John Le Carre - A Murder of Quality
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Praise for John le Carr
There are those writer[s]who themselves should be immortal. I would suggest immortality for John le Carr, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers.May he write forever!
Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded.
Scott Turow
A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer.
The Wall Street Journal
Le Carr is simply the worlds greatest fictional spymaster.
Newsweek
Le Carrs work isthe gold standard of espionage fiction and the author isa master of any sort of fiction, no matter the genre.
The Seattle Times
Le Carrs execution is perfect.
The New York Times Book Review
Le Carr has a great talent for entangling his audience in the sticky tape of complexity, paradox, and irony, and much of the pleasure in his stories is following the same dense, dark path as his characters.
New York Daily News
He has reinvented the realistic spy story as the supreme theater of paradox, where heroism breeds vice, and virtue is a quite accidental by-product of impudent crimes.
Time
John le Carr[is] not just todays gold standard, but the best there ever was.
The Huffington Post
Le Carr [is] the worlds most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia.
The New York Review of Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
A MURDER OF QUALITY
JOHN LE CARR, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-two novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including The Constant Gardener, The Russia House,The Little Drummer Girl, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd 1962
First published in the United States of America by Walker and Company 1963
Published in Penguin Books 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright le Carr Productions, 1962
Copyright renewed David Cornwell, 1990
All rights reserved
PUBLISHERS NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Le Carr, John, 1931
A murder of quality / John Le Carr.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60376-5
1. Smiley, George (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Boarding schoolsFiction.
3. MurderInvestigationFiction. 4. Dorset (England)Fiction. I. Title.
PR6062.E33M8 2012
823.914dc23 2012019593
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To Ann
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 DArcys, Fieldings, and Hechts will search in vain.
J OHN LE C ARR
J OHN LE C ARR
December 1989
T he origins of most of my books are by now a mystery to me, even if they were not at the time, butA Murder of Quality is clearly set in my memory. It was my second book and I wrote it in the flush of the modest success enjoyed by my first, Call for the Dead. I began it in 1961 when I arrived in Bonn ahead of my family to take up a junior post at the British Embassy, and by the time it appeared I had The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in my sights.
I still had a notion in those days of writing a thriller a year and adding a much-needed few hundred pounds to my Foreign Service salary. Or so I told myself, even if my ambitions were secretly larger. I wrote A Murder of Quality first in the gloomy pension in Bad Godesberg where junior British diplomats were stabled while they awaited accommodation, then in the tiny house in the Gringstrasse where we lived with our two children and our au pair. In consequence, I wrote the book lying down, on beds, in notebooks, in the few snatched hours that were left to me by family and diplomatic life.
My sources were extremely present to me, as they will be to the reader. I hated English boarding schools. I found them monstrous and still do, probably because I began my boarding school career at the age of five, at a place called St. Martins, Northwood, and did not end it till I was sixteen, when I flatly refused to return to Westcott House, Sherborne, on the solid grounds that I would take no more of such institutions.
Yet as life would have it, eight years later I was banged up once again, this time at Eton as a junior Modern Languages master.
Eton was not Sherborne at all. Sherborne in my day had been rustic, colonialist, chauvinist, militarist, religious, patriotic and repressive. Boys beat other boys, housemasters beat boys, and even the headmaster turned his hand to beating boys when the crime was held to be sufficiently heinous or school discipline was thought to be slipping. I dont know whether masters beat masters but, in any case, I loathed them, and I loathed their grotesque allegiances most of all. To this day, I can find no forgiveness for their terrible abuse of the charges entrusted to them.
Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, internal immigration as the Germans call it, or simply getting the hell out. I practised the first two, then opted for the third and took myself to Switzerland.
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