Sherry Chandler

This summer I have been re-reading twenty years of Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury novels. (See Wikipedia also.)

The world Grimes creates is as much a fantasy as anything you’ll find in Tolkien or Peter S. Beagle, and like Tolkien and Beagle, the fantasy world she creates is fully realized. It is all high fun but it can take a very serious turn.

Grimes manages both to emulate and to parody the English manor house mystery of doyens such as Agatha Christy, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Her Melrose Plant, the erstwhile Earl who has shed his titles but remains to the manner born, is a sort of postmodern Peter Wimsey, while Richard Jury himself, that catalyst in whose steps the roses of healed lives grow, is a nod both to Dame Ngaio’s gentleman policeman Roderick Alleyn and the Baroness James’s rather dour hyper-sensitive poet cop Adam Dalgliesh. Her supporting cast of characters is drawn from Dickens, Wilkie Colllins, Dashiell Hammett, and no doubt many more.

Grimes is clever and literate and it’s all done with a wink and a nod to pretty much the entirety of English and American letters. The Dirty Duck*, just to give one example, is a revenge drama set in Stratford with a set of characters constantly trying to see the entirety of the currently playing “Hamlet.”

She can take her theme from Dickens or Dickinson, Robert Browning or Hoagie Carmichael.

All of which preamble leads me to this quotation taken from the blurb on the back cover of I Am the Only Running Footman, the eighth in the series, and what seems to me its equation of greater violence with greater seriousness:

Early on compared ad nauseam to Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and other “Golden Age” experts, Grimes clearly harks back to that tradition but nevertheless seems to be developing more consistently along the lines of American models, among them Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, so that the disparity in social class and attitude between the detective and his subjects is increasing. Moreover, her puzzles are becoming more graphic and violent and less tidy-English-houseparty-ish, just as her explorations into the psyche become more and more haunted and, for the reader, haunting.

—Houston Chronicle, taken from the backcover blurb for I Am the Only Running Footman (Little, Brown, 1986)

Well, The Dirty Duck, which was #3, had murder victims slashed from sternum to pelvis. I’m not sure violence can get much more graphic. And I would question whether Robert B. Parker and/or Raymond Chandler are necessarily more serious than Dorothy Sayers. Or that one has to turn to the American detective novel to find a higher seriousness. P.D. James is pretty serious.

Oh well, this blurb was written for #8, and we are now up to #21, so maybe it’s not fair to pick on the poor Houston Chronicle.

And I’ll have to admit that I Am the Only Running Footman is one of my least favorite Grimes novels precisely because it is less tightly plotted. And it does not have her usual allotment of well-realized cats, dogs, and wise children. Though it could be argued that it’s a transitional work, novel #9, The Five Bells and Bladebone, puts us right back in Long Piddleton, the Miss-Marple-type village. It’s a novel wherein one of the characters takes her pseudonym from Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise.

I think the idea is to run the entire gamut of the genre, a series of virtuoso performances. While it is true that with the last two novels present Jury with nemesis, a villain who cannot be caught, I’m not sure that this so much a growth (except insofar as every craftsman grows in his/her craft) as it is a continuation. Even Sherlock Holmes had his nemesis in Professor Moriarity, with whom he plunged over Reichenbach Falls. Jury’s nemesis also strikes me as a nod to Reginald Hill. And of course Americans will think of Hannibal Lecter.

Grimes has always had a serious streak, could always be haunted and haunting, when it comes to orphans and endangered children.

One might say she weaves the grit of Marlowe with the glitter of Wimsey.

*Grimes’s titles are all the names of English pubs, and at least one pub features in each of the novels.

“You put your right wing in, you pull your right wing out
You put your right foot in and you rub it on a cop….”

There is an unmistakable odor of mendacious hypocrisy, to paraphrase cousin Tennessee, about all of these sudden self-righteous calls for the resignation of Senator Craig. Back before the ‘06 election, when rumors of his suspect sexual activities could have hurt other Republican candidates’ chances in their races, many of the rightwing noisemaker cadre dismissed the relevance of reports of his bathroom hijinks or of the exact orientation of his penile compass. Now they can’t wait to shove him overboard to join the rest of those crippled rodents dogpaddling away from a swiftly foundering ship of state. Guess that’s because he is up for re-election next year, so their ethics have become situational. Craig should take a page from that lewd, naughty, nasty fellow, Bill Clinton, and defy the lot of them. God knows, the good Senator would not like to portray himself as some weak little girly-man, not, not, not!

Ari & Co.’s Noisemaker Cadre have begun running those Gonzalazian TV ads here in central Ky.: paraplegic vets and Iraq war widows begging the great unwashed to contact our congresscritters to order them not to politicize the Iraq & Afghanistan wars, especially not by forestalling the creation of more crippled vets and war widows. These ads are so smarmy and deceptive that they make my skin crawl. Nothing but political concerns–and lies, LOTS of those– got us into Iraq–where there were so many more attractive targets for our sophisticated weaponry to destroy in splashy photo-ops. But we found damn few of our justifications for waging a war of aggression: no yellowcake, massively destructive weapons or mobile germ labs, & al Quaida only showed up in force after we had been there a while. Karl must have wanted to make sure there was enough war on terra left to guarantee the [re]election of his Waco Simulant. Haven’t we largely left Afganistan with the mission there unaccomplished?–the Taliban is growing back and the opium crop flourishes and Osama is uncaught, but that last item does not concern the Simulant.

Anyway, when I saw the first of these ads I had the merest frisson of a hint of what it must have felt like to see a well-shod foot on the end of a well-tailored leg come smarming into one’s own private cubicle.