Explore "A Murder of Quality" by John le Carré on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The origins of most of my books are by now a mystery to me, even if they were not at the time, but A 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.