The Tailor of Panama
Harry Pendel is a British tailor in Panama City with an impeccable reputation, an invented past, and a gift for telling people what they want to hear — qualities that make him irresistible to Andy Osnard, a louche and predatory MI6 officer in need of a local asset. Pressed into service as a spy among the elite clientele who trust him with their fittings and their secrets, Pendel does what any good tailor does: he embellishes. What begins as harmless fabrication to placate an impatient handler spirals into invented intelligence so convincing that Washington begins to act on it, with consequences neither man can control. A wicked riff on Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, The Tailor of Panama is le Carré at his most darkly comic — a scalpel-sharp dissection of how intelligence services hear exactly what they've decided to hear, and of the ordinary, self-deceiving man who obliges them.
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Description
Harry Pendel is a British tailor in Panama City with an impeccable reputation, an invented past, and a gift for telling people what they want to hear — qualities that make him irresistible to Andy Osnard, a louche and predatory MI6 officer in need of a local asset. Pressed into service as a spy among the elite clientele who trust him with their fittings and their secrets, Pendel does what any good tailor does: he embellishes. What begins as harmless fabrication to placate an impatient handler spirals into invented intelligence so convincing that Washington begins to act on it, with consequences neither man can control. A wicked riff on Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, The Tailor of Panama is le Carré at his most darkly comic — a scalpel-sharp dissection of how intelligence services hear exactly what they've decided to hear, and of the ordinary, self-deceiving man who obliges them.
