My Name Is Michael Sibley

by John Bingham, John le Carré (Introduction)

John Prosset is found dead in his country cottage. This news is a shock to his old friend Michael Sibley, who had been staying with him that weekend. But a bigger shock arrives with two policemen who inform him that Prosset was bludgeoned to death.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Crime, British Literature, Espionage, Thriller

Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

John Michael Ward Bingham - who became the seventh Lord Clanmorris - was born in Haywards Heath on 3 November 1908.

He was educated at Cheltenham College and became an art editor for the 'Sunday Dispatch'. He married Madeleine Mary Ebel on 28 July 1934.

During the Second World War he served with the Royal Engineers and was attached to the General Staff. He also worked for MI5 and was supposedly the inspiration for John Le Carre's George Smiley. And over the course of thirty years, he served MI5 in various high-ranking capacities, including undercover agent.

He wrote under a pseudonym and published 17 novels in the thriller, detective and spy fields. These included 'My Name is Michael Sibley', his first novel published in 1952, 'A Fragment of Fear', and 'I Love, I Kill'.

He succeeded to the title of 7th Baron Clanmorris on 24 June 1960.

He died in 1988.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Name Is Michael Sibley is the 2nd mystery I've read by English writer John Bingham. It's an interesting take on the mystery.

Michael Sibley is the protagonist of this story which is told from the perspective of the main suspect in a murder. We follow Sibley as he is interviewed by the police about the murder of his friend / school acquaintance, John Prosser. It's more normal that the mystery is told from the perspective of the investigators so this adds a different twist.

As the story progresses, Sibley reviews his life, his 'friendship' during school with Prosser, a mate who teased him and made Sibley miserable. We continue with Sibley's life, his first job as a newspaperman in a small town, where he grows in confidence and meets his first girl friend. As time progresses, Prosser makes contact with him once again, something that Sibley can't turn down, no matter his negative feelings towards Prosser.

Throughout this review of Sibley's life and contacts with Prosser, he continues to be investigated by the police and Sibley reacts in seemingly odd ways to this investigation, lying to the police, encouraging his new girlfriend to provide an alibi for him, getting rid of a set of brass knuckles he had purchased as a young student, but feels might somehow implicate him in the murder.

The story can be slow at times but the perspective and development of the character(s) and plot are intriguing and well-crafted. It makes you wonder as you progress into the story whether Sibley is actually guilty of the crime and how much information the police might have. All in all it's definitely a fascinating concept and a well - developed, interesting mystery, not perfect, but still worth reading. (4 stars)

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the 2000 reissue of this novel, which has a foreword by John Le Carre. Here I discovered Bingham was the original of Le Carre's George Smiley, something I had not known before and which raised Bingham in my esteem. Many years ago I read several of Bingham's books, including this one (as well as his excellent account of the Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel); at the time I was expecting them to be cracking mysteries, as it were, and was too young and stupid to realize that Bingham was offering something very much better.

Mild-mannered, undistinguished journalist Michael Sibley is shocked when his old schooldays companion John Prosset is bumped off, because it was something Sibley has always fantasized about doing himself (although the world knows them as the best of friends, Sibley has always loathed his overweening, arrogant acquaintance) -- and in recent weeks, with Prosset seemingly moving in on Sibley's fiancee, the fantasies have been becoming ever more alluring.

Almost immediately Sibley realizes he's in many ways the ideal suspect for the police, and so he starts "improving" on events a bit -- telling little white lies here and there, encouraging fiancee Kate to do likewise, and so on. The net result is, of course, that every last falsehood and disingenuity comes back to bite him, and he looks guilty as sin. Is it possible that he is guilty as sin, but lying to the reader? Or is he, as he claims to be, an innocent man destined for the hangman's noose?

There's nothing flamboyant about the way Bingham tells this tale -- he was a very plain, restrained, quiet writer -- and yet Sibley's account of his misadventures succeeded in completely mesmerizing me. With luck some of his other novels are still in print . . .

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very strong literate mystery novel, not in the sense that it dwells in lofty metaphoric realms or grandly momentous themes of Literature-- although, secretly, under the guise of a crime novel, it actually does. Add that it is this author's first novel, and there is a lot to admire here; I kept being more and more impressed as the scope and depth increased. Maybe something about expectations, and the always disarming practice of starting at a walk.

There is a kind of accepted framework of the first-person novel that goes something like this:

In the midst of a character's completely ordinary day, something happened ... Before there was time to get his bearings, he was involved in a larger story than he ever expected ... When he has a moment to think, though, he will tell you that he might have seen it coming, and it could only have happened to him ... And to know what he means, you'll need a few details...
Not of last week or last year, but of long ago, when he was a boy, when something unusual happened that escaped everyone's notice, except for that boy, so best to start there, and here it is ..
reader, see what you think . . .

Which becomes the transition that will play again and again in the telling of the current-day story. And steeped in biographical detail, mood and atmosphere, but mostly of character development-- that's what Bingham has done here.

As long as each outing from the past has some bearing on the current narrative, whether in hard cause-effect terms or more obliquely, and as long as each outing is a compelling mini-story of it's own-- this works out to be very effective. Across the arc of the novel we will have five or six of these memory flashes all linked to what is happening in the present drama.

What this is, (I think), is a variation on the epistolary novel, except not from so mechanical a device as, say, the lead character's diary. Rather we have the scrapbook of memory and happenstance, documentary or random or intuitive, from which to coax meaning; and in the end we may expect a drawing-together of threads from all disparate elements... perhaps.

Bingham has written a serious novel here and though there may linger the feeling of experimenting with form, for a first time out he's controlling a lot of narrative angles very well. That each and every back-track inspires curiosity in the reader --rather than oh-no-not-more-exposition-- says a lot.

Much more in the Bingham catalog to come, and not too early to say he's working along the lines of a Highsmith or Greene, for whom the desperation of a murder mystery makes a perfectly prepared ground for humans in high conflict; drama when pushed to limits unimaginable, and cued from offstage by flashes of memory and intuition that may, or may not, be reliable.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book is just like watching an old black and white movie with a voiceover.

[Malcolm Noble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a link to my review on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAsb18...

[Neer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsatisfactory ending. More here: https://ahotcupofpleasureagain.wordpr...

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Michael Sibley's best friend is found dead in his home, the police pay Michael a visit to ask some general questions. Michael had nothing to do with his beloved friend's demise, or does he? In Michael Sibley, Bingham gives us an anxiety ridden narrator who lives by the philosophy that one should think before one talks.

But as this novel progresses, Sibley's over thinking and over analyzing causes him to lie to the police, and then have to continue lying to cover up his initial lie, catapulting him from just a friend of the deceased's to suspect numero uno. And all the while, the reader is left to ponder how they'd react in Michael's shoes. This is a well crafted psychological thriller that serves as a reminder to the rest of us that the small little lies we all tell from time to time to make our lives easier can royally backfire.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detective story written by a contemporary of John LeCarre. This one kept me guessing about Mr Sibley's guilt or innocence until the very last page.

[David Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unsettling account of a man suspected of a murder the reader knows he didn’t commit. The police only have the merest circumstantial evidence against him but Michael Sibley has such little self-confidence and in his wish to protect his girlfriend’s reputation his halting dissimulation is no match for the experienced officers of Scotland Yard. I’ve just been reading “A Farewell To Arms” by Hemingway and throughout that I was thinking to myself, “You stupid idiot [Nurse Ferguson], is that what you want, cos that’ll what’ll ‘appen?” A similar feeling of frustration pervades this novel. We spend the whole time inside the mind of Sibley who explains his actions as perfectly reasonable because he knows he is innocent (isn’t he?). It’s just that he’s a weak character and everything he says or does compounds his likely guilt. The sort of nightmare anyone with respect for justice but wicked thoughts could find themselves in.
I was pretty much on the edge of my seat at the denouement and well aware that, in reality, there have been plenty of miscarriages of justice; one only has to think of Ruth Ellis (ok, she did do it but…) Timothy Evans (ok - he might have done it after all), Herbert Armstrong (trumped up bollocks about “excuse fingers”) and Derek Bentley (judicial vindictiveness) to predict which way this was likely to go. As Sibley admitted to himself, “Each [character] had acted primarily in the ways which accorded with his own interests or feelings, regardless of other people. It had been, over and over again, a case of ‘Pull up the raft, Jack, I’m all right.”

[Marietta · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an introduction to his first novel, Call for the Dead, John le Carre states that he fashioned his character, George Smiley, on the author, John Bingham, a fellow spy who encouraged le Carre to write. Although they did not remain friends, le Carre admired Bingham's novels. I decided to read one, and I was not disappointed. It is a well-crafted murder mystery. At times the story is predictable, but it is an interesting psychological thriller about a man who becomes involved in the murder of a friend. Worth a read for anyone who likes mysteries.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe this was mentioned in "A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré" because I bought it near the same time. Another reviewer said "Reading this book is just like watching an old black and white movie with a voiceover." which pretty much nails it. Written in 1952 and set in 1930. Much drinking, smoking and acting against self-interest.

[Chahula · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no arguing that Prosset was a bit of a tosser, but Sibley is such a snivelling, unreliable narrator it's hard to cheer for him. Still, Bingham manages to tease out the story in a gripping sort of way. A bit Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a bit Hangover Square.

[Stanley Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent exceptional riveting.

Bingham made a thriller just by crystal clear description of scenes. Nothing fancy just a brilliant story teller. Highly recommended.

[KBS Krishna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kafkaesque

[Michael Sibley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have not read this book but I know it is good

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was given to me by a friend. I wasn't familiar with John Bingham. The story is written in first person. It begins rather slowly, then pulls you in to where it becomes a page-turner. It's comic in parts, tragic in others, as the protagonist, Michael Sibley, becomes involved in a murder case involving a so-called friend. In movie terms, it has a Hitchcockian mood with various twists and turns that keep you guessing until the very end. Novelist John le Carre knew Bingham and notes in the introduction that his George Smiley character is somewhat based on the author. For a different and intriguing murder mystery, I recommend this novel.

[John FitzGerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was Bingham's first novel. The idea is excellent, but I found myself wading through far more detail than I thought necessary. Nevertheless it was interesting enough to keep me reading. This is a first-person account, and at the end you're left to decide for yourself just how true it is. It's an interesting question, too.

[Diamond Stacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first John Bingham I have read, and I was extremely impressed. Highly recommend, especially for those who like Patricia Highsmith, or crime novels in general.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my full review click on the link below:
https://crossexaminingcrime.wordpress...

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: Michael Sibley's friend is murdered, but Sibley lies to the police and becomes a suspect.