But “The Little Drummer Girl,” published in 1983, is not just any spy story, and you can see what may have drawn Park to adapt it for television, in a six-hour, three-night mini-series beginning Monday on AMC. While it’s as suspenseful as any Le Carré plot, it’s structured less around spycraft than around a series of seductions, overlapping and conflicting, that allow Park to indulge his fondness for moments of heightened melodrama.

More crucially, it’s a story about the intersection of espionage and theater — the ways in which spies are actors and actors are spies, both trained to investigate, deceive and live false lives. Le Carré makes this idea literal, with an Israeli counterterrorism team recruiting a young actress, through their own elaborate process of deception and staging, and persuading her to infiltrate a Palestinian network planning attacks in Europe.