The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly

 

The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly

published 1961

 

My friend Christine(Chrissie) Poulson recommended The Spoilt Kill to me and I am very grateful: it was an excellent, thought-provoking read. It has a fascinating setting in the Potteries, the towns in the UK where household china is made, and Mary Kelly plainly knew her stuff.

The book opens with the discovery of a body, with very few details. There is then a long section called What Happened Before, bringing us back up to that point, and for the first time we find the identity of the victim. And then the book moves into What Happened After.

It’s a first person narrative from a man who has been employed on the quiet to investigate a problem at Shentall’s pottery – not murder, of course, at this stage, but a question of pirated designs. This obviously gives him licence to ask nosey questions, and find out all about the business, and tell us at the same time.

A key suspect is the very talented designer Corinna, a young widow who has moved to the area from elsewhere (while most employees are local). The private eye – who is pretending to be writing a history of the firm – has to find out about her, but is plainly attracted to her, and unsure what to do next. We meet other employees, carefully described and defined, and with a lot of attention to layers of class and snobbery…

If I had read the book with no clues I would have been convinced that the author was male (something discussed on the blog last year) – except for one early indicator. That is the mentions of Corinna having her period, which I feel would not have been described in that way by a male author at that date.

‘Headache?’ I asked.

She looked at me sullenly. ‘My insides enjoying their revenge, that’s all. Something you never have to take into account.’

 

I ended the book with no idea of the narrator’s first name – no-one seems to use it. It is Hedley, weirdly enough (discovered from other books by Kelly), what kind of a name is that?

As opposed to Corrina. Glancing mention is made of the traditional American folk song Corrina Corrina (there are various versions of the title, ways of spelling the repeated name). Bob Dylan has an incredibly beautiful romantic version of the song, but it seems unlikely Kelly could have known that one in 1961, as it was first recorded in 1962 (and turned up on  The Freewheeling Bob Dylan in 1963).

Most of the book reads like a literary novel of the era: there is amazing depth of character, and a fascinating picture of life at the time. I was saying recently (in a post on a Nigel Balchin book) how much I liked descriptions of office life, and here was something even better: the factory, the art room, the switchboard, even the man on the gate.

People come on tours of the factory, and Corinna shows them round:

‘Visitors!’ She shot a sour look out of the window at the kilns and the leaden sky. ‘You’d think the place was a spa, the way they come.’

And a fleeting scene in the canteen, as workers discuss the crossword and plan a weekend outing to a beauty spot. One of the employees, Freddy, has a party in his house which enables us to get to know everyone better.

He led me into a room that ran from front to back of the house. Most of its furniture had been taken out, but prominent among what remained, pushed against the walls, was a long sideboard, the whole of the top of which was stacked with bottles and glasses in profusion. The cleared floor space was crammed with dancing couples, half the girls from the works, it seemed, floating their short skirts like powder-puff Christmas presents.

There was a reasonable attempt to let us know what everyone is wearing,

Gillian! She was an icicle, a narrow brittle icicle wrapped in a tightly belted scarlet raincoat that exactly matched her lipstick and flattered her crisp black hair and blue eyes.

 

There’s this rather sad comment on Corinna’s life, on a matter of standard Clothes in Books interest:

When you live alone you’re either in bed or out of it, you can’t bring yourself a cup of tea, or breakfast; so there’s no call for bedjackets. She’d put on a grey cardigan, over which the collar of her nightdress was caught up like a ruff.

 

And this complex thought, in relation to teaching:

And no one can blame children for not feeling pity, that highly conscious application of experience.

Truly, it was a book full of interest in many different ways.

After I’d read it, I asked Chrissie for her views, and this is what she said:

The Spoilt Kill. I was fascinated by it partly because I spent time in the Potteries in the late 1970s when I was doing a PhD at Keele and also worked on ceramics when I was an Assistant Keeper at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery shortly afterward. So I liked all the detail of how things were made and then the tone of the novel … SK was published in 1961, but it is really the 1950s of course with its attitudes to sex and the clothes, maybe even a touch of Chandler in its world-weary PI. It has such a distinctive flavour.

 

A great description, Chrissie, and thanks again for excellent recommendation.

The man working a kiln is from the US National Archives, a pottery in Tennessee.

The collection of bowls is from the state archives of North Carolina.

Party picture by Frederic Varady.

Woman in blue – 60s fashions from an Australian magazine.