Mary Kelly, "The Spoilt Kill" (1961)

Each year's prize is no doubt influenced by the year before's, but more than influence, there's a faint sense of actual trolling here. The 1960 winner involved faked industrial espionage, rendered airily and unconvincingly; the 1961 winner involves real industrial espionage, rendered in convincing, concrete detail. I learnt a lot more about pottery than I had expected, and ended the book with a faint desire to buy fine china. The espionage strand of the plot is woven with with a murder strand, with the relation between the two unclear for a fair part of the book. Both strands are of fine quality, resolved satisfyingly. Characters are well-written, often identifiably human, not just contrivances of the plot. The Staffordshire setting is terrific. The final few pages are really excellent, downbeat in a very unexpected and very welcome way.

So all in all, you can see why the novel won an award, and it's got a lot going for it. But the accolades in the introduction to my copy—"masterpiece", "one of the finest British stories about a private investigator"—strike me as rather hyperbolic.

The first point of demerit is the writing, which has a tendency towards the purple and some peculiar passages in which the author seems to exhaustively test out a stylistic device---for example, three pages where five of or eight paragraphs begin with a single-word sentence. The narration is first-person, and I suppose one could attribute all this to the clever capture of a slightly pretentious voice, but I rather think that the author quite likes their narrator, and reckons the prose does him a favour. I'm not sure it does.

The second point of demerit is the relentless appraisal of women's appearances, by the narrator, other men, and other women. It's not just that they're all evaluating looks all the time; it's also that they're all drawing ridiculous inferences from appearance to character. There's even a bit of meta-judging, where the narrator makes judgements of some other men's characters on the basis of their judgements of women's appearances (and whether their judgements accord with his). I suppose this again could be very clever writing: a woman accurately capturing the way in which male gazes imposed verdicts on women in that time and that place, in the cause of undermining the power of that gaze. I don't much doubt the accuracy of the description, but I do doubt the emancipatory intention; again, the author seems to like the narrator, and it's the narrator whose judgements we hear about most often, in most detail. Also, women get blamed for a lot of things in this book. Really a lot.

All in all, I think this one is excellent if you're prepared to credit the author with a sophisticated dislike of the narrator, and fairly good if you're not. I'm not. ( )

The subtitle of this novel is A Staffordshire Mystery and Staffordshire's pottery industry is a big part of the story. It is set at Shentall's, a long-established pottery that has become the victim of espionage: Someone has been leaking the designs for some time, so that rival firms can produce similar but cheaper products in a quicker way.
Hedley Nicholson, a private investigator, tries to find the person responsible, when a murder happens: A body is found in one of the vaults where the clay is stored.

I must say that initially, it was a bit hard to concentrate on this novel. All the descriptions and technical terms of the pottery were a bit much for me, and I had trouble to distinguish the different members of the staff. The story grew on me though, and became more and more gripping. It is definitely not your average, cosy crime story - Mary Kelly neither spares her characters, nor her readers. ( )

I found this book to be dull and boring: the characters were flat and I flet nothing for them.

A detective is called in by a pottery company to find out who is selling their designs to an outside source before they can be produced and put into shops.

But then there is a murder and the detective gets sidetracked, he also falls in love with the person he believes is the spy.

Even skimming & getting to the ending was boring.

If you want to know all about the workings of a pottery manufacturer, this book gives you that information. ( )

The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly looked very promising. A Virago Modern Classic (#449) and a CWA Gold Dagger winner (from 1961). I have a feeling that’s a unique combination.

The narrator is Nicholson, a private detective, and he is investigating the theft of designs, almost certainly by an employee from a long-established, family-owned pottery. Shentall’s of Stoke.

The investigation is covert, with the fiction being that Nicholson has been hired to write a history of the pottery.

One employee draws particular attention. Corinna Wakefield: the only employee not born and bred in Stoke. She is a handsome middle-aged woman, seemingly in the world. She is independent and a little aloof, but she is always professional, and very, very good at her job.

Corinna is a compelling character, by far the strongest of a very well drawn ensemble. Not always sympathetic, but it is clear that her life has not been easy nor is her situation, as an outsider and a woman in a man’s world. She has had to be tough and independent to cope. A leading lady to admire maybe, certainly a leading lady to make you think.

And Corinna is on the spot when a dead body is discovered in a vat of molten clay. Murder!

Nicholson doubts Corinna’s innocence, but he is drawn to her …

The mystery, and the investigation of two crimes that may or may not be linked, is very well handled.

And everything is underpinned by utterly believable human relationships and some clear psychological insight. Things that make for the best mysteries, I think.

The story unfolds in three acts:

■What Happened
■What Happened Before
■What Happened After

It’s interesting, and just a slightly more structured approach to the way many works of crime fiction have been written. The opening was certainly attention-grabbing but, for me, the history of what happened before the murder was a little slow and the events after a little rushed.

But that’s a minor quibble, and there was much here to enjoy

The sense of place was wonderful. The pottery lived and breathed, and I had no doubt that Mary Kelly had done her research, and that she had used it well.

The sense of period was perfect too. I would have known that the book was set in the early sixties without reading the date and without any specific references to dates or events in the text. And the author marshalls her characters well to make some subtle but telling points about the their lives and choices.

Nicholson’s character was my only other quibble. I found him to be a little inconsistent, but I’m prepared to write that off to the conflict between his personal and professional instincts as pretty much everything else was very well done.

The world that Mary Kelly created, the characters she created, and the story that she told were fascinating.

And I have to say the The Spoilt Kill is more than worthy of its Golden Dagger and a fine addition to Virago’s list. ( )