The Spy Who Came In from the Cold occurs during the heightened tensions that characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s Cold War, when a Warsaw Pact–NATO war sparked in Germany seemed likely. The story begins and concludes in Berlin, about a year after the completion of the Berlin Wall and around the time when double-agent Heinz Felfe was exposed and tried.[2]
Le Carré's debut novel, Call for the Dead, introduced the characters George Smiley and Hans-Dieter Mundt. In that story, Smiley investigates the suicide of Samuel Fennan. He quickly establishes a link between the East German Secret Service and the deceased, and learns that Mundt, an assassin, killed the man after a misunderstanding between Fennan and their controller, Dieter Frey. Mundt escaped from England shortly after, getting back into East Germany before Smiley and Guillam could catch him. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold picks up two years later, where Mundt has had a somewhat meteoric rise to become the head of the Abteilung, because of his success with counter-intelligence operations against British networks, as well as a member of the Presidium of the Socialist Unity Party.
Le Carré said that the inspiration for the character of Leamas came from a "Peter Finch-like figure in a raincoat" whom he remembered seeing pull out a wad of foreign currencies at London Airport, demanding a large Scotch; an "archetypal secret agent figure — exhausted, barely knows what country he's in, much-travelled, down on his luck."[3] He was also inspired by The Darkroom of Damocles by Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans; Hermans famously disparaged le Carré and accused him of plagiarism.[4]
