Book
A Murder of Quality
First published 1962
Stella Rode, the wife of a master at Carne School, is murdered in her isolated house. An old wartime colleague asks George Smiley to investigate because the police are struggling to penetrate a closed institution governed by status, gossip and long memory.
Smiley finds that Stella's habit of exposing other people's weaknesses gave several members of the school community reason to hate her. The case is a murder mystery rather than an intelligence operation, centred on class, humiliation and the private violence beneath respectable post-war England.
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