Product Description

George Smiley was simply doing a favour for an old friend, Miss Ailsa Brimley, who edited a small religious newspaper. Miss Brimley had received a letter from a worried woman reader: ‘I’m not mad. And I know my husband is trying to kill me.’ The writer of the letter was one Stella Rode, wife to an assistant master at Carne School, Dorset, and by the time it arrived, she was dead.



Carne was an ancient, self-regarding Church foundation, proud of its proper standards of social distinctions. George Smiley went there to listen, take sherry, ask questions and think. And thus uncover, layer upon layer, the complexities, skeletons and hatreds that comprised this little English institution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #269920 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Daily Telegraph
‘Beautifully intelligent, satiric and witty’

Review

‘Beautifully intelligent, satiric and witty’

‘Vastly entertaining’

‘For my money, le Carré is the equal of any novelist now writing in English’

Guardian
‘For my money, le Carré is the equal of any novelist now writing in English’

Customer Reviews

Smiley goes Agtaha Christie
An early day George Smiley is called to solev an murder mystery at one of the nations best public schools. Here you'll find many familiar elements which made Le Carre greater novels: a younger Smiley, an elitist environment and down to earth police inspectors. Smiley is not as much drawn out as in later novels, but is there allright. A Murder of Quality is one of Le Carre finer sketches, a prelude of much what was to come.

The books reads perfectly as a Murder Whodunnit, much like Agatha Christie, but with familair Le Carre characters. Between the lines, Le Carre takes a dig at some of teh snobbish and extraordinary characters of a public school.
I've read it at one go, didn't bore me at all. Recommended

murder in the old style
I think this is one of the first Le Carre novels, and Smiley appears in it for some reason or another, even if it is not a spy novel.
Murder has happened at a private school. A boy has been killed.
Based on this premise, Smiley has to become acquainted with the small inner life of this school, its apparent grandeur and fashionable respectability, and its mean everyday life which hides behind the surface. Investigation is a way to expose the inanity of British society in the 50s before the great crisis of the 60s.
Very well written as all Le Carre works, this is your novel if you like Agatha Christie, if you prefer murder in the parish yard instead of the gutter crime of the black series.

Makes a change
... This is a murder mystery in the classic mould. It is also a sideways glance at class, via the ludicrous tradition and snobbery of an English public school.
We learn a little more about George Smiley [we never learn much, but every book sheds a little more light]and we see him in an unfamiliar setting.
The plot is well structured and, as ever, lucidly written. The whodunit element is present, but it isn't too hard to outguess George and get to the murderer quite swiftly.
I read this in one sitting-it is not a long book, but it is every bit as satisfying as the author's more sustained efforts.
Recommended.
Bill