Probably one of the first spy-novel fans to become intrigued with John le Carre's new bestseller, The Honourable Schoolboy, was TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Bing Wong. In fact, he got involved with the book and author that are the subjects of this week's cover story well before Le Carre--David Cornwell, that is--began to write his tale of British intelligence and Far Eastern intrigue. Wong and Cornwell met in the summer of 1975 in Hong Kong. As Wong recounts, Cornwell "picked my brain" for background detail. Last October, when Cornwell returned to the city, Wong and the author "huddled in his hotel suite for two days, going over a first draft, one paragraph after another. He had charts of sea tides, timetables for events in chronological order, maps and pictures of places in old and contemporary China. Cornwell is more fastidious about his novels than many writers are about their nonfiction."

Our piece on Cornwell was the work of Senior Editor Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the story; London Correspondent Dean Fischer, who interviewed the novelist; and Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins, who did what would be described in Le Carre's spy argot as the "burrowing"--the background research. Fischer talked with Cornwell for 16 hours, both in London and at the author's farmhouse overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Cornwell lived up to his reputation as a rugged interview only when he jauntily insisted that Fischer join him on a "forced march" of three miles over the cliffs near his home.

Kanfer, who also met Cornwell in England, had a different surprise. "Like everyone else, I used to wish that Le Carre would write a serious book," he says. "But then one day I realized that he was writing serious books--they just happened to be in the espionage genre."

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