The Nature of Things

I had thought that Martha Grimes was finished with her Richard Jury mysteries. Then I ran across a note in one of the book review sections that I read about this book that was published this year. It is the twenty-fifth in a series that has been running since 1981. Since I had read all the previous twenty-four, it seemed incumbent on me to read this one, too. The thing about Richard Jury and all his posse of fellow characters that readers have come to know over the years is that they never age. When the series started way back in the prehistorical days of the '80s, Jury and his sidekick and best friend Lord Ardry, aka Melrose Plant, were dashing, devastatingly attractive, upper class, 40ish Englishmen. Now, almost forty years later, they still appear to be dashing, devastatingly attractive, upper class, 40ish Englishmen. If only I knew where to find their fountain of youth! All of Grimes' well-loved characters appear in this tale. It starts when the murdered body of a Frenchwom...

Vertigo 42: A Richard Jury Mystery by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars The books in Martha Grimes' Richard Jury series often are rich in literary and film references and this one is no exception. The homage to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo is perhaps obvious from the title, but there are also overt references to Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, as well as more subtle nods to Oscar Wilde and even the Bard himself, Shakespeare. It all makes for a fun game for the reader, a kind of hide-and-go-seek, which is an actual game that plays a part in one of the mysterious deaths of the plot. Once again, Jury is called upon to investigate a cold case, this time as a favor to a friend. Seventeen years before, Tess Williamson died in a fall down stone steps in the garden of her house in Devon. The verdict on the death was left open, as no definitive conclusion could be reached, but the inspector in charge of the investigation at the time leaned toward an accidental death due ...

The Black Cat by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars After the disappointment of Dust , I found Martha Grimes to be a bit more back to form with this penultimate entry in her Richard Jury series. It had dogs and cats and children and the recurring characters that we've come to expect in the series. The plot was pretty well done and there were plenty of red herrings as well as foreshadowing of clues to send us toward the solution. Moreover, in this one, the Long Piddleton contingent made only a very brief and mostly unannoying appearance. That was a plus. On the other hand, there was a bit too much of the non-verbal communication between the dog, Mungo, and the cat, Morris (a female cat, by the way), as they tried to make the stupid humans see the truth. There were a few chapters that were seen through the eyes of the animals and which we spent inside their heads. Just a bit too precious, but Grimes really can't seem to control herself when it comes to her animal characters;...

Dust by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Back to one of my guilty reading pleasures as a break from some of the more serious reading I've done lately. Martha Grimes' Richard Jury series fits the bill for that. I must say though that this time the reading was more guilt than pleasure. Guilt, as in "Why am I wasting my time reading this?" This is the 21st entry in this series. We are nearing the end. I believe there are a couple left, although Grimes may write more. In such a long series, one expects hits and misses. I would put this one more on the "miss" side. In the end, I gave it a VERY generous three stars, mostly for old time's sake; in actuality, it probably deserved two-and-a-half at best. The first problem with the book is its plot. A young man is shot to death on the balcony of his room at a trendy Clerkenwell hotel. The body is discovered by young Benny Keegan who is working at the hotel. Benny and his dog Sparky once saved Richard Jury...

The Old Wine Shades by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars A man walks into a pub and starts telling a story to a stranger. The stranger is Superintendent Richard Jury of New Scotland Yard and the storyteller allegedly has no idea who he is. Over the next three nights, he returns to the bar to meet with Jury and continue telling him his baffling story. The story concerns a woman who has disappeared, along with her nine-year-old son and their dog. The man claims the woman is (was?) the wife of a friend of his, a physicist who is now in a psychiatric hospital, having suffered a breakdown because of the unexplained disappearances. The disappearance occurred some nine months before. The woman, child, and dog had gone to Surrey to look at some property. The couple was considering moving there. They looked at one house and had tea with the residents and then went on to a second property. The woman was seen there but neither she nor her son have been seen since, seemingly having vanished i...

The Winds of Change by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Child abduction. Human trafficking. Pedophilia. Child murder. Martha Grimes' series of so-called "cozy" mysteries has certainly taken a turn to the dark side with the last two or three entries that I've read. None has been darker than this one, number 19, The Winds of Change. It starts with the inexplicable murder of a tiny girl. Found cast aside like garbage on a London street, she's five or six years old and nameless. No one immediately comes forward to claim her. She has been shot in the back. Who would want to murder a small child? Superintendent Richard Jury begins his investigation and soon learns that there is a pedophilia ring operating in the area. A number of small girls are kept prisoner in a house to serve the sick desires of some of the local upstanding businessmen, but police have been unable to gather the evidence needed for probable cause to raid the house and break up the ring. (This be...

The Grave Maurice by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book started out as a sort of homage to Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time , sometimes referred to as the best mystery ever written. Like the protagonist in that book, we find Superintendent Richard Jury laid up in a hospital bed and unable to pursue his usual occupation. He needs distraction. Sergeant Wiggins brings him Tey's book to read and his doctor provides him with a much more current mystery. When last we saw Jury (in The Blue Last ) he was lying grievously wounded on a dock. He was found there by a dog and his boy and by his friend Melrose Plant. His life was saved and now he's in recovery, soon to be released. But in the meantime, his mind needs something to occupy it. His surgeon catches his interest with a mystery from his own life. Two years earlier, his fifteen-year-old daughter had vanished without a trace along with a champion thoroughbred that she was tending at her grandfather's stud fa...

The Blue Last by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars All the usual Martha Grimes ingredients are here: precocious and charming children; clever cats and dogs; quirky villages and villagers; memories of World War II; quaintly named pubs, of course; in London, Richard Jury, Wiggins, Cyril the Cat, Carole-Ann, and Mrs. Wasserman, and in Long Piddleton, Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, Aunt Agatha, and all the other villagers we've come to know and expect. And, naturally, there is the typical convoluted Grimes plot that bobs and weaves and circles back on itself. In Grimes books, it is always the journey itself that is most satisfying; often, the conclusion is less so. That is the case with this book. A friend of Jury's in the City of London police asks his assistance in solving a mystery. Some bones have recently been uncovered on the site of a pub, "The Blue Last," that was destroyed in the blitz during World War II. They are the bones of a woman and child. Ostensi...

The Lamorna Wink by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars This sixteenth entry in the "Richard Jury Mysteries" is actually a Melrose Plant mystery. Richard Jury only makes a brief appearance in the story at the end of the book during the wrapping up phase. The hook of the story is that Jury is in Ireland on Scotland Yard business and his friend Melrose, bored with his existence in Northumberland and hoping to get away from Aunt Agatha, decides to rent a house for three months in Cornwall. Of course, there is no easy escape from Agatha and soon she is ensconced in Cornwall as well, staying at a B-and-B and learning the real estate trade from her new friend there. The house which Melrose has chosen to rent is right out of Rebecca or Jamaica Inn or some other Daphne du Maurier tale. It exudes an air of tragedy, even in the harsh beauty of its surroundings. Melrose wonders from where the feeling of sadness and mystery which surrounds the house emanates. He doesn't have to ...

The Stargazey by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well into Martha Grimes' Richard Jury series, one finds the quality of each individual book sometimes a bit hit or miss. This one was definitely a hit for me. I enjoyed it quite a lot, even though I suspected pretty early on who the culprit(s) was(were). Or maybe it was because I figured it out pretty early and was able to watch Jury and his friend Melrose Plant struggle to the same conclusion. It's a somewhat complicated plot with definite noir tendencies. It involves art forgery and theft, the consequences of political murder, the activities of a professional assassin, a couple of murders, and has the usual characters from Northants that we have come to expect and enjoy, as well as the London contingent of Scotland Yard, cats and dogs, Jury's neighbors, and the quirky Cripps family. Yes, all the essential elements are here and Grimes concocts a very tasty dish of them. Jury, as always, is inexplicably lonely on a Sa...

The Case Has Altered by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars When it comes to light summer reading, perfect for sweltering days spent in air-conditioned comfort in one's favorite chair, it's hard to beat one of Martha Grimes' Richard Jury mysteries. She's up to her usual standard in The Case Has Altered although there were one or two things that annoyed me. But I'll get to those in a moment. In this fourteenth entry in the series, the mystery involves the murder of two women. One was a guest at a country home of local gentry in the isolated fens. She was the ex-wife of the owner of the estate and a thoroughly self-centered and evil person who was disliked by everyone who knew her. Plenty of possible suspects for her murder. The second victim, killed a few days after the first, was a barmaid at the pub called "The Case Has Altered" who also worked part time in the kitchen and as a sometimes maid at the estate. She seemed to be a thoroughly inoffensive pe...

Rainbow's End by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars I've recently been somewhat disappointed by the books that I've read in this series - a series that I have, on the whole, found very enjoyable. So, it makes me happy to report that I found Rainbow's End to be quite entertaining. Perhaps the summer heat has addled my brain, but I liked it very much. This book is the thirteenth in the long (and continuing) Inspector Jury series. As in the last book, The Horse You Came In On , we find Jury being persuaded to take a trip to the United States to follow up on potential clues regarding the death of an American who died at Old Sarum in England. The woman was a silversmith from Santa Fe, who created amazing works in silver and turquoise. Her death at first seems to have been from natural causes or an accident, but District Commander Brian Macalvie doesn't think so. From our previous acquaintance with Macalvie, we know that he's NEVER wrong. His instincts regarding ...

The Horse You Came in On by Martha Grimes My rating: 1 of 5 stars "Prose seems to be falling off just a bit," said Jury..."Definitely fallen off," said Jury, yawning. Yes, even Superintendent Richard Jury seems to acknowledge it in this Martha Grimes cozy mystery. The prose has definitely fallen off. Fallen off a cliff, in fact. When I commit to reading a book, I stick with it to the very end. Even when I find myself skimming rapidly over sections of it because the writing is so bad. That certainly happened with this book. Frankly, it was one of those times when I seriously considered breaking my rule and quitting the book halfway or three-quarters of the way through, but I did persevere and managed to make it through to the bitter end. I deserve a medal for that. What was Grimes thinking? What was she hoping to accomplish with this convoluted story? It has so many plots and counterplots that it is impossible to keep them all straight. Indeed, they are all so unint...

The Old Contemptibles by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars When the woman with whom Richard Jury is engaged in a passionate affair is found dead of a barbiturate overdose in her flat, it seems that Jury's famously bad luck with women has reached its nadir. Since the death is considered "suspicious," Scotland Yard investigates, and since, because of his relationship with her, Jury is considered a possible suspect, he is suspended from the force. Unable to participate himself, he deploys his friend Melrose Plant to go to the woman's family home in the Lake District and go undercover to find out what he can about their relationships. The fabulously wealthy Plant impersonates a down-at-heels librarian who hires himself out to the family in order to catalog and organize their library. He is soon discovering all kinds of interesting things about the family. For one thing, this family seems extraordinarily unlucky. They have suffered four suspicious deaths in a period o...

The Old Silent by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Continuing my reading trip through the Martha Grimes series featuring Superintendent Richard Jury of New Scotland Yard, I have arrived at the tenth entry, The Old Silent . So, I'm not quite to the halfway mark yet in a series that extends, to this point, to twenty-three books. The series has evolved quite a lot since its beginning. Sgt. Wiggins has become a more fully fleshed-out and sympathetic character. Brian Macalvie, the stubborn District Superintendent who never gives up on a case, sometimes returning to a years-old crime to solve it and who, it seems, is never wrong, has become a returning character in these stories. And we've become more familiar with all the residents of the sleepy little village of Long Piddleton, especially amateur detective Melrose Plant. All in all, it is a good mix of interesting characters, enough to keep the reader involved and invested in the outcome. In this book, we see Richard Jury som...

The Five Bells and Bladebone by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well, in a very, very long series such as Martha Grimes' Richard Jury, I guess we can't expect every entry to be a winner. This one was a bit of a letdown, which actually surprised me because it started out as if it would be very entertaining, but somewhere around the two-thirds mark, it seemed to lose its way and the last third really meandered around trying to find that way once again. But it never did. In the end, I would award it two-and-a-half stars, but since I can't do a half-star here, I'll be generous and make it three. The story briefly is this: Richard Jury is finally getting some well-deserved vacation time. He plans to spend it in the little village of Long Piddleton with his good friend, the fabulously wealthy Melrose Plant. Things look promising as he arrives in town and we get to meet all the Long Piddleton characters we've come to know in earlier books, including the extremely ob...

I Am the Only Running Footman by Martha Grimes My rating: 1 of 5 stars Having just finished Middlemarch , I felt the need for a short, light, quick read to give myself a change of pace. Well, Martha Grimes' Richard Jury mysteries usually fill that bill and I've been slowly reading my way through them, so I decided to pick up the next one in the series, I Am the Only Running Footman . It was indeed a quick read, but that's just about the only praise I can give it. What was the woman thinking? Her writing is usually pretty crisp and flows smoothly, but this book, published in 1986, was confused and disjointed in its plotting. I had a hard time maintaining interest and it was a struggle  just to finish it. If it hadn't been so short, perhaps I wouldn't have. Really, the book had the feeling of having been cobbled together with leftover ideas from other plots and they didn't hang together very well at all. This book again features Macalvie, the obsessive but brilli...

Help the Poor Struggler by Martha Grimes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Whenever I need a break from more serious reading, there are a few authors that I know I can depend on to entertain me without taxing my poor brain too much. Martha Grimes is one. I have thoroughly enjoyed acquainting myself with her series of Inspector Richard Jury mysteries over the past year. This is only the seventh in the series that now runs to twenty-three books at last count, so it's likely that I have a few more years of fun reading ahead of me - unless I decide to do a Grimes readathon and finish up in a hurry. Nah, I'd rather spread the pleasure out. Help the Poor Struggler is another of those strangely named British pubs that Grimes takes for her titles. This one is located in Dartmoor, haunt of that long-ago Hound, and is a particularly hardscrabble example of the genre. But it is favored by the District Superintendent/Commander Macalvie of the police. Both Macalvie and the pub feature prominently i...

The Deer Leap by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars All the usual elements of a Martha Grimes mystery are here - the sleepy and quirky English village where everybody knows everybody's business; the beautiful women who are attracted to Superintendent Richard Jury and he to them; the hypochondriacal but indispensable Sgt. Wiggins; Jury's civilian sidekick Melrose Plant; the charming children; and, of course, the animals. It is the animals that are at first the center of this mystery in the village of Ashdown Dean. Something terrible is happening to the pets of the community. Several have disappeared and some have later been found dead. The pets have a champion in the person of fifteen-year-old Carrie Fleet who lives on the estate of the "Baroness" and operates a pet sanctuary there. She rescues them whenever she can - sometimes at the point of a shotgun. One of the animals that she unfortunately wasn't able to rescue was a dog belonging to the local post mistre...

Jerusalem Inn by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard seems to constantly be meeting beautiful women to whom he is instantly attracted, but the attraction never goes anywhere. The women never stick. That's true again in Jerusalem Inn , but at least this time the beautiful woman has a good reason for not pursuing a relationship. She's dead. Jury meets the lovely Helen Minton in a snow-covered graveyard in the Newcastle village of Washington at Christmastime. He has taken days off to spend Christmas with his cousin's family in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and, delaying the inevitability of their company on a afternoon, is taking a walk in the graveyard when he comes upon Helen. She seems unwell and he walks her back to her home and makes a date to have dinner with her. But, on the appointed day, when he goes to collect her at the Old Hall museum where she works, he finds the local police already there. Helen Minton has been discovered de...