Martha Grimes

• Born: May 2, 1931
• Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; amateur sleuth; psychological; cozy

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Richard Jury and Melrose Plant, 1981-; Emma Graham, 1996-

Contribution

Martha Grimes’s mysteries, despite their familiar British surroundings and English eccentrics, defy the usual categorization. Her plots partake of the best of many schools—amateur sleuth, police procedural, psychological study, private investigator—without succumbing to the limitations of any given type. This rare versatility is largely the result of two strategies: the pairing of a Scotland Yard detective with an aristocratic amateur sleuth and a sustained attention to atmosphere.

The two detectives—Detective Superintendent Richard Jury and Melrose Plant—are idealizations from different worlds, a slightly oddball team containing one man from the metropolis and one from the country. Grimes’s control of the atmosphere in which these two operate marks an exceptional talent. Not a single detail is without design. The novel titles are drawn from pub names (her trademark), the poetic imagery alternates delicious humor and somber apprehensions, and the rolling montage technique combines Grimes’s uniquely wrought mysteries.

Biography

Martha Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was reared in western Maryland, and worked and lived in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and England. Her father died when she was a child, and her mother operated a summer resort near Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, to support the family, which included an older brother, Bill. After earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Maryland, Grimes went on to the University of Iowa, where she studied poetry. She taught English at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland, for fourteen years and also taught a seminar on detective fiction as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University. She was married briefly.

After Grimes worked for some time on her poetry, she recognized that the suspense, drama, and death in her poems were strong indicators that her real strength as a writer would be detective fiction. There were several years of rejection slips before The Man with the Load of Mischief was published in 1981.

Grimes’s fascination with England began during a romance with an English writer. She began taking annual extended visits gathering material. Although the English setting is necessary to her work, she found the perspective she gained from living in the United States to be equally important. As much as she has been compared with , Grimes’s composition process is unlike that of Christie, who plotted her stories from the end backward. Grimes’s work is expressionist in more than imagery alone. She determines “whodunit” only after most of the story is written. Grimes’s talent has gained recognition, although she is still underrated. Her third novel, The Anodyne Necklace, won the Nero Wolfe Award for the best mystery of 1983.

Analysis

Martha Grimes, poet and English professor, was sitting in Bethesda, Maryland, poring over a book on British pub names, when she was struck with a vision of her future: writing mysteries set in and around British pubs. Loving both British mysteries and England itself, she saw the pub as the symbolic heart of British daily life and as the natural gathering place for the closed society so necessary to the classic detective story. On her frequent trips to England, she studied small villages and their pubs, absorbing the atmosphere and observing the people.

With the pubs go the eccentric characters of the English mystery tradition. At the start, Grimes had intended Melrose Plant to be the central figure in her series. Eccentric in having dispensed with his claims to nobility, he would be surrounded by other humorous characters, noteworthy for some quirk, talent, or obsession. His Aunt Agatha, for example, one of the most unswervingly obnoxious women in a mystery series, will never forgive her nephew for thwarting her pretensions to titled eminence. His butler, Ruthven, is as self-possessed as Jeeves and as accomplished in domestic feats as Bunter. In the village of Long Piddleton, Dick Scroggs is the inventive proprietor of the Jack and Hammer, where Marshall Trueblood, antique dealer, and flashy dresser, usually shares the drink of the day with the lovely, well-bred Vivian Rivington or perhaps with the old char, Mrs. Withersby.

At some undetermined point, the character of Detective Superintendent Richard Jury was developed, and he was a different sort of detective from Plant. Jury became increasingly important until each man had his own role. This development was something Grimes had to defend to her publisher, who finally agreed to the notion of a shared working relationship, a cooperative, fifty-fifty arrangement. Grimes argued that her books simply could not succeed if either man’s role were diminished. When Jury is in London, another set of eccentrics comes on the scene. At Jury’s flat, he is sandwiched between the headstrong Carole-Anne on the second floor and the fearful Mrs. Wassermann in the basement, both of whom long to see him married. On the job, Jury is complemented by his sidekick, the eternally sniffling Wiggins, his voluble and luxury-loving boss Racer, the winsome Fiona Clingmore, and the mischievous feline Cyril. However much Racer tries to make Jury’s life miserable, it is clear that he is mere bluster. Like the milieu of the pub in Long Pidd (as Long Piddleton is known), the scene at the Yard is a comic one.

As important as the collection of engaging characters is the world created for them, and this world Grimes suggests with a wide range of British idioms, clear and concrete descriptions of interior as well as exterior settings (details of furniture, dress, dinnerware, the quality of daylight), and delicately rendered nuances of feeling in conversation. Music, too, underlines the shifting moods as the atmosphere alternates from light to dark. As carefully observed and accurate as these details are, their cumulative effect is not what might be expected. The details are selected precisely for their power to convey the romantic illusion of the classic British mystery.

In 1983, Grimes wrote about the willing suspension of disbelief so enjoyed by the loyal readers of this sort of mystery. So keen was she on researching Scotland Yard that she even read several official reports of the commissioner to the queen, attempted unsuccessfully to interview former convicts, and, if one is to take her in earnest, visited the plate-glass and steel edifice on Victoria Street in the company of a man who claimed that he was being poisoned. Regardless of the absolute veracity of the account of that visit, Grimes herself was under no delusion about her purpose:

Although I wanted to know the red-tape details, I didn’t want to use them. My sort of mystery is far more an exercise in deduction and an occasion to give free play to a dozen or so cranky types than it is a “true” account of how Scotland Yard operates.

The reader does not really want to know, Grimes concluded, about the level of police corruption in London or that the Yard is not really called in on complicated cases out in the provinces—“not even in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper.” The reader wants the conventions that are the stuff of his dreams.

With the research accomplished, the next logical step is usually the plotting. However, Grimes typically would not know who the murderer was before Jury did. She could not outline the story in advance, she said. She did not even have a central murder in mind when she began writing. This unconscious method of composition is quite consistent with the expressionist style she chose and with her assertion that this kind of mystery was the stuff of dreams. While Grimes’s conscious mind would be occupied selecting the details of the atmosphere appropriate to the unthinkable deed, her unconscious would devise the motive and the means for a death—shockingly out of place, yet consistent with the mood.

Perhaps Grimes’s greatest strength, given the doubling of detectives, the pairing of metropolis and village, and the two levels of story development, conscious and unconscious, is the montage effect she manipulates so dexterously. She brings her poetic talents to bear, accenting imagery, and she has a delicious sense of humor that she uses to relieve her more somber passages. This rapid alternation of mood, character, setting, and action is admirably suited to the two most important requirements of the detective to plot forward movement and diversion. Montage serves as camouflage.

The Five Bells and Bladebone

The Five Bells and Bladebone (1987) is a particularly good example of this doubling, of contrasting moods, and of alternating perspectives. Its plot involves the classic problem of identity. The pub for which this book is named is located in London’s East End, the Limehouse district. It is a place with a murderous reputation, which the story’s opening sentences feelingly invoke:

What else could you think of but getting your throat slit?

Whitechapel, Shadwell, the Ratcliffe Highway: images of the bloody East End flashed like knives in and out of Sadie Diver’s mind each time she heard the sound of footsteps behind her on the dark walk from Limehouse. She was still thinking of it as her heels clicked wetly on the fog-draped pavements of Wapping. Never caught him either, did they-so much for the police.

These are the thoughts of Sadie Diver as she walks toward a life-or-death encounter on a slimy slipway along the Thames. No sooner has this abrupt and chilling immersion into suspense occurred than the scene is shifted to another character in another place: Tommy Diver, Sadie’s romantic kid brother, is standing on the Thames dock downriver, anticipating a trip to see his sister the next day; then, as abruptly as before, the scene shifts to formal gardens and the perspective of a hungry white cat stalking a dark moving shadow, then licking a bloody paw.

Three dark views, three tangentially related fragments of action, make up the first chapter lightened, in chapter 2 by yet another kaleidoscopic shift, this time to the Jack and Hammer in Long Pidd. Melrose Plant is waiting, crossword puzzle in hand, for his friend Richard Jury, who has two weeks’ vacation and wants to spend it in the quiet countryside. Bedeviling Plant, as he waits, is Dick, the pub’s proprietor, who is making improvements to the place with his hammer, and Aunt Agatha, who is limping about on a bandaged ankle and badgering her nephew about Jury’s time of arrival. Plant begins entering words such as “dolt” and “nit” in his crossword as he struggles to retain his composure despite Agatha’s abuse. When Vivian and Marshall arrive, things do not improve for the former earl. More four-letter words come to Melrose as he begins inventing answers to the questions shot his way. Jury’s car has broken down, he tells them, writing in F-O-O-L, and he has met an old flame; they are having tea at the Woburn turn off while the car is being fixed. Thus, Grimes bedazzles her audience as she juggles time and tone, clues and characters.

Once Jury does arrive in Long Pidd, the two detectives discover the first body (Sadie Diver’s is found later). Plant and Jury come upon the body of Simon Lean, the ne’er-do-well son-in-law of Lady Summerston of Watermeadows, whose body has been stuffed into a desk that had just been delivered to Marshall’s shop. The teamwork begins with Plant supplying local connections and perceptive consultation and Jury calling in London officials and conducting interviews.

Both men are romantic idealizations, each in his own way. Jury, for his part, can authorize certain police procedures, but he never seems to depend on technicians. According to Grimes, he moves too slowly, listens too patiently, and is too affable to be taken as the real thing. He operates as a professional but without the taint of hard-boiled realism. His deductions come to him, as often as not, through an imaginative synthesis. It is Plant who asks, soon after Lean’s body is taken away by the police, “Was the killer trying to conceal or reveal?” The brainy Plant is, from an American point of view at any rate, the ideal aristocrat—one who has withdrawn his allegiance from the aristocracy and simply takes life as it comes in the English village. When Jury realizes that Lean’s wife, Hannah, and the dead Sadie are lookalikes, he brings his deductions to Plant for closer consideration.

The question of identity on which the plot turns becomes increasingly ambiguous as images of water mount. The proper names alone seem to be clues—Watermeadows, Sadie Diver, Ruby Firth (one of Simon’s lady friends), Roy Marsh (Ruby’s jealous companion)—but the real clues waver like lights on water or evaporate like a mirage when approached. Grimes shows that legal proof of identity is anything but certain. It is possible, as Jury says, to take someone’s identity away from him, to wipe out a life. Ultimately, the reader wonders if one can ever know who anyone else really is.

The Lamorna Wink

The Lamorna Wink (1999) presents a departure for Grimes, granting the elegant and aristocratic Melrose Plant his first starring role in a series built primarily around Richard Jury. In this novel, with Jury away in Northern Ireland, Plant lands in the midst of a mystery while seeking solitude in Cornwall. Sleight of hand and deception color the tone of this story, and Grimes again fills her pages with exceptional characters. Plant embarks on his journey to Cornwall in high spirits, delighting in simple acts such as riding on a train. As he imagines dark, mysterious pasts for his fellow passengers based on old films, the inescapable Aunt Agatha interrupts his reverie. Horrified to learn that Agatha is “coincidentally” traveling to Cornwall as well, Plant resigns himself to an altered holiday and amuses himself by ordering her a pot of poison at the Woodbine Tearoom in Bletchley village.

The order is taken by Johnny Wells, a jack-of-all-trades teenager working three jobs to pay his way through school. Johnny’s fascination with magic helps fuel the undertone of trickery prevalent throughout the tale. The preternaturally mature youth quickly endears himself to Plant by offering to entertain Agatha for an afternoon. Plant wastes no time and immediately seeks out and rents a house in the village. Interest piqued by photos of the family renting the house, Plant soon learns that the family’s two children died in a tragic accident four years earlier. In the midst of this serious and reflective scene, Grimes’s inimitable style shines through as she deftly weaves humor into Plant’s search of the house. As he turns a corner expecting to see a portrait of a young and tragic heroine wandering in the mist, he comes face to face with a painting of...chickens. In the village, forced to choose between cafés called the Drowned Man and the Die Is Cast (the Poor Soul café didn’t even make it into the running), Plant determines that Bletchley may be the first “village noir” of England.

Johnny’s aunt Chris, part owner of the tearoom, disappears without a trace one evening soon after Plant’s arrival. Eager to help his new friend, Plant calls on Divisional Commander Brian Macalvie of the Devon and Cornwall constabulary, who is in the area investigating a mysterious homicide in the town of Lamorna Cove (home of the Lamorna Wink pub) a few miles away. This novel offers startling insights into Macalvie’s character. Previously described as committed, driven, and extraordinarily demanding, with a cobalt gaze that “could strip you with a look,” Macalvie unveils a past riddled with tragedy.

Morris Bletchley, an American millionaire who made his fortune with fast-food chicken restaurants, bought the country house of a hard-luck aristocrat and turned it into a high-class hospice, where he enjoys careening full-tilt through the hallways in a borrowed wheelchair. As the grandfather of the drowned children, Bletchley believes there is more to that accident than meets the eye. As it happens, Macalvie led the investigation of the drowning and shares Bletchley’s opinion.

The story unfolds in typical Grimes style, meandering through the lives and thoughts of the characters, allowing glimpses here and there into the complexities of relationships. Her incomparable use of imagery and ability to capture a scene with a few well-chosen words remain her greatest strengths as a writer and set her apart from others in the mystery genre.

Also of note is how Grimes seamlessly changes the feeling of a story from tragic to humorous. Those familiar with the series welcome the return of the Long Piddleton crowd as Vivian sets a date to marry her Venetian fiancé (again), unleashing a hilarious chain of events as her friends think of ways to stop the wedding. Jury’s return in the eleventh hour allows readers to witness the engaging banter between him and Plant just before the answer is revealed, and the solution to the case exposes a dark side of the human spirit that will shock even the most jaded reader.

Grimes faced the wrath of disappointed Jury fans when she published Hotel Paradise (1996), introducing a twelve-year-old crime fighter named Emma Graham. Apart from a knack for tracking down serial killers, the heroine is a close self-portrait of the author at the same age. Despite resistance to Emma from readers, Grimes followed up her initial adventure with Cold Flat Junction (2001), Belle Ruin (2005), and Fadeaway Girl (2011), which were warmly received by critics. Alarming readers, Grimes arranged for the temporary “death” of Richard Jury in The Blue Last (2001), returning her to the best-seller lists after a decade. Jury himself returned two years later in The Grave Maurice (2002). This novel was followed by The Winds of Change (2004), The Old Wine Shades (2006), Dust (2007), The Black Cat (2010), Vertigo 42 (2014), The Knowledge (2018), and The Old Success (2019). Grimes continues to combine extensive research with excellent writing to produce an elegant, engaging mystery.

Principal Series Characters:

• Detective Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard rises from chief inspector to superintendent. Urbane, handsome and compassionate, he turns women’s heads but remains unattached. He is helped by Melrose Plant and Sergeant Alfred Wiggins.
• Melrose Plant, Jury’s friend, and an amateur sleuth, lives in the village of Long Piddleton in Northamptonshire. Single, well-educated, and rich by birth, he is Lord Ardry, but he has given up his titles.
• Emma Graham is a twelve-year-old Maryland girl based largely on her creator’s adolescent self.

Bibliography

Campbell, Mary. “Grimes’ Dust Nothing to Sneeze At.” Review of Dust, by Martha Grimes. Sunday Gazette-Mail, April 8, 2007, p. 5F.

Grimes, Martha. "Author." Martha Grimes, www.marthagrimes.com/author-info. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Grimes, Martha. “Killing Time with Martha Grimes: Mystery Writer Reflects on Twenty-five Years with Jury.” Interview by Oline H. Cogdill. The Ottawa Citizen, April 9, 2006, p. C7.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2nd ed. Greenwood Press, 2007.

Strafford, Jay. “Emma Graham, Girl Detective, Returns.” Review of Belle Ruin, by Martha Grimes. Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 28, 2005, p. K3.