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THE INCONGRUOUS SPY by John Le Carre. 381 pages. Walker. $5.95.

Lurking among the chillier shadows of John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a plump, worried man named George Smiley. Smiley is the British intelligence agent who sets up the betrayal of the hero's mistress so that another part of the plot can thicken. Though nearly 150,000 copies of Spy Who Came in have been sold in the U.S. alone, very few readers will know George Smiley from any other stranger who hurries by in a dark street with his hat pulled low. But Smiley has quite a dossier.

Turns out that Smiley figures in the first two capers by Le Carre (alias David John Moore Cornwell), which are now reissued in one volume as The Incongruous Spy. One of the two is a routine British murder mystery set in an Establishment boys' school. The other story is much better.

Call for the Dead was Le Carre's first novel. It examines the same world of seedy treachery that the author got to know better and like even less by the time he wrote Spy. The tale begins when a Foreign Office clerk apparently commits suicide because he is under suspicion as a security risk, though Smiley has in fact let him know he was cleared. It ends with Smiley battling East German agents.

Cold War Frontier. The main carryover from the earlier stories that Cornwell built up in Spy is not a character but an atmosphere: grubby realism and moral squalor, the frazzled, fatigued sensitivity of decent men obliged to betray or kill others no worse than themselves. Cornwell said recently: "I chose spying as a subject for reasons of polemic. Western democracy seems to have one unifying force: the idea that individuals are more valuable than philosophies. My intention was to write about a group of people who consciously abandon the Western principle in order to defend it."

It is this brand of authenticity and moral paradox on the cold war frontier that led at least one critic to be lieve that the author must be a spy himself. Cornwell did spend three years in the Foreign Office. "But not espionage --I've never done it." He learned his spymastery from published reports: "I was astonished at how much had been said. Intelligence seems to be an iceberg of which 80% is above water."

"The Ultimate Nonsense." Cornwell detests the James Bond kind of book:

"Bond spends what he likes, keeps a stable of cars, fornicates by proxy for six million commuters. He is indifferent to pain (particularly other people's), and is fortunate in one respect: the nearer he gets to the enemy, the more horrible the enemy becomes."

With Spy sure to earn at least $200,000, Cornwell recently quit as a British consul in Hamburg and moved self, wife and three growing sons to Crete, where the British income tax does not reach. There, in a white stucco house within 30 yards of the sea, he is working over the final draft of his next book.

Called The Looking-Glass War, it springs from the fact that in one way he now finds Spy not realistic enough. "The biggest fault," Cornwell says, "was that the operation was brilliantly conducted. My next book is about an operation that isn't so efficient." And he sees it as exposing "the ultimate nonsense about spying."

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