In reviewing The Christmas Egg, Boucher expressed the hope that Nightingale would return. What he (like almost everyone else) failed to realise is that, in a very oblique passage in The Spoilt Kill, Kelly had effectively killed off her first series detective in a car crash. Nicholson reappeared in her next novel, but he, too, was quickly abandoned. After that, she concentrated on writing stand-alone novels, and although her style was too understated for her ever to achieve bestseller status, she retained a devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses… Such conscientiousness may sound dull. In fact, however, it is all in a flight with the gentle, witty, profound acuity with which her characters are treated.”
Yet there was something willful, as well as something admirable, about the way that, throughout her career as a novelist, Mary Kelly defied the conventions and commercial imperatives that guide the fortunes of almost all writers. Her publishers, not surprisingly, began to despair of her. So did some critics. Even her admirers admitted to some frustration.
An example was H.R.F. Keating, who opened an essay about her books in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers as follows: “One of the best contemporary British crime writers, but: such must be the verdict on Mary Kelly.” Keating regretted the fact that she published so infrequently, and felt that she skimped sometimes on plotting, but emphasised that “there is enormous pleasure to be got from her books…what propels the reader through the pages is…the sheer excellence of the writing…from her very first sentence Mary Kelly observes so meticulously, describes so exactly and economically. Hers is a never-blinking eye.”
Mary Theresa Coolican was born in London on 28 December 1927. She was educated at a convent and at Edinburgh University, where she met her future husband, Denis Kelly (to whom I am indebted for sharing his loving and fascinating memories of her). After marriage and graduation, she worked as an auxiliary nurse and, like Denis, as a teacher; her first permanent post was as a teacher of Latin and English at the Convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Beckenham.
She enjoyed detective fiction, including the novels of Michael Innes and Dorothy L. Sayers, and the clear structure of the classic genre appealed to her; she often likened the Golden Age of Murder between the wars to the era of sonnets and sonneteers. At one point, her publisher promoted her as “the new Dorothy L. Sayers,” but this was wide of the mark. Mary Kelly’s writing was nothing like Sayers’s, far less Christie’s. Satisfaction with the plots of her books always eluded her.