The Barnes & Noble Review
September 1999
The Jury Is Out! Some of my favorite writers created make-believe worlds: Edgar Rice Burroughs, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Of all the contemporary mystery writers, only one has gone to the lengths of the masters I just mentioned. Martha Grimes has created an England very much her own. If it doesn't always square with reality, so be it. That, indeed, is its charm, because Grimes imbues most of her work with jolly good will and fireside tales well told.
The Lamorna Wink, her latest, is no exception. While Richard Jury is, as usual, the star, much of the stage time is given to the art collector and part-time sleuth Melrose Plant, one of Jury's oddest and best friends. Plant is so vivid as a character that in a couple places I had the impression he was narrating the book in first person. In some respects, he's more memorable than Jury himself.
Grimes gives us a setting worthy of Agatha Christie — Bletchley House, the sort of old British place that BBC producers love to shoot exteriors of. The place is filled with older people, some of them ill and waiting for death, living on the largesse of a benefactor who may not be what he seems. No trouble there, except that a few of the guests have disappeared from time to time in the past.
Grimes loves convoluted plots, which is why I won't even try to uncomplicate this particular one for you. As much fun as the plots are, it's the mood she sets that really matters — the world she has created out ofwholecloth for the amusement of her readers and, presumably, herself.
Grimes has the rare ability to tell most of a novel in a sardonic, even surreal style and then shift, in the final pages, to genuine melancholy and sorrow. Nothing here is as it seems — this may be Grimes's sleekest plot twist to date — until Richard Jury comes back onstage and sorts things out.
I haven't read all of Grimes, so I can't say that this is absolutely her best book. But I'll tell you one thing — it is, by turns, charming, mysterious, funny, and — in the end — somber. Grimes may have created her own world and populated it with grand oddballs, but she never forgets the verities of the human condition. This is an excellent novel.
—Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman's latest novels include Daughter of Darkness, Harlot's Moon, and Black River Falls, the latter of which "proves Gorman's mastery of the pure suspense novel," says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. ABC-TV has optioned the novel as a movie. Gorman is also the editor of Mystery Scene magazine, which Stephen King calls "indispensable" for mystery readers.
For most of the 16th in her Richard Jury series Grimes allows the great detective to lie fallow. This, then, is the greening of Melrose Plant, Jury's Watsonlike friend and admirer. Though laid back by definition—it's in his aristocratic DNA—Plant does make the most of his opportunity. That is, before you can say Lord Peter Wimsey, there he is up to his designer Wellingtons in homicides. True, a couple of the untimely deaths are four years old, but fresh ones loom. And it's all happening on the storied Cornwall coast where the inhabitants are famous for being sullen, secretive, and prone to intemperate behavior (see DuMaurier's Rebecca). In the village of Bletchley, Brenda Friel and Chris Wells operate a successful tearoom. Chris goes missing. Melrose suspects foul play. Ah, but there's a hitch. Not only is Miss Chris a missing person, she's a leading suspect—in the murder of a young woman she's reputed to have held in extremely low regard. While all this is going on in Cornwall, trouble breaks out in Long Piddleton, Northampton, home base to Melrose and his band of charming eccentrics (see The Stargazey, 1998, or any other series entry). Rampant complications, tear-away subplots, until, at virtually the last moment, Jury rides in on his deus ex machina to pull it all together—sort of. Discursive and overplotted, yes, though no more than is typical of this highly popular series. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild selections)
