Profiles of Martha Grimes' Writings
from Contemporary Authors Online
Martha Grimes's mystery novels have prompted critics to commend the wit
and elegance of her writing and to compare her work to that of such
masters of the classic British detective story as Dorothy Sayers, Margery
Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Agatha Christie. Unlike her celebrated
predecessors, however, Grimes is an American rather than a native Briton
and relies on frequent trips to England and knowledge gleaned from reading
and research to supply her with materials from which to create her stories'
settings and her characters' backgrounds and dialects.
Grimes's idea for her first novel was sparked by a British pub name, and
she has continued in each subsequent novel to use a British pub as both
the title and part of the setting. Grimes told Washington Post reporter
Sarah Booth Conroy in 1983: "I remember vividly when I decided to write
my first mystery. I had written a narrative poem and another novel,
neither published. But in 1977, I was sitting in a Hot Shoppe in Bethesda
[Maryland], looking at a book about English pub names, and I came across
'The Man With a Load of Mischief'. Suddenly I knew that's what I wanted
to do: write books set in English pubs.... Now, unless I have the pub name
first, I can't write the book." In addition to bearing the name of a pub, all
of Grimes's novels feature as their main characters Richard Jury, a
handsome, dedicated, sensitive, and urbane Scotland Yard detective;
Jury's aristocratic, agreeable, yet dilettantish assistant, Melrose Plant,
whom critics consider a literary descendant of Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter
Wimsey; and Plant's obnoxious, snobby, interfering, American-born Aunt
Agatha.
Grimes's first detective novel concerns five murders in the English village of
Long Piddleton. One of the murder victims is drowned in a keg of ale at the
village pub called The Man With a Load of Mischief. In the course of his
investigation into the Long Piddleton murders, Inspector Jury and the
reader make the acquaintance of a number of eccentric villagers who are
suspects in the case. According to Jean M. White, in her Washington Post
Book World review of The Man With a Load of Mischief, the denouement of
Grimes's "tangled plot" is "untidy." But White, who commented that Grimes
"has learned her sleight-of-hand from Christie and delights in the rich
characterization of Marsh," concluded that this untidiness was "a minor
complaint for readers who value wit, atmosphere, and charm in their
mysteries."
In Grimes's second novel, The Old Fox Deceiv'd, Jury solves a series of
mysterious deaths and disappearances connected with the Crael family
household. Set in a Yorkshire fishing village, the story opens with the
discovery of a corpse wearing a costume from a Shakespearean play in an
alley near the pub that gives this book its name. A New Yorker critic
judged The Old Fox Deceiv'd "a pleasure from that classic start to its
equally classic finish." White remarked that Grimes had improved upon the
plot of her first novel and concluded: "This time Grimes has put it all
together with a tidy plot with a clever twist, an assortment of fetching
characters," and "sly wit and atmosphere." Charles Champlin, in his Los
Angeles Times Book Review critique of The Old Fox Deceiv'd, deemed
Grimes "a new and charming American disciple" of the classic detective
novel genre whose writing "confirms that the spirit of Mmes. Christie,
Allingham and Sayers.... lives on."
In 1983 Grimes won the Nero Wolfe Award for best mystery of the year
and garnered much critical acclaim for her third mystery, The Anodyne
Necklace. The book's setting is divided between London's East End and the
British village of Littleborne. Its plot centers on murders in both locations
and their connection to a jewelry theft. Jury performs much of his
detective work while watching gamesters play Wizards and Warlocks in the
Littleborne pub called The Anodyne Necklace. New York Times Book
Review critic Newgate Callendar noted that the plot of this book "is
carefully structured, including the surprise ending." He considered Grimes
to be "a superior writer who brings a strong touch of poetry to her
imagery." White, reviewing The Anodyne Necklace in the Washington Post
Book World, called attention to the eccentric villagers of Littleborne and
the "marvelously alive characters" with which Grimes peoples London's East
End, noting that Grimes's "rowdies are masters of communication in street
jargon." White further remarked that Grimes possesses a "sharply
observant eye for social comedy while offering sly detection" and deemed
The Anodyne Necklace "a literate, witty, stylishly crafted mystery of
detection in the finest British tradition." Callendar, however, qualified
Grimes's part in this tradition, refuting the idea that Grimes is a
"combination of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers" and asserting that
The Anodyne Necklace "is stamped with the author's own exquisite
sensibility."
Callendar considered Grimes's next book, The Dirty Duck, to be "even
better than The Anodyne Necklace." Commenting that "it is hard to
overpraise this book," the critic described it as a "beautifully written" and
"well-worked-out murder mystery with something of a surprise ending."
White also praised Grimes's writing in The Dirty Duck, noting that the
author "is in good form with her literate style and witty eye" and that she
"could hardly miss" with the "assortment of colorful characters" portrayed
in The Dirty Duck. Many of these characters, aside from the usual trio of
Jury, Plant, and Plant's Aunt Agatha, are rich Americans touring Britain
who find themselves the targets of a razor- brandishing murderer. One of
the tourists, a computer buff, is determined to prove that Shakespeare
was involved in the 1593 slaying of his literary rival Christopher Marlowe.
Coincidentally, the murders, which take place in London and
Stratford-on-Avon, home of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Theatre, are
linked by quotations from Elizabethan poetry that the murderer leaves next
to the victims' bodies. In the end, the controversy surrounding Marlowe's
death, in conjunction with the killer's poetic clues, provides the key to the
identity of the tourists' slayer.
The Jerusalem Inn, Grimes's fifth mystery, features a classic British
mystery situation--the house party--and begins with an aborted romance.
While Jury spends the Christmas season with unpleasant relatives in the
English countryside, he shares a poignant moment with a woman he meets
in a graveyard. Before their acquaintance can develop, however, she is
found murdered. Jury joins the investigation into the woman's death, and
shortly thereafter another killing occurs in a nearby hall, where Jury's
assistant, Plant, his Aunt Agatha, and their friend Vivian are staying as
part of a holiday house party composed of eccentric, artsy aristocrats.
Jury solves the two murder cases, which turn out to be connected, and
does so in part through clues to the victims' past that he finds in the local
Jerusalem Inn.
Help the Poor Struggler is a tale of revenge and child murder set near
Dorset, England. In this book Grimes introduces Brian Macalvie, a cynical,
experienced chief constable with whom Jury must work to find the party
responsible for a series of child killings. Macalvie, meeting Jury at a bleak,
shabby pub called Help the Poor Struggler, aids Jury by linking the recent
murders to one that occurred twenty years earlier and resulted in an
erroneous murder conviction. According to a Time critic, the book is
written with ""a deadly earnest tone and a climactic burst of violence
befitting its story of long-calculated revenge." Robert Barnard, reviewing
Help the Poor Struggler in the Washington Post Book World, also noticed a
shift towards solemnity in Grimes's tone and viewed it with favor,
commenting: "The best thing about [Grimes's] early books was a
Sayers-like boisterous humor, and it is odd to find that growing
seriousness suits Grimes as it never did Sayers. Where Sayers became dull,
Grimes takes on a new tautness and purpose." Barnard, an Englishman,
also remarked that in Help the Poor Struggler Grimes find-turned her
portrayals of English society, which, according to Barnard, had in earlier
books been a "slight but disconcerting bit off-key, out of focus."
Concluded Barnard: "There are still mistakes, often in dialogue..., but the
feel is now right, the narrative confident and convincing.... One hopes
that Martha Grimes' readership will grow so large that she can take a
sabbatical year or two in Britain.... and add that top layer of total
confidence to her picture of British life."
-- from Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001. Reproduced in
Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2002.
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