Well It Is Friday

Due to tight budget it has been \another day of relaxing and since it has been an overcast day with the occasional shower i decided to do some reading. Covered quite a few a few chapters from each book with another one fully completed. Hey ho, so back to reading and maybe that Daredevil movie DVD to watch later on. Might even watts that third Jason Bourne trilogy , having watched the other two.  I also listened to one of thses Big Finsh Dr.Who audio items. It was Tom Baker as the good old Doctor.

Book 68 - John Le Carre "A Murder Of Quality"

John le Carre "A Murder Of Quality" (Penguin Modern Classics)



The second book in the Smiley series is not a classical spy story but a crime novel. 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 three) 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.

What is most noticeable is the tone of deference and class differences that would be missing today, over 50 years after the book was published.

The police seem content to allow an outsider, Smiley, with no apparent qualifications and without question, to take a lead in the investigation of a murder. Class differences between the townspeople and the public school are emphasised and it is this difference that Smiley uses to his advantage to reveal the murderer.

The one thing that i enjoyed most about this short novel is the true beating le Carre give class: he just destroys the upper class/university crowd. Brutal !