A Murder of Quality: A George Smiley Novel

An early Le Carré, which reminded me more of Michael Innes or Agatha Christie than of other le Carré volumes I've read so far. A good mystery story, though.

The second novel of Mr.LeCarré, though it doesn´t deal with spies, it helps us undestand better George Smiley and his past.Wonderful the way the mistery murder is solved, and beautifully written

George Smiley's disappointing second outing is closer to Agatha Christie than vintage Le Carré. Smiley leaves his discomfort zone of bleak, grey London to solve a murder in a small Dorset town, but Le Carré's writing is at its best during the few scenes set in the capital. The plot feels pushed into the background by the story's social dramas – town vs gown, Chapel vs Church, and a rather ham-fisted attack on England's educational system.

My second George Smiley novel in as many days. This books was not a spy-thriller, but was more of a simple murder mystery. It was a quick story, and while I enjoyed the read, it certainly is not a classic and was not one that I imagine will be memorable. I look forward to the more famous of Le Carre's spy novels that are coming up in this series.

Another well read audio book from Michael Jayston. A more 'pure' murder mystery than its predecessor, A Murder of Quality is a simple, sometimes plodding story that reveals little about Smiley. After the backstory in the first book, this novel feels a bit like business as usual. Not a bad tale but better things are to come in the series. I enjoyed A Call For the Dead (the predecessor to this book and the first Smiley novel) more.

A lovely little book about murder in an English public school, full of larger than life and (dare I say?) slightly reassuring nostalgic stereotypes of the English class system in times not long gone by.

A 3.5 rounded up to a 4. Another solid George Smiley novel by le Carre, albeit without his usual Circus compatriots (or as usual as it would be for someone used to Karla!verse Smiley, who usually had Peter Guillam to partner up with). A good murder mystery / thriller story that was also an amazingly quick read. I happily own the Smiley book which follows this one - I'm sure I'll be reading it before too long.

This le Carré is what I imagine [The Remains of the Day] would be like as a murder mystery. For me this means it was very enjoyable but I would recommend that people keep in mind the language and pacing.

A short second novel. I believe this is the only 'mystery' that Le Carre has written. Solid cozy. The thing I enjoyed about this novel the most is the true beating Le Carre give class: he just destroys the upper class/university crowd. Brutal.

Quite possibly my favorite George Orwell essay is "Such, Such Were the Joys" in which our man Eric Blair recalls his days as a sort of charity case at a posh English boarding school that thought it was even posher than it actually was. He was miserable there, of course; one can see the beginnings of the great man whose every work is in some way or another a crie de couer against the banal (and not so banal) evils of collectivism. It's also, because Orwell was a prose stylist and a storyteller so close to perfect as makes no odds, a fascinating read, descriptive and honest and sort of bleakly lovely. His Crossgates was a place one survived, rather than graduated from.

It's hard, then, for someone like me, so in love with that essay, not to keep thinking of it as our man George Smiley, ex-intelligence man whose life is still very much shaped by his experiences plying his then still unofficial trade during World War II, finds himself in the role of cozy mystery detective again as he comes to a posh English boarding school, Carnes, to help figure out who killed a schoolmaster's wife in a bloody, gruesome and bizarre fashion. I always thought Bingo and Sim had more going on than poor little Eric Blair realized, don't you know, and I feel the little boy who would be come my hero sort of peeking around corners and watching Smiley at work throughout the book.* I wish he could have seen someone like Smiley, at any rate, to see that not all grown-ups are perfidious jerks. But of course, he wouldn't have grown up to be the hero he was if he'd had an easy, trusting childhood, would he?

But that's neither here nor there. Except in that it takes place at an English public school (like so many other novels and plays and films and whatnot, hmm? But as Orwell observed, for many people, their school days were the most eventful and dramatic and interesting of all their days. Poor benighted souls, they, hmm?) at which Secrets Are Being Kept. But of course, where in Orwell's essay, those secrets are largely socio-economic and class-based, in A Murder of Quality, well, there are elements of socio-economic and class struggle there, too, no doubt, and these elements are thwarting the murder investigation in true Town vs. Gown fashion, but... this is Smiley, dammit. Smiley! Come on, bust out the spy stuff!

News flash: there isn't much spy stuff, except in Smiley's back story and insomuch as it has formed his character as a careful thinker and observer and analyst -- who has a tremendous loyalty to his circle of colleagues from the War. One of whom edits and writes an advice column for a journal, and who received an alarming letter from the murder victim just before her death, a letter that may be a Giant Freaking Clue or an equally Giant Red Herring. And since the victim is very much Gown and the police are very much Town, the investigation could use someone like George, sometime academic, mild-mannered, unpretentious but trustworthy and obviously intelligent, to cut through the bulldung and figure out what happened.

Look, murder mysteries really aren't my thing. I always get a little depressed about how a person can be and usually is regarded as Only Interesting After She's Dead and only because someone Did A Bad Thing by killing her (or him). And yes, I know, a life only really takes shape when it's complete, i.e. over, and all that, but mostly I like watching lives in progress, decisions being made, actions taken or not taken, conversations had or suppressed, etc. There is plenty of this in a murder mystery, of course, but it's generally on the part of the detective, to whom the victim is usually a stranger; the detective is not, therefore, showing us the victim/stranger so much as leading us through a careful examination of the hole she has left and who might have wanted to make that hole happen. We're not really interested in the victim, but in the detective; the victim is just a means to the detective's end. See? Depressing. But lots of people like that stuff, and they're free to. It's just not usually for me.

But every once in a while, I like to take a look at a genre that I usually avoid, just to make sure that I'm avoiding it for good reasons and not just out of habit or of intellectual (or pretend anti-intellectual) posturing. And sometimes I do find that I've been unfair; witness my great enjoyment of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels, "frontier tales" which, while not precisely westerns, are still more like westerns than most other kinds of stories, and thus are generally chucked into my mental "avoid" bin. I'm terribly, terribly glad I grew up to give those another chance.**

And so, A Murder of Quality, which basically seduced me into reading a straight up mystery novel, just out of love for its hero. Tsk tsk, Mr. le Carre. Now my guard is up, you!

That being said, there's still a lot to recommend this novel. As one could expect from a novel taking place largely at an upper-class school, there are a lot of moments in which the class-consciousness of certain elements of the community gets wickedly skewered. The best bits of these happen whenever a minor character, a teacher's wife named Shane, speaks, to wit:
"I'm never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlor."
And:
"Baptists are the people who don't like private pews, aren't they?"
Oh, is she ever quotable, is Mrs. Shane Hecht. And everything that comes out of her mouth will make you want to slap her.

Strangely enough, Shane is not the murder victim, or really anyone of any importance at all, except as a mouthpiece for the gentry, struggling to reassert their dominance over English life after the great social leveling of two world wars and not coming off well at all. No apologia for the ruling class, here (another quality, one might say, that this book shares a bit with Orwell's work, no?)! No, the murder victim is another teacher's wife, who comes off as a bit of a paragon of humility and independent thought for most of the novel, until [REDACTED] is discovered.

Through it all, Smiley is Smiley. Utterly forgettable, unprepossessing, mild, hard even to notice, but with a mind tuned by years of unglamorous spy work for uncovering secrets that makes him a perfect amateur detective. We only occasionally get a hint of what he's thinking, which I appreciate, not being a fan of the omni-omniscient narrator who knows all characters' thoughts anyway. Even when a nasty so-and-so like Shane teases him about his "unfortunate" marriage to a woman far above his social station (and who just happened to have grown up in the neighborhood of the Posh School in Question), he keeps his cool and just calmly lets her think she's gotten the better of him. She can sneer all she wants; in the end she has to keep being nasty old Shane Hecht (who, now that I think of it, reminds me rather a lot of Bingo from "Such, Such Were the Joys") and Smiley gets to keep being Smiley, knower of things he doesn't tell, friend of people of actual quality versus upper-crust Quality.

I know with whom I'd choose to pass an evening, at any rate.

*This is of course odd because Orwell/Blair was a little student many, many years before the period in which this novel is set, but those English Public Schools do have a sort of timeless quality to them, don't they? One would almost think it an effect for which they strive deliberately!

**I still avoid romance novels, though. Like the plague. Unless they're written by close and dear friends to whom I can't say no and find entertaining no matter what they're doing.

In this very skilfully read audiobook, Smiley takes on a murder set in a British prep school where snobbery runs rampant. In Agatha Christie fashion, there are lots of red herrings in a somewhat closed setting, but of course George Smiley is up to the task. Mush less dense and convoluted that LeCarre's espionage, this is still an anjoyable read.

George Smiley bliver indblandet i et mystisk mord på en kostskolelærers kone Stella Rode. Mordet sker efter at Stella og hendes mand Stanley Rode har været til middag hos husforstanderen Terence Fielding - bror til Adrian Fielding som var del af Smileys gruppe under krigen. Undervejs ser vi nogle af konflikter mellem By og Kappe (eller Town and Gown) dvs byen og kostskolen Carne, som er et snoppet og ubehageligt sted at være hvis man ikke passer helt ind.Fielding snyder med nogle matematikopgaver for at hjælpe eleven Tim Perkins, angiveligt fordi han er i fare for at dumpe og han er nu så god til at spille cello. Da Fielding kigger i Stanley Rodes taske for at snuppe opgavesættet kommer han til at bemærke mordvåbenet og andre mistænkelige genstande. Desværre gætter Rode forkert og dræber også Perkins. Og det hele fordi han så konen som en hindring for sin karriere.Stanley fortæller Smiley en anden version, hvor Stella er skurken, fordi hun har styr på mange af lærernes små og store hemmeligheder.Uheldigvis for Fielding viser det sig at Perkins selv har skrevet alle opgaverne, dvs Fieldings forklaring er det pure opspind.Motivet virker noget søgt og Smiley er vist stadig "under konstruktion" i denne halvbagte krimi

This is a very good little mystery, and the second entry in the George Smiley series. What makes it slightly disappointing is that there is no espionage involved, and of course, that's what we want from Le Carré. Here, Smiley is asked as a favor to look into a murder at a prep school. He must find his way through an interesting maze of lies, and we see a bit more of his character revealed, which is the most interesting part, IMO. It's good, just not great, but the trashing that the upper class receives as the story unfolds is highly entertaining. It's a shortie, so definitely worth the read if you are interested in this series.

This le Carré is what I imagine [The Remains of the Day] would be like as a murder mystery. For me this means it was very enjoyable but I would recommend that people keep in mind the language and pacing.

I did not understand the title at all. An uneven and confusing small novel in which Smiley solves the murder of a tutor’s spouse at Carne school, a snobby sort of institution that he makes no secret of despising. In fact, that emotion overhangs the entire book, which is more of a cathartic outlet for le Carre whose public school days have deeply scarred his psyche, than it is an entertainment for the reader.None of the characters other than Smiley and his female “sidekick,” Ailsa Brimley, are likable. Too often they’re stereotypical stand-ins for "real" characters, as in the case of Felix D’Arcy, the homosexual colleague of “poor little Rode,” the social lesser, grammar school-educated, public school wannabe "Carnie" whose wife, Stella, is the murder victim.Despicable Stella, we learn, has a nasty hobby of terrorizing people at Carne with her knowledge of their embarrassing secret pasts. It is this nasty personality trait that gets her murdered.Another Carne tutor is about to retire. Terrence Fielding happens to be the younger and diminished brother of one of Smiley’s WWII espionage cohorts who is much admired by Smiley. Adrian Fielding died in heroic service to his country. It is hard to imagine the misogynistic, acidic, classist pederast that Fielding is could ever have been Adrian’s brother.Sufficient red herrings, and an additional murder remind us how much we always enjoyed Agatha Christie as a youth. But lackluster action, overall dull and flat writing, and an inexcusable melodramatic ending make us grateful that George Smiley gave up police procedural attempts and eventually returned to espionage. And that goes for le Carré, too.One particular line that foretells the quality that is to become consistent with his name is in reference to Smiley, “. . .once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin. . .” Great stuff! I'm glad this is not the first John le Carre Novel I ever read; I might not have read any more of his more mature and excellent espionage fiction.

I enjoy le Carré's spy novels but this is a good old-fashioned whodunnit. To my knowledge, this is the only mystery he wrote. The setting is a distinguished school where traditions, manners and class matter. George Smiley investigates on behalf of an old friend who received a letter from the wife of a teacher at the school claiming that her husband was trying to kill her. I wish le Carré had written more like this one.

Damn good writing, but the plot is a little boring. Still, a clever book and a fun read. I am beginning to see why George Smiley is so revered.

In some ways, this is a better book than the earlier "Call for the Dead." Le Carre has learned to pace his story better (unlike "Call," which had a massive exposition session right at the end), and "Murder" doesn't have the gear shift from a mystery to a spy story halfway through. This is a murder mystery, pure and simple, with Smiley taking on a surprisingly Hercule Poirot-esque role. As with the earlier book, character detail is very rich and Le Carre easily brings his fictional public school setting to life. The book is a pleasant, quick read and I certainly don't regret the three nights I spent with it.However, the Poirot comparison can only remind me of other, older mysteries that did this sort of story just as well, if not better. Le Carre isn't imitating anyone, but he's definitely falling into a story structure that was well-known by the early 1930s; by 1961, it's practically old hat. While he takes great care to flesh out his characters and misdirect the audience on a few occasions, the denouement is no better than an Agatha Christie of the same period, and it's fairly obvious that type of "reveal solution" isn't where Carre feels naturally comfortable as a writer. The best aspects of "A Murder of Quality" are Smiley's - and thus, Le Carre's - comments on and experiences of the classicism that pervades the bubble world of the public school. Comparatively, the mystery itself isn't nearly as interesting.

This is the second George Smiley novel, and like its predecessor, “Call for the Dead,” it isn’t the spy thriller that one associates with le Carre, but a mystery. Smiley, in semi-retirement, is called by a friend to investigate allegations made at a Dorset Public School. It’s a brief work, just 146 pages, but it’s fun to see how le Carre weaves a web of lies, confusing facts, and red herrings in an excellent prelude to his more famous spy novels. The setting also gives him full reign to express his hatred for the “Public School” mentality and morality, which he was subjected to as a young man.

Smiley is always a good fellow to spend some time with. String in his own convictions, but not judgmental. Clever, but very understated. This is a fine, thin public school murder mystery.

George Smiley is retired from his intelligence work and recovering from a recent divorce, but agrees to help his old friend and wartime colleague Miss Brimley, the editor of a Christian magazine with a limited and devoted readership. Miss Brimley has received a letter from a long-standing reader stating: "I'm not mad. And I know my husbad is trying to kill me." But by the time the letter has reached it's destination, it's author, the wife of a teacher at the exclusive Carne College, has already been violently murdered. Carne is a community quite closed off from the rest of the world, and those who people the school aren't willing to speak to the police, but they might be willing to speak to Smiley, who once knew the brother of a certain Fielding, a Housemaster at the school who is about to retire. As Smiley probes into the crime and starts uncovering facts, it seems more and more people may have had motives for murdering the victim, though of course Smiley manages to get to the bottom of things despite the school's politics and narrow social conventions. In the process, he must also face unpleasant gossip concerning him and his estranged wife, Lady Ann Sercombe, who was raised in Carne town. My first Smiley novel, which I unfortunately read out of order. This didn't in any way take away from what was a very enjoyable read, though it had me wondering why a novel about a spy agent had no espionage in it.

This second novel begins to develop George Smiley....his brilliance, his demeanor, his being all take shape in this novel. It is not a s[y thriller, those come later, but it shows what Smiley is capable of, and as a writer, LeCarre gets better with each effort. You glimpse the style that makes him a cut above in the genre. I am biased, he is a favorite of mine, but I can see how he developes himself and his charachters to a greater degree from his first work. His style is smooth.....and keeps you thinking as you read.

The second book in the Smiley series is not a classical spy story (the same as the first one). But while the first one was dealing with spies, this one is not even close to the spy community. Does not make it less of a le Carre book though. In the heart of the book is again a mystery - a woman is killed after she had been repeating for a while that her husband will kill her. Smiley gets involved after someone that he worked with during the war receives one of the letters from the dead woman (with her fear that she will be murdered). And when the said woman ends up dead, Smiley catches a train (or 3) and goes to the small village with the big English school in the outskirts. The murder is on the school grounds but the dead woman is the only one from the wives of the teachers that had been part of the village's life. So in order to understand what had happened, Smiley need to get into both lives - different and remote from each other even if they are lived by people living next to each other. And this is what makes this novel a small gem - the description of these two lifestyles in the 1960s done by a master of the observation such as le Carre (after all he writes about spies because this is what he knows best) overshadows the mystery.As for the mystery - it is a decent one even if a lot of the clues are there early on, even if someone can deduce who the killer is (or once they read the book, they like to think that their suspicion was correct), Smiley's thought process on the background of the English life is interesting to be read.The supporting cast of the previous novel is missing here - it is almost an Agatha Christie kind of book - a lone detective that exercises his gray cells. It could have been any detective. It just happened to be le Carre and Smiley. Which makes the book probably a bad entry in the spy series of novels... but it still is a nice book if looked at as a murder mystery set in the English village.

A very modest LeCarre story but enjoyable

surprisingly good crime novel this. i've never read any le carre before, and if this is any indication i'm really going to enjoy getting through the rest of his output. it's quite slight in many ways - murder in enclosed private school community with it's typical class problems and strange rituals - as it's like so many crime novels on a similar theme (off the top of my head, "was it murder" by james hilton). but what le carre does so tremendously is cut the book down to the bare essentials. it's very short, but punchy for all that and by excising the fat (seriously, much as i love the golden age baggage the countless bits of business with amateur sleuth and local villagers/ teachers/ students/ police aren't missed much by le carre's decision to do without them) le carre can concentrate on his prose and characterisation. and he writes like a dream. lovely, elegant, gliding sentences and characters who are *just* made believable enough to remove them from ciphersand smiley is a lovely figure to have as a detective. shame he never was used in quite such a format again. am looking forward to reading more of le carre now. good stuff

early le carre. short, builds smiley character. better to follow.

When I stayed over at my sister's house on her birthday, I picked this book to read in bed because I knew I had a copy at home and therefore wouldn't need to borrow hers to finish at home. A re-read of a murder mystery with what is, in my opinion, an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Le Carre's second book is a whodunnit just like his first, Call for the Dead and had just as little appeal to me.

A lovely little book about murder in an English public school, full of larger than life and (dare I say?) slightly reassuring nostalgic stereotypes of the English class system in times not long gone by.

Remarkable. A murder mystery, solved by a retired spy using espionage methods!