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1972 reprint. No designer credited.
Le Carré's first novel establishes the Smiley legend — the anonymous, scholarly little man who is somehow a brilliant spy, and who somehow won the beautiful Lady Ann Sercomb, only to be repeatedly betrayed by her. The Lady Ann stuff is back-story in the novel, but Paul Dehn's screenplay, filmed as The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet, 1966 — I wrote briefly about it in the March 2018 issue of Sight & Sound), makes it central to the plot: the traitor Smiley unmasks is his friend and his his wife's lover. My entirely unevidenced theory is that the film helped Le Carré formulate the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
When the book was first published, in 1961, spying still looked like a rather shabby, small-scale thing: the Portland spy ring, notable for the crudity of both their methods and their motives (avarice, lust, resentment), were in the news; Call for the Dead reflects that reality. Kim Philby's defection came a couple of years later, at which point the game started to look rather bigger, and the entanglement of the Establishment with treachery became clear.
Smallness and shabbiness help to make this a terrific novel. It has all the Le Carré virtues in embryo: the vivid characterisations, of Smiley himself and Mendel the policeman and a host of minor characters; a tangled but perfectly intelligible plot; a sharp sense of the minute gradations of the English class system and the soul-draining dreariness it insists on (it's fascinating how well Lumet, a visiting American, reproduced this in the film); the plausible reduction of human activity to different varieties of betrayal; an atmosphere of doubt and disillusion, of a war that continues after all moral clarity has been lost — maybe that's the real fog of war we should worry about. The book does, it's true, show early signs of some of Le Carré's limitations — notably, his ear for dialogue has a very narrow range; he can't do much beyond a certain kind of upper-middle-class masculine chit-chat; not to mention all those virtues noted above, which become vices at excessive length. Still, for the moment he was keeping it short and snappy.
A group of Dresden figures, a wedding present to George and Ann, is a recurring image. I imagine whoever designed this cover must have been fantastically proud of the way he incorporated it, and fantastically frustrated by having to incorporate the big red label to remind prospective readers what they were looking at.
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