Talk:The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

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not first

This is not the first Le Carré novel to avoid the subject of espionage, I believe. A Murder of Quality, which is a piece of crime fiction, has in fact few reference to Smiley's spy job and cannot be said a spy story at all, and it was published 9 years earlier. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.191.166.45 (talk) 18:57, 20 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is, however, his first novel that has nothing whatsoever to do with the world of espionage. A Murder of Quality makes much of Smiley's contacts in the Circus, from the moment he is called into the case to the moment he identifies the murderer. This has no characters in it from the Circus and, apart from a ridiculous suggestion by Shamus in one paragraph of the novel, does not mention espionage at all. Sincerely, SamBlob (talk) 01:11, 15 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me the above discussion and the article itself are missing the point. A Murder of Quality is a murder mystery, as its title clearly indicates, and so is Call for the Dead. Even A Small Town in Germany is more or less a detective story within a spy story. The point is that all three of these, like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, and all of Le Carré's novels subsequent to The Naive and Sentimental Lover, are genre fiction--related genre fiction, in fact. The Naive and Sentimental Lover is John Le Carré's first, and so far only, non-genre novel. TheScotch (talk) 06:18, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've changed the article in accordance with my above observation. I've changed "first" to only because only seems to me more significant and "first" implies there are others. Of course, if Le Carré goes on to write another non-genre novel, only will have to go, but that seems unlikely at this point. TheScotch (talk) 09:30, 29 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]