I want to grip people by the mystery and to have attention to the last page due to the unsolved secret so that they cannot leave it. That is what I want - to grip them and force them to read to the bitter end. That is why I sometimes try something new. In Due to a Death I first give a tantalising view of the end without telling the secret...
So said Mary Kelly in an interview a few years after this novel was published in 1962. And my goodness did she succeed. I was awake at an unearthly hour, unable to stop reading till I got the the bitter end - and bitter is not a bad word for the conclusion of this truly remarkable novel. I've been a lover of The British Library Crime Classics since they first began, and have read a large number of them, though not always reviewed them. They vary tremendously in style and subject matter, of course; some are quite lighthearted, some quite dark or bleak or scary. But this one, I have to say, is in a class by itself.
So yes, the novel's opening chapter gives a glimpse of what's going to happen at the end. It's totally mysterious - a man and a woman (the narrator) are in a car. Something very frightening and disturbing has just happened. Both of them seem to be bleeding from some kind of injuries. A police car appears to have been chasing them, but it overtakes and speeds off. Soon we learn that the body of a young woman has been found on the nearby marsh. Rumours are quickly spreading in the village shop: 'Must have been the usual, then, poor thing'. The narrator knows she must think hard about the events that have led to this situation:
sift the past for fragments of memory, sharp, coloured, dimensional, like cubes of mosaic, which separately seemed insignificant; put together they took on meaning, formed a picture itself demanding to be explained, like a dream, or rather a nightmare so dreadful I couldn't bear to explain it...
The rest of the novel shows her slowly and painfully doing just that. Agnes, for that is her name, is a young woman married, not very happily, to Tom, an accountant and keen amateur naturalist. They live in a run-down village called Gunfleet, on the edge of the marshes. Their only social life - visits to the local pub, meals, picnics - is shared with Tom's two friends, Tubby and Ian, and their wives and children. Then a mysterious stranger, Hedley Nicholson, appears in the village. Nobody knows who he is or what he is doing there, but he and Agnes become friends of a sort: he takes her out for driving lessons and they have long and intense conversations. His intelligence - and lets face it, his mystery - are a welcome contrast to the rather superficial people she's generally thrown together with. And she soon realises she's getting far too emotionally involved.
But that's only part of what's going on here, though it is also integral. I'm not really sure if this is even a crime novel, though the young woman's death in the first chapter suggest this, but more than anything it's a mystery novel. Mysteries abound, all of them in the end proving to be inextricably bound together. There's the question of Agnes's parentage: brought up in a 'good' orphanage after her single mother's death when she was two, she has received financial support through a local solicitor and, when pressed by Hedley, admits that she suspects it must have come from her unknown father - but why is so anxious not to investigate further? There's Agnes's worry about the real activities of Tom and his two friends - are they really going out on their supposed explorations of the native flora, and if so, why are all three suddenly and inexplicably short of money? Why is Agnes so drawn to the quiet, sensitive Ian, who she longs to protect from his bossy, stingy wife Helen, who makes her husband and children eat the sandwich crusts next morning for breakfast? Mysterious activities go on at the local garage, and Hedley's car gets damaged when apparently being driven by someone else. And, of course, there's the question of what really happened to the girl whose body turns up in a ditch on the marsh. And Agnes, as we come to realise, is not always the most reliable narrator, though Hedley's probing questioning eventually gets to the root of her secrecy.
Due to a Death is a remarkable novel for several reasons. Of course there's the complex and wonderfully planned plotting, and the subtleties of the character development. The grim, bleak landscape of Gunfleet is strikingly evoked:
From the lay-by there was nothing to be seen of the estuary; only, overhead, a wide marine sky embossed with pearly clouds, and the slow plumes of the cement works' chimneys; through the windscreen, concrete posts and barbed wire half-swamped by chalk-dusted thickets; and behind the fence, breaking the surface of the grey undulations like a bathers' warning, a red rust-pitted disc: Police Advice - Danger, Keep Out.
I somehow managed to miss Mary Kelly's earlier novel, A Spoilt Kill, which won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award (though I'm putting that right very soon). Readers of that novel will know that Hedley is a private detective, but that knowledge is not essential to enjoy this one. Sadly, she stopped writing in the early 1970s, but I hope there will be more of her books to come from Crime Classics. The quality of her writing is exceptional - this really does deserve to be called literary fiction. I'll leave you with a passage of description that I liked a lot:
I walked down to the street that evening, to see if the men were coming. The sky was the colour of sugared almonds, orange, pink and mauve.The old women stood with folded arms at the doors; the old men, smoking, hovered round their runner beans; and between the marigolds sat neutered cats. Woodey's wireless sounded from an open window, some soprano launching emotion into the air. At the end of the street a car started. I could hear the dim throb of the jukebox from The Ship.
Definitely one to read and enjoy.
