The Christmas Egg

“No guts, these people,” said Tim at length, with something of the chill of an upper civil servant condemning a lapse into humanity.

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…

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.

The Christmas Egg consolidated Kelly’s developing reputation as a quirky, intelligent crime novelist, but she was never interested in following fashion or working to a template. Later, in an excess of modesty that seems typical of her, she would describe the three Nightingale books as “sins of my youth”.