Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail had an interview with British spy author, John Le Carre aka David Cornwell. I’m telling you this now because I don’t read the weekend papers until the following week and I spotted it last night.

A Most Wanted Man, his 21st novel, centres around Issa, a young half-Chechen of enigmatic background who flees a Turkish prison and ends up in the care of an idealistic German lawyer, Annabel. The novelist specializes in these beautiful lady dreamers — Tessa in The Constant Gardener, Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl. Accuse him of it, and he says with a disarming laugh, “That’s the joke about my writing — that I can’t write women. It’s because I grew up so late.”