"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" was a thinly fictionalized retelling of this period. John le Carré's contempt for the people in the organizations he wrote about could be seen as a reaction to the excesses of the era Greene wrote about.

Perhaps by necessity, these aren't good people. The le Carré view can be summarized as, for that business you need people who only need the justification of the approval of their handler (and maybe a few dollars) or a story about being aligned to a secret power to release their inborn urge to be an utter piece of shit. He describes a world of compromised people, working and blackmailing each other all the way down. That they often use investment banking and journalism as a cover is no accident. I found his books more entertaining.

Greene covered much of the same ground in The Human Factor. I find Greene to be the more edgier cynic on intelligence agencies. Human Factor is ultimately more profound than Tinker, Tailor.. Amazing that it was even filmed in its time; today I don't it would be greenlighted.

Greene is certainly a more literary writer with more human insight, and le Carré would be more plot driven. I read Havana, Brighton, and Quiet American decades ago now. Genre wise, Alan Furst apparently took up the gauntlet, but his characters seemed like unmemorable plot devices to me.

Near the end of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" the Alec Lemus character says this exactly. It's a theme Le Carre makes clear.

A lot of these people were driven by vanity, need, arrogance, ambition, narcissism, greed, ideology, biases etc.

Well, these sounds familiar.