Due to a Death

Review to come - I am not exactly sure how I feel about this book yet This was a shockingly depressing story. Initially, I was rather disengaged with the story especially due to the way men treated Agnes, the main character of this story. Perhaps, it was done intentionally to represent how little soc......more

I’d never heard of Mary Kelly but my wife, who loves to experiment with new authors, picked up the British Library Crime Classics edition of Due to a Death from our local library. If she likes the writing she’ll read out the odd sentence or two to me: I got quite a few from Due to a Death. I’m not p......more

At just over 200 pages, this is a slender book by modern standards. Mary Kelly (1927-2017) is a new author to me, but I was intrigued to read that her novel The Spoilt Kill won the Crime Writers Association ‘Golden Dagger’ award in 1961. Despite its brevity, I found it to be both a troubling and a de......more

Well it’s not 2 star, but it’s probably not 3 either. I can’t say I enjoyed, I found the pace slow, the dialogue verging on confusing and the climax, well, pretty anticlimactic. I didn’t really appreciate the dark and fairly uncomfortable tone either. That said, there were some interesting characters......more

British 60s noir. Excellent.......more