Call for the Dead characters

Appears from the start

A short, plump, unremarkable-looking officer of Britain's security service, badly dressed and easily overlooked. A scholar of seventeenth-century German literature by training, he was recruited into intelligence work before the war and spent it in Germany under cover, running a small network of agents he recruited himself. Back in London he has been reduced to routine vetting and loyalty interviews, work he performs with painstaking care and no appetite for office politics. His marriage to Lady Ann Sercomb has collapsed, which he bears quietly. Patient, courteous and unusually attentive to small inconsistencies, he is the sort of investigator who notices what does not fit and cannot let it alone.

Also known as Ann Smiley

Appears from the start

Smiley's wife, a beautiful and well-connected woman from an aristocratic family, whose marriage to an obscure and dowdy intelligence officer astonished everyone who knew her. She has left him and gone abroad. She is largely absent from the events of the book but is a constant background presence in Smiley's thoughts.

Appears from the start

The senior official who sits between the service and its political masters, a smooth career administrator with no field experience and an unfailing instinct for what will embarrass the department. He values presentation, ministerial comfort and a tidy file above the truth of any particular case, and his handling of the Fennan affair is governed throughout by damage limitation. Smiley regards him with weary contempt.

First appears in chapter 2

A senior Foreign Office official, Jewish, able and well regarded, who had been a communist sympathiser as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1930s. An anonymous letter revives the old allegation, and Smiley is sent to interview him. The two men talk amicably on a walk in the park, and Smiley leaves convinced there is nothing in it and tells him so.

First appears in chapter 3

Fennan's wife, a small, frail German Jewish refugee who survived the camps and carries their damage in her body and her manner. She lives with her husband in a house at Walliston, sees almost no one, and receives Smiley with a bitter, mocking hostility, treating his questions as another intrusion by a state that has already taken everything from her. Her account of the night of her husband's death does not entirely hold together.

First appears in chapter 5

A younger colleague of Smiley's who has moved into work on East German and satellite intelligence. Loyal, discreet and fond of Smiley, he supplies the departmental knowledge and old files that Smiley can no longer obtain for himself.

First appears in chapter 6

A Special Branch inspector close to retirement, thin, dry and precise, who is drawn into Smiley's private investigation. He is a practical policeman with no illusions about official reticence, willing to do legwork the service will not authorise, and he becomes Smiley's most useful ally.

First appears in chapter 7

The disreputable proprietor of a Battersea car-hire business, a heavy drinker who rents out vehicles without asking questions and keeps deliberately vague records. He is the one lead Smiley can follow to the fair-haired foreigner who has been using one of his cars.

First appears in chapter 14

A German whom Smiley recruited and ran as an agent during the war: lame, physically imposing, formidably intelligent and, at that time, entirely committed to the fight against the Nazis. Smiley thought of him as his best and most difficult pupil, and the two men parted with real affection. He has since made a career in East German intelligence.

First appears in chapter 14

A fair-haired, cold-mannered East German operative working in London under commercial cover. He does the practical and violent work of the network he serves, efficiently and without evident feeling, and disposes of anyone who becomes a liability to it.