Mary Kelly

• Born: December 28, 1927
• Place of Birth: London, England
• Died: 2017

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; psychological; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Inspector Brett Nightingale, 1956-1958; Hedley Nicholson, 1961-1963

Contribution

Mary Kelly is unique in her use of industrial settings for many of her novels—a steel mill, a paper factory, and a pottery, for example. Her murders often involve elaborately planned industrial espionage rather than personal grudges. Her characters, however, are complex. Her detectives themselves are confused about their lives and often flawed in their capacity to maintain human relationships. Because of her interesting settings and compelling characterization, Kelly can maintain suspense from the first paragraph to the novel's final page.

Biography

Mary Kelly was born Mary Theresa Coolican on December 28, 1927, in London, the daughter of Francis Spenser Coolican and Kathleen Reedy Coolican. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in London and then at the University of Edinburgh, receiving her master’s degree in 1951. In 1950, she married Denis Charles Kelly and moved to Surrey, where she taught in a private school and then in Surrey County Council schools from 1952 to 1954.

Although her first book was published in 1956, it was not until The Spoilt Kill (1961) that critics began to rank her at the top of her genre. For that book, she was given the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association. Between 1962 and 1974, she published six additional novels, and in 1963, American readers discovered her recent books and read her earlier ones. Kelly’s interest in music, particularly opera, is evident in many of her mysteries. Mary Kelly died in 2017.

Analysis

A Mary Kelly novel does not ordinarily begin with the discovery of a body but instead with the establishment of the confusion of a central character. In her first novel, A Cold Coming (1956), for example, Alec Stormer awakens on the edge of a cliff with no knowledge of where he is or memory of how he came to be there. Less dramatically, the librarian, in March to the Gallows (1964), spots a medallion, which has been stolen from her, and worn by a strange woman. From her puzzlement about the reappearance of that medallion comes the larger mystery that is the core of the book. The Twenty-fifth Hour (1971) also begins with a puzzled protagonist, in this case, a devoted aunt, who cannot understand why her niece in France has sent for money without explaining her needs. There is no suggestion of criminal activity until the aunt gets to France, and even then, she is concerned primarily about the safety of her secretive niece, who is finally dragged back to England. Because a Kelly novel often begins with seemingly unexplainable events and sustains that nightmare atmosphere throughout the book, it holds the reader in suspense in a very different way from the novel of detection, which offers subtle clues, both valid and misleading, all along the way.

The industrial settings also produce an almost surrealistic quality in the novels. The landscape of Due to a Death (1962) is not the green countryside of England but an ugly industrial estuary. The body in The Spoilt Kill is found in a clay-filled machine used to make pottery. Generally, the homes in which Kelly’s characters live are either unlovely, standardized middle-class houses or sordid slums.

The Spoilt Kill and Due to a Death

The flaws of Kelly’s characters are as evident as the defects of their surroundings. After her third novel, she abandoned the musical inspector for a mysterious private investigator or secret agent, Hedley Nicholson, who appears in The Spoilt Kill and Due to a Death. Nicholson’s uncertainties are evident in both of these novels. In the first, he was hired by the management of the pottery to investigate the theft of some designs. His undercover work demands that he deceive the chief suspect, a widow. While cultivating her friendship and gaining her trust, as his job demands, he first likes and respects her, then falls in love with her. With this new focus, he sees himself more clearly. As he lies, snoops, and reports to his employer, getting people fired and jailed, he becomes more and more disgusted with his work and himself, less and less capable of setting himself apart from the thief and later from the murderer whom he is pursuing. At last, he is as much a loser as those whom he destroys. When the innocent widow discovers that he has been lying to her and using her, she is brokenhearted. Although she loves him, she feels that she cannot trust him, and she breaks off the relationship. This consciousness of self-destruction by one supposedly on the side of the right explains Nicholson’s rejection of any close relationship in Due to a Death, to the bewilderment of the female narrator, who admires him and throughout the novel is on the verge of loving him.

Like Graham Greene, to whom she has been compared, Kelly creates not only confused and tormented heroes but also sometimes appealing and understandable villains. In The Spoilt Kill, the murderer is a man who committed his crime almost by accident, a man whom Nicholson, the investigator, recognizes to be more generous than he. Similarly, in Due to a Death, the murderer is a kind man who shows a profound love for his son through his first marriage and great patience with his shrewish second wife. When he is discovered and kills himself, one is not relieved that a killer is out of the way but appalled at the tragic waste.

In Kelly’s novels, her Catholic background is obvious. When she shows the defects of her sympathetic characters (their pride and difficulty in loving others) while pointing out the generosity and kindliness of those who have stolen or killed, she stresses that all humans are equal before God and that all need divine grace. Thus, after he is exposed, the murderer of The Spoilt Kill, the penitent, clearly believes that he has been forgiven by God, though not yet punished by civil law. In contrast, the representative of human justice, Detective Nicholson, is aware of the lack of divine grace the murderer has received.

March to the Gallows

The difference between human and divine values is also emphasized in March to the Gallows. Here, however, the sleuth, a humble librarian, receives the gift of grace. From childhood, she has felt inferior to the members of a wealthy neighboring family. While they glittered, she grew up in the shadows, sometimes treated kindly, sometimes ridiculed. Then her purse is snatched, and she realizes that she has lost the medallion that her fiancé gave her before his accidental death. In tracing the medallion, she discovers some dreadful truths about the family that had patronized her: Their lives are a cesspool of crime and treachery, drug addiction, and blackmail. They have not struggled against sin. Instead, they have become evil precisely because they believe in neither good nor evil, turning to degradation to find some excitement in their meaningless lives. Face-to-face with their emptiness, the librarian has the grace to pity them, and she announces that she will not take the initiative in turning them over to the law.

The Twenty-fifth Hour

In Kelly’s fourth mystery, The Spoilt Kill (1961), the book in which she abandoned Inspector Nightingale in favor of the flawed narrator, Hedley Nicholson, the metaphysical quest began to assume more importance than the search for the criminal. The new emphasis was evident when she wrote The Twenty-fifth Hour (1971) ten years later. Although one revolutionary is shot during the story, there is no actual murder. The mysteries are the whereabouts of the niece, who keeps disappearing with some revolutionaries and reappearing, and the reason for the sinister behavior of a family who has shut themselves up behind their gates, where they are discovered to be concealing some secrets left over from World War II. Appropriately, the title refers to a mythical extra hour in the day when mystifying events occur—mystifying, not murderous. That the book is structured to include the interpolated comments of the heroine’s husband, who has been reading what she says in it about her involvement with another man, indicates that the real mysteries here are love, grace, and forgiveness, not a body in a pool or a library.

It is to Kelly’s credit that she can maintain suspense in her unconventional pattern. In A Cold Coming (1956), she had not mastered her art, and long sections of conversation alternated with equally long sections of frantic action. In the later books, however, Kelly learned to suggest the presence of danger in the most prosaic scenes and during the most searching conversations.

Write on Both Sides of the Paper

Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969) illustrates the mastery of form and theme that Kelly attained after her early apprenticeship works. Typically, the opening of the novel is dramatic and mysterious. Three men, identified only by their first names, are burglarizing some plants. The sentences are short, the description crisp and accurate, and the thoughts of “Aidan” fragmentary and profane. When the section ends, the narrator, Hannah Major, introduces herself and announces that she has begun by re-creating that opening scene because it is the key to the story she will tell. Hannah does not, however, narrate the entire book. Several episodes switch back and forth between Hannah and the other major characters: Aidan Losely Gough, an advertising agency executive so pressed by a debt to a “club” owner that he has been willing to sign on as a burglar, and Hannah’s lover, William Lockett, who works for the paper company that has been burglarized in the initial episode. The characters eventually come together at the old home of David Kinto, and once Hannah arrives, she takes over as the single narrator. She does not explain the episodes that she re-creates but simply describes events and repeats dialogue. When the novel ends, William foils the theft, and Hannah helps Aidan get out of trouble. However, the characters agree that although they know that the theft involves a company in another country, they still do not know, nor want to know, what scheme has brought death to one man and peril to them all. Thus, the mystery novel ends with the mystery still unsolved.

As in Kelly’s other novels, the real quest in Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969) is not a murderer but the attainment of goodness and the display of grace in human beings. After he is attacked in the woods, William recognizes his attacker as David Kinto, who once stole William’s girl. Worried that Kinto’s one good eye has been put out of commission in the fight, William abandons his job and respectable life to nurse Kinto, an unprincipled liar and one of the thieves of the first episode. Later, Hannah joins the group, and she and William work desperately to free Aidan from the debt that caused him to be the second thief. The novel operates on contrasts: the hatred Kinto’s mother felt for her son, as shown by the mocking “inheritance” of pennies he finds in his old home; the forgiving love shown by William to his old enemy; the deceit of Kinto, the honesty of Hannah; Aidan’s desire to maintain his middle-class respectability; Kinto’s acceptance of his status as a reprobate; and ironically, Aidan’s insistence on turning over the paper to his criminal employers, no matter what the results, contrasted with Kinto’s decisive act when he tosses the paper roll into a reservoir—not because of what trouble it might cause in South America but because it was causing quarrels among the four comrades. At the end of the story, Hannah makes a statement that would seem strange in most murder mysteries but one that is typical of Kelly: One should not pity the dead, she says, but the living. It is in this world that pity is in such short supply.

Thus, once again, Kelly dramatizes her consistent theme. Given the mystery and terror of the world in which all must live, the torment and imperfection of every human, the irresponsibility of the disreputable, and the selfish arrogance of the respectable, the only answer can be human compassion, provided through redeeming grace. Indeed, Kelly places more emphasis on pity for the living than on behalf of the dead.

Principal Series Characters:

• Brett Nightingale is a Scotland Yard inspector, the protagonist in Kelly’s first three published mysteries. He sings tenor roles in a London amateur opera company when he is not sleuthing. His likable qualities are as important as his decisiveness and courage when puzzling out a crime.
• Hedley Nicholson is a mysterious private investigator and a somewhat flawed narrator who appears in two of Kelly’s novels.

Bibliography

DuBose, Martha Hailey, and Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000.

Edwards, Martin. "An Unconventional Christmas Novel by an Unconventional Writer." Crime Reads, 22 Dec. 2023, crimereads.com/an-unconventional-christmas-novel-by-an-unconventional-writer. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. McFarland, 2004.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Knepper, Paul, and Anja Johansen. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Review of The Christmas Egg, by Mary Kelly. The New York Times Book Review, July 24, 1966, p. 28.

Review of Dead Corse, by Mary Kelly. The Times Literary Supplement, July 21, 1966, p. 640.