The Tailor of Panama

Le Carré's Panama City in the last years before the 1999 canal handover: a cramped colonial old town under the glass banking towers, the canal cutting inland to the locks, the rich hills and the poor barrios all held together by rumour and money. An expatriate tailor, flattered and squeezed by a British intelligence man, invents a country's secrets from his shop. The map runs from Casco Viejo out along the waterway to Miraflores and the Bridge of the Americas.

Harry Pendel

Casco Viejo, the old quarter

Part One

The story's heart is the faded colonial old town, a grid of Spanish balconies and crumbling stucco a short walk from the banking towers. Casco Viejo is where the tailor keeps his shop and his customers gather to gossip and be measured, and where the city's oldest money and its street poverty rub together.

Part One

explicit The novel places its old-city scenes in the historic colonial quarter of Panama City, named in the text; this marks the centre of Casco Viejo, also called Casco Antiguo or San Felipe.

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Harry Pendel

Pendel & Braithwaite, the tailor's shop

Part One

The tailor's shop, styled as a genteel English house of cloth, is where Harry Pendel dresses the powerful and, cornered by a British spy, begins to sell them stories he has stitched together. The shop is fictional, but the book roots it firmly in the colonial old town among the bankers, ministers and fixers who pass through.

Part One

inferred Pendel's shop, Pendel & Braithwaite, is invented; the novel sites it in the old colonial city, so this marks a representative point in Casco Viejo near the old-quarter streets the book describes.

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Harry Pendel

Palacio de las Garzas, the presidential palace

Part One

The seat of Panama's president stands in the old quarter, its courtyard famous for the herons that give it its name. The tailor's supposed value to London rests on his closeness to men like the president, and the palace stands for the circle of power the invented intelligence claims to reach.

Part One

explicit The presidential palace is a real building in Casco Viejo; the novel turns on access to Panama's rulers, and this marks the Palacio de las Garzas.

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