|
A Murder of Quality is the second novel by John le Carré.
It follows George Smiley, the most famous of le Carré's
recurring characters.
George Smiley is called by a wartime colleague, Miss
Brimley, who now publishes a small Christian magazine,
to investigate a "death menace" letter sent by a reader
who claims her husband, a boarding school instructor, is
trying to kill her. The brother of Fielding, a classics
professor who was one of Smiley's close wartime
associates in the Circus, is also an instructor at the
school where the woman's husband teaches, the famous
Carne College. Unfortunately, the woman is killed before
Smiley can even talk to her, and Smiley goes to the
school to investigate, in an effort to ease Miss
Brimley's concern that her failure to call the police
was a cause of the woman's death.
Carne was the youthful home of Smiley's estranged
wife Ann, and Smiley is both the subject of snide gossip
and witness to a rural "town/gown" gap (with mistrust on
both sides) that makes finding the killer seem more and
more unlikely. At every step, he realizes that were many
possible reasons for the murder, and the number of
suspects only seems to get bigger. The town police focus
on a madwoman as the murderer, but both Smiley and the
investigating officer believe her to be innocent ... and
then Smiley discovers the hiding place of the murderer's
blood-stained clothes, while the police find a second
murder victim, a boy in Fielding's house. The clues, and
a confession about the secret, delusional vindictiveness
of the murdered woman from her husband (which confirms
the odd reaction to her that Smiley had noted from the
local minister), lead Smiley to the real murderer:
Fielding's brother, who was being blackmailed by the
woman due to a WWII homosexuality conviction, and who
had only kept his job at substantially-reduced wages.
The boy had inadvertently seen evidence that disproved
Fielding's brother's alibi for the time of the woman's
murder, although the boy was never aware of it before
his death.
Le Carré has denied that Carne was based on any
particular school: "There are probably a dozen great
schools of whom it will be confidently asserted that
Carne is their deliberate image. But he who looks among
their common rooms for the D'Arcys, Fieldings and Hechts
will search in vain."
Next |
