A Murder of Quality

At the request of his old war time colleague Ailsa Brimley, George Smiley agrees to look into the murder of Stella Rode. Brimley had only just received a letter from her saying she feared for her life at her husband's hand. The husband, Stanley Rode teaches at Carne School, but Smiley is doubtful that he had anything to do with his wife's death. As Smiley investigates, he learns that Stella was a nosy busybody who loved to learn other's little secrets and then gossip about them - or possibly blackmail them. When a student is killed and Smiley unearths a secret, he has the evidence to name the killer.Based on John Le Carré's 1962 thriller (his first) in which George Smiley is brought out of spy retirement to solve a murder in a British public school. The setting is based on Le Carre"s own schooldays in Sherborne and his brief experience teaching at Eton.

Poor old "George Smiley" (Denholm Elliott) never seems to get left to his retirement for long by John le Carré. This time, it's his pal "Miss Brimley" (Glenda Jackson) who embroils him a mystery after a lady is killed in a small village. Just before her death, she wrote to the Christian magazine run by his friend claiming that she knew the identity of her own killer. Intrigued, well cajoled more like, he sets off to see what he can deduce with the help of local police inspector "Rigby" (Matthew Scurfield). As it happens, his younger spying days were spent in the company of the brother of local boys' school master "Fielding" (Joss Ackland) and pretty swiftly we begins to appreciate that all is not as it seems - or should be - in a school were the relationship between this master and the enigmatic young "Perkins" (Christian Bale) is somewhat circumspect. Indeed this whole community seems to have secrets and prejudices to hide - and even the dead seem to be involved! Elliott holds this together solidly if not exactly remarkably, but Ackland does better as the flawed school master with a penchant for things still very much frowned upon and the supporting cast deliver something that reminded me a lot of the television dramatisations of the P.D. James "Adam Dalgliesh" novels with plenty of attention to the detailed look of the drama. It's all just a bit slow, though, and this adaptation lacks any sense of the sinister or the dark and the ending rather lets the whole thing down. Still, it's good to see Elliott take the lead for a change and fans of the genre will probably find it passes ninety minutes effortlessly enough.