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Editorial Review Product Description
A bloody and apparently senseless murder had been committed at Carne School, one of the oldest and most glittering ornaments in the British public school system. George Smiley, whose connections with Carne were complicated by sentiment, had had a curious forewarning of the crime and, in a private capacity, pursued its investigation. Without his espionage-trained insight into the workings of the human mind, Smiley might never have solved the case. But logic and insight were hardly enough to spare him the emotional aftermath of a conclusion he did not want to face. Customer Reviews (19) 
Smiley as murder detective
LeCarre is my absolute favorite author and I would find it really hard not to give him a five star review. What I enjoy best about his books is his characters. They are all very special quirky people and I particulary enjoy watching the way they interact with one another.
George Smiley doesn't play international spy catcher in A Murder of Quality. In this book he simply assists the police in a murder enquiry. The other unlikely heroine of this book is the prim and proper spinster editor of a Christian newspaper, who happens to be an old friend from Smiley's past and asks for his help.
The murder takes place in an English residential school, and possible suspects include a whole cast of neurotic types that typically inhabit English boarding schools.
Smiley has the same deceptively simple, plodding, commonsense approach to solving a murder as to international espionage. Watching him get there is just as much fun as discovering who the murderer is.
By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE
Introduction to Fully-Imagined Smiley's World
"A Murder of Quality," (1963), was but the second novel published by British author extraordinaire John LeCarre, pseudonym of David Cornwell.It followed upon the heels of Call for the Dead and immediately preceded The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the novel that was to make his name internationally.LeCarre, who had first hand experience of the spy business, was to continue to burnish his name with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's People, among his many other publications.He has had a long life and a long writing career, and is still with us and still writing.He's a prolific, much-honored, best-selling author, largely of spy novels, at his best during the cold war years. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked for the British Secret Services: MI5 , which deals with domestic British matters; and MI6, which deals with international espionage.He then began writing novels under the LeCarre pseudonym as employees of those agencies were not allowed to publish.
"A Murder" is an astonishing achievement for a young writer so early in his career.It weighs in at a mere 150 pages (later on he will take 300 pages to get to the point), yet he gives us vividly, and full of spice, and malice, a tale of town and gown: the midlands town of Carne, and, as the English would call it - we'd call it a prep school - the famous and prestigious fictional public school of Carne seated there.He delivers Carne and its unhappy faculty on the page, and no wonder, as LeCarre spent two years teaching at Eton, arguably England's real-life most famous and prestigious public school, before joining MI5.LeCarre gives us the surrounding countryside, the transportation, the language, the seasons of these people, the weather in and geography of London.His writing is terse and witty, dialog snaps and crackles: one of his trademarks, the powerful set piece openings and closings, is already visible.The man was just born to write:he describes a "contrived suburban Gothic script," as an important clue.
Mind you, the murder(s) under discussion are nothing special.The wife of a teacher at the school writes to the advice column of a small magazine, claiming her husband is trying to kill her.The magazine's editor/chief cook and bottle washer used to work with George Smiley in the spy biz during the war: she calls on him, now retired, to play detective.But before he can get to Carne, the woman is, indeed, murdered.The plot does turn out to be rather humdrum, but the author delivers some excitement, subtle examination of character, moral substance.As with his novels of espionage, moral ambiguity defines the central characters: there's no simple right or wrong, it's a morally complex place.But there is a murderer.
Most of all, this book gives us a glimpse into LeCarre's developing fictional world.We meet the policeman Rigby, and hear mention of Mendel.And we meet the author's internationally famous fictional character, the full-blown Smiley, already married to Lady Ann and suffering through, already living in Bywater Street.At one point, Smiley muses that `throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end.A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust."
Somewhat later the author will remark, "Smiley himself was one of those solitaries ....Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession.The by-ways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction.A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed."
This, my friends is the Smiley we will soon meet in the author's later works.He will certainly possess the cunning of Satan; and every now and then he will demonstrate the tender conscience of a virgin, though Alec Leamas won't see much of that characteristic in "The Spy."It's an invaluable book for the author's fans.
Early le carre. So-so.
I suppose I would recommend A Murder of Quality to anyone who wants to get into John le Carre, intent on reading his bigger, better and later works. I can say this because this is the first of his books I've read, and can easily see him shaping his style and point of view. Though it is occasionally intriguing, A Murder of Quality is not a great read. Le Carre seems to be trying to figure out how to fuse a complex plot with descriptive characterizations and a larger social commentary. All are sometimes apparent, but on the whole it is a stepping stone type of experience. I do look forward to reading his more taught, deeper books.
George Smiley's second appearance
This slim book is John Le Carré's second novel while working as a British diplomat in Bonn and Bern and/or elsewhere in a roving capacity, and again it stars George Smiley (GS). He was Le Carré's hero in his debut Call for the Dead, which described him as being an accomplished and committed spy since 1928, who survived a frightful and nasty war in Germany, and who is now (early 1960s) as before, wearing glasses, short, pudgy, and badly, but expensively dressed. He is also separated from his aristocratic wife Ann, and some of the characters in this book let him know that they know.
This book is not about espionage, but about a murder at Carne, a centuries' old public school. Miss Brimley, a WW-II colleague of GS in wartime intelligence, who has turned editor of a religion-based periodical, contacts GS when she receives a letter from the wife of one of Carne's teachers, whose family has for generations subscribed to the journal. She claimed in her letter that her teacher-husband is planning to kill her... When she is found dead days later, Miss Brimley contacts GS and pleads with him to find out the truth. GS, still in retirement following the dramatic outcome of his first appearance in Le Carré's debut novel, agrees and starts to investigate.
Le Carré's subsequent description of the rift between the school and the rest of Carne village, the feuds, prejudices and resentments between and among new and old staff (many are alumni not employable elsewhere) are cruelly revealing of the class-based rifts in English society at the time. Le Carré manages at times to portray an atmosphere of awfulness about the English/British mindset not far removed from what the late film director Sam Peckinpah conveyed in his 1971 movie Straw Dogs, a film that was until 2002 banned in Britain.
Great reading. Highly recommended.
Dated and not very good
This is one of the first Le Carre books to feature George Smiley and it's not very good. Our short dumpy unassuming hero is called in (unofficially) to help when the wife of a teacher at a cold unfriendly English boarding school is murdered. The first third of the book relates in great and tedious detail how some people in England are the right people because they went to the right schools and universities and dress up properly for dinner. Then there are the other sort of people, the ones who didn't go to the right schools, and will therefore never quite be trusted with the top jobs or looked upon as equals. There's also a lot of rambling about who attends which church and what this says about their character. Unless you have a huge interest in the British class system as it existed in the early 1960s, this is a huge waste of time for the reader. I only persevered because I wanted to see how it ended. The second two thirds of the book is as well written as you'd expect, but the plot only ever becomes marginally interesting. One to skip.
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