A Murder of Quality, John Le Carre
A Murder of Quality, John Le Carre
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A Murder of Quality

Author: John Le Carré

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 4 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/21/2024

Synopsis

Beautifully intelligent, satiric and witty — Daily Telegraph For Alisa Brimley, editor of the small magazine Christian Voice, receiving a letter from a longtime subscriber might otherwise be a perfectly normal occasion—except Stella Rode, the reader in question, writes that her husband is planning to kill her. Brimley calls upon an old wartime friend to help her investigate: retired Circus spy, George Smiley. Before Smiley can begin, Rode is found murdered, and Brimley asks Smiley to venture to the small town of Carne, home of the elite Carne School where Rode's husband is a public school junior master. Once there, he sets about peeling back the layers of pretense and artifice that cloak both town and institution, and discovers that there's more to Rode’s murder than a simple crime of passion. John le Carré’s second novel finds George Smiley in a classic whodunnit-style mystery. Trading the international intrigue of the Circus for the small village of Carne, A Murder of Quality is a deft examination of another uniquely British institution: the elite public school.

About John Le Carré

John le Carré (1931 – 2020), born David John Moore Cornwell, was a British-Irish author. He spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld; at sixteen, he found refuge first at the University of Bern, then Oxford. After graduating with honors, he taught at Eton for two years before he was recruited into British Intelligence. In 1961, while still an MI6 agent, he published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced the world to George Smiley. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, spent 32 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and earned him a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent spy novelists. Though he declined all British-based honors and prizes, he accepted the Premio Malaparte (Italy) in 1988, the title of Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. Over the course of sixty years, he published over two dozen novels that would come to define an age; his final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.

About Simon Vance

Simon Vance is a critically acclaimed narrator who has recorded over eight hundred audiobooks and has received over fifty Earphones Awards. A twelve-time Audie Award winner and frequent finalist, he has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice, an AudioFile Best Voice, and the first Booklist Voice of Choice. A former BBC Radio presenter and newsreader in London, he currently lives in California, where he also pursues stage and television acting.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

Le Carre's first book was not so much a spy novel as a detective story with spies in it, and this second book is even less a spy novel: it is a detective story with George Smiley in it. But that does not prevent A Murder of Quality (1962) from being a well-written, entertaining book. In an introducti......more

Goodreads review by Jaline

A dog that had not bitten the postman; a devil that rode upon the wind; a woman who knew that she would die; a little, worried man in an overcoat standing in the snow outside his hotel, and the laborious chime of the Abbey clock telling him to go to bed. In this second book in the George Smiley s......more

Goodreads review by Blaine

For his second book in the George Smiley series, John le Carre' turns attention to private boarding schools. The edition that I read contained a short intro by the author who deemed it a flawed thriller but some of that may be due to his very own dislike of private boarding schools he was forced to......more

Quotes

Beautifully intelligent, satiric, and witty.

"Simon Vance’s finely calibrated narration makes this little-known George Smiley novel of special interest. For Smiley completists, it’s a pleasure to watch Smiley deploy his wartime skills in such a Miss Marple-ish bit of nosy-parking, and for anyone, Vance’s subtle mastery of tone and voice is an event in itself." - Audiofile Magazine

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