Printing

This morning I popped into Faversham and sold a few books, before going to the Office, where I am at the moment. Printed out all my recently received visit locations and instructions, including a couple of Iceland shop visits for the beginning of next week

Tomorrow I will be doing Deal for a couple of visits and one in Canterbury. Then Thursday and Friday I will be visiting the island to do a Greggs visit.

Book 22 - John Le Carre "A Murder Of Quality"

John Le Carre "A Murder Of Quality" (Penguin)



Started reading this very short novella yesterday and finished it tonight.

This 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 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. So, although not a spy story/ it is a nice book if looked at as a murder mystery set in the English village.