Harriet Devine's Blog

Due to a Death by Mary Kelly

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.

 

Tension by E M Delafield

This is one of the two most recent releases from The British Library Women Writers Series (the other was Mamma by Diana Tutton). I have to admit that, though I've dipped into one two of Delafield's novels before, I have never read her enduringly famous Diary of a Provincial Lady. So you could almost describe me as a sceptic rather than a fan, unlike many of the bloggers I follow. Could Tension convert me?

Published in 1920, this was Delafield's sixth novel. Set in the fictional cathedral town of Culmouth, somewhere in Devon, the action centres around an institution called the Commercial and Technical College for the South West of England. As its name suggests, it teaches shorthand and typing to classes of mostly young women, keen to get secretarial work. As the novel begins, the college has just appointed a new Lady Superintendent, a Miss Pauline Marchrose, described by Fuller, the Principal, as being 'almost a lady' as well as 'a thorough woman of business, capable, and hard as nails'. This last epithet will prove to be sadly untrue. What happens to Miss Marchrose will be the central story here, but what happens to her is a direct result of the actions of Edna, Lady Rossiter. She and her husband Sir Julian are patrons of the college, and Edna is proud of her position on the management committee. There's nothing she likes better than patronising those who she sees as her social inferiors, and believes, quite erroneously, that they respond well to her frequent commiserations about their sad, enclosed lives. 

Edna Rossiter is an astonishing fictional creation. A monster of hypocrisy, she believes herself to be an exceptionally sensitive soul, alive to the beauties of nature (the 'Divine Spark'), which she is endlessly trying to impress on anyone she considers to be ignorant of nature's healing properties, generally much to their annoyance. This description of het makes me laugh every time I read it:

Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness towards her husband.

She is convinced that her method of dealing with life is informed by the the maxim she is so fond of - 'Is it kind, is it wise, is it true'. Needless to say, her actions bely this in every possible way. The trouble starts when she hears the name of the newly appointed Miss Marchrose. She remembers at once that this was the name of a young woman who, some years ago, jilted her cousin Clarence Ibister, causing him to have some kind of mental breakdown. Long ago though this happened, and Clarence now being happily married to 'a true, pure, sweet loving girl - and one in his own class of life - just a well-bred English maiden', she persuades herself, and attempts to persuade others, that Miss Marchrose will be a malign influence on the morals of the young women she is teaching. Her greatest anxiety is the fact the the young woman is becoming very friendly with a fellow teacher, Mark Easter. Mark is a married man, but his wife has for a long time been incarcerated in a home for 'dipsomaniacs', while he struggles to look after his two undisciplined children on his own. Initially she is concerned as to whether 'Clarence Ibister's jilt' is aware of these facts, but it soon becomes clear that she is, and that is hasn't prevented her from enjoying Mark's company. So Edna quietly sets about creating suspicion and doubt among the rest of the college staff. The fact that she never actually spells out her grounds for suspecting the young woman's integrity only exacerbate the disquiet and tension which increases daily within the college. 

Being an incurable romantic, I was hoping for a happy ending to Miss Marchrose's situation. She's clearly very drawn to Mark, and the two of them obviously enjoy each others' company and spend a great deal of time together. Certainly she would like this to develop into something more. But this is 1920, and despite the younger generation's frequent assertions of their support for Free Love, theory and practice are still very far apart. This is exemplified by the case of Mark's sister Iris, a rather foolish young woman who has just published a novel called 'Why Ben!', a 'Story of the Sexes'. Although the contents of the book are never revealed to the reader, it's clearly a very daring venture. Iris herself, however, is engaged to a Mr Garrett, and once married immediately abandons her belief in Free Love. Morality is still of the utmost importance in this society, and so, to hope for a positive outcome for Miss Marchrose's aspirations is not logical. What she ends up with as an alternative may not seem very romantic, but there's every indication that it may ultimately work out well for her.

Reading this novel over a hundred years since it was first published, it becomes very clear that this is an era in which women get a pretty raw deal. Pauline Marchrose is highly intelligent and competent, and wants to have an independent life but, as she tells the sympathetic Sir Julian, struggling to support herself in London as a young woman had been a gruelling experience:

...the deadly monotony of it - day after day sitting in the clatter of those machines, typing as hard as one could go. Nothing to look forward to, except Saturday afternoon and Sunday,, and then I was dead tired, and I hated my rooms, because they were cheap and ugly and uncomfortable.

Taking up teaching had improved her life immeasurably, and she loves her present job, but will she be able to keep it, given the gossip and distrust surrounding her in the college? It's even possible to feel some compassion for the awful Enid, who Sir Julian married in a sudden outburst of pity, though he has never really loved her and now finds her (quite understandably) boring and embarrassing. As for the men, they don't show up very well either. Both Sir Julian and Mark are pleasant and sympathetic, but essentially too weak to make any real changes to their own rather unsatisfactory lives. 

I asked at the beginning whether Tension would convert me to an admirer of Delafield. On the strength of this novel the answer would be a resounding yes. I was delighted by her ironic wit, and her keenly perceptive view of the society of the day. So I'll be seeking out some more of her novels soon. Very grateful to the British Library for once again coming up with a winner.

 

Mamma by Diana Tutton on Shiny New Books

It was a great day for me when the British Library announced a new series - 20th Century British Women Writers. This promised to provide exactly the kind of books I enjoy most, and it hasn't disappointed - I've read and loved all of them (well, I wasn't crazy about Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex, but I probably wasn't in the mood for that kind of humour). So I was delighted to be asked to participate in the blog tour for Mamma. I've avoided blog tours for a while, having twice agreed to one and found I hated the book, but I knew I was safe with this one. I'd heard of Diana Tutton and knew of her Guard Your Daughters - now published by Persephone - and read several reviews, but this would be a first for me. And of course I loved it. 

You can read my full Shiny review here, but here's what I said in my opening paragraph:

[This] is the story of a woman who falls in love with her daughter’s husband. However, though I’m sure we all could picture the sort of sensational novel that could have had such a plot line, this is the most delicately nuanced account of a woman struggling with powerfully unexpected and confusing emotions. And, though this situation is obviously central, the novel is about far more than that. It’s about society in the 1950s: family relationships, the generation gap, class divisions, and sexual mores.  It’s immensely readable and extremely enjoyable.

Diana Tutton wrote only three novels - the third one, The Young Ones (1959) is about brother and sister incest and sounds intriguing. She clearly enjoyed challenging subject matter and is an excellent writer. So do read Mamma!