Bingham was recruited into MI5 by Maxwell Knight. One of his younger colleagues was David Cornwell, who was inspired by Bingham’s success as an author of fiction to become a novelist himself, under the name John le Carré. Le Carré subsequently acknowledged that Bingham was a key inspiration for his most famous character, the spy George Smiley. [From the Introduction by Martin Edwards to The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories, 2018]
Books
Five roundabouts to heaven
Nineteen years is a long time. But when Peter Harding and Philip Bartels meet up again in the French countryside of their youth, the history and the dark secrets it holds are still there. tempered only slightly by time. The two men share more than a past friendship. Decades earlier, trapped in disenchanted marriage with his wife, Beatrice, Philip meets and falls in love with the graceful, charming Lorna Dickson. Overcome by the prospect of a humiliating divorce, Philip makes the decision to poison Beatrice. But when he invites his best friend, Peter, to meet his mistress at lunch one day, he unwittingly sets off a shocking chain of events that will forever change the lives of everyone involved. Now available for the first time in over twenty years, Five Roundabouts to Heaven is one of master writer and storyteller John Bingham's greatest works. With a chilling, expertly calibrated plot and mesmerizing prose, it is the powerful study of how murder can SO easily enter the minds of ordinary people.