Martha Grimes DUST review

 

Grimes, Martha.  Dust  2007

Dust is a nice throwaway mystery with Richard Jury doing most of the detecting on a murder in a hotel room. His Long Piddleton friend Melrose Plant contributes nicely without the long involvement of some of the other habitues of the town pub. There are red herrings galore and you may miss some of the allusions if (like me) you are not well enough acquainted with the works of Henry James. The hot affair between Jury and a sex obsessed fellow detective gets some period chapters and looks more like a set up for future books than something necessary to this one. 

Book Review The Lamorna Wink

 

The Lamorna Wink by Martha Grimes

I started my love affair with Martha Grimes when I ran across her early work titled The Dirty Duck. Any theatre nut will immediately recognize that this is one of the names of a pub in Stratford Upon Avon that sits close by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.  That book puts her major detective, Richard Jury,  in the city and is full of theatrical lore.  From then on, my experience with Grimes has been up and down.

The Lamorna Wink, unfortunately, is one of the downs. Although advertised as a Richard Jury Mystery, this offering leaves Jury out of the picture entirely until the final chapters. Instead, we get the stuffy lump, Melrose Plant, trying his hand at detection.  Plant falls in love with an old mansion in Cornwall and since he has endless money just decides to rent it for a while. The rental includes inheriting the unsolved tragic death of two youngsters in the sea at the bottom of the cliff upon which the house sits. All of Grimes’ skill in description goes for naught as Plant and a few of his Long Piddleton cronies drink their way through the mystery.  Plant and his friends provide humorous counterpoint in the more normal Jury mysteries, but they simply cannot carry a book by themselves—even if it delves into the world of child porn and snuff films.  Don’t bother!

On the other hand this might be the time to urge the theatre folks who might read this to take a look at  Grimes'  The Dirty Duck.

Here is a bit of what I wrote several years ago. 

 What theatre lover doesn’t feel a rise in heartbeat at the mention of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon or the walk along the Avon out to the Holy Trinity Church?   Wouldn’t there be an additional adrenalin rush if there was a nasty Jack the Ripper style killer knocking off American tourists left and right?  Martha Grimes has now written some twenty Richard Jury mysteries.  The Dirty Duck, written in 1984, was the fourth in the series.  Her work, at least in this early effort, lacks the depth of texture found in P.D. James or Elizabeth George, but it does have a headier sense of irony and humor. The characters tend to live in within the more exaggerated stereotypes of Britons and Americans. Names tend to be on the jokey side as in Melrose Plant, or Honey Belle for a woman from the American south. The book takes you to every Shakespeare haunt in Stratford and then adjourns to London for action in the West End, Southwark, and Deptford.  Anyone who has followed a couple of my London Theatre Walks will find themselves in familiar territory.  

The Joy and Light Bus Company REVIEW

 

The Joy and Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith

Fans of the McCall Smith #1 Ladies Detective Agency series will not be disappointed in this addition to his long list of tales about the life and times of Mme Ramotswe, her husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni,  her bespectacled and opinionated associate—Mma Makutse, and their friend who runs an orphanage—Mma Potokane.

As usual there are a few side plots, but this outing concentrates on Mr. J.L.B.  Matekoni’s attendance at a business seminar where he touches base with an old school friend, T.K. Molefi, who has had major successes in life.  Mr. Matekoni has been feeling a bit of depression in his middle age and is enticed into a new business opportunity with his old friend. This new business is the title of the book—a bus service that will use Mr. Matekoni’s Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors as the major repair depot. The major stumbling block from his wife's point of view is that the Speedy Motors business and its building will have to serve as collateral for a major bank loan. If things do not work out, it would mean disaster for the repair business as well as Mma Ramotswe’s detective agency.    

That's the central problem and I don't give anything away by saying up front that all the threads are tied up happily at the end.  That does not mean that you cannot continue to savor the nuggets of advice and humor that are peppered throughout.   

Here are a few that I found worth mentioning.  In a discussion of the obligations of the rich there is, “If you drive a Mercedes Benz, you have a duty to do something to make up for it.”

In a conversation about the nature of men, the term “Past Tense Men” is coined. Although there are fewer of them now, they are the men who thought that women were placed on earth to take care of them.  In a similar vein the women discuss how hard it is for men to talk about or share their feelings. Women can pour out their hearts to their friends and have a good cry.  “Men do not like to cry on their friend’s shoulders" says Mma Ramotwe. 

 Bon mots from Mma Ramotswe’s “go to book” Clovis Andersen’s Principles of Detection are dropped in periodically. This funny and sage advice is a good example.  “Never try to reach a conclusion before you reach the conclusion.” Also from Andersen comes the concept of the “crooked timber of humanity.”  Human beings he says are like a piece of wood and they all have their individual grains, knots, and whorls. Observers must accept that and look carefully to find the best parts.

From Mma Makutsi comes a term from her secretarial school--“mitigation of damage.”  She defines it as the ability when you perceive a bad situation developing to immediately take steps to keep it from becoming worse. This advice is quite important in the resolution. Along the same line is an old agricultural axiom that “there is always more than one way to bring in the harvest.”

My eye was particularly caught by the way that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni  will simply not listen to rational arguments when his decision to trust T.K. Molefi is challenged. His faith overshadows all logic. He is impervious to any and all warnings. I'm not sure what McCall Smith was seeing here, but I saw here a contemporary dilemma that is current in today's political climate. Mr. Matekoni's problem is that he has a bit of Trumpism on his brain. Unexamined loyalty is preventing a clear eyed view of the dangers of his actions. 

No matter. Optimism wins. Mma Ramotswe’s sense that “most people are kind—if you give them a chance,” is only slightly tempered by Mma Potokwe’s observation that she wished that it were true. The final words are spoken as the happy-again couple sits on the veranda of their home while the evening falls and the fireflies light up the sky. Mma Ramotwse opines into the darkness "Do what you are doing not what other people think you should do. You should do what you do as well as you possibly can. . . . and you should do it with love.”

 

 

A first line quiz on great plays

 

Here for your entertainment is a slight revision of a quiz I posted some years ago.  It reflects mostly classical and 19^th and 20^th century plays. A reasonably well read theatre goer should have no trouble identifying a fair number of them. Some advantage goes to the Monmouth College grad or older faculty as I directed nine of them there and have taught all of them before I retired in 2002.  One final hint.  None are musicals, not because I don’t like them, but because scripts or published versions are not easily available to double check the accuracy of their first lines.  Here goes:   

11 1. “Nothing to be done.”

2.I2. "If music be the food of love, play on.”

3  "3. "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket; I have things up my sleeve.”

4.   4. "Children, youngest brood of Cadmus the Old, why do you sit here with branches in your hand while the air is heavy with lament?”

5.   5. “The train’s in, thank God. What time is it?”

6.   6. "Willy?”

7.    7. "Who’s there?”

8.    8. "Is that you Petey?” 

9.     9. "Oh my word, I don’t think they are even up yet.”

10 10. "I pray you all give your audience and hear this matter with reverence, by figure a moral play.”

1111. “Oh God for an end to this weary work; a year-long I have watched here--head on arm.”

1212 . “Jesus H. Christ!”

   13.  “Now fair Hippolyta our nuptial hour draws on apace.”

1114. “With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces . . .”

1515.  “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” Your grades:  13-15 Right  ”A” You are a dramaturgical scholar.

Your grade:  

13-15 Right  ”A” You are a dramaturgical scholar.

9-12 Right  “B” Almost at the top.  When I went to college this was still considered an excellent                                  grade.”  

8-11 Right: “C” Still respectable, You probably didn’t take a lot of  theatre history or dramatic literature                      sequences along the way.

5-7 Right: “D” passing but you should probably not try out for Jeopardy. 

Below 5 Right: Get thee to a nunnery as you need to brush up on your Shakespeare, Miller, and                            Williams.  

Answers: 1 Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot  2 Wiliam Shakespeare Twelfth Night 3 Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie 4 Sophocles Oedipus Rex 5 Anton Chekov The Cherry Orchard 6 Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman 7 William Shakespeare Hamlet  8 Harold Pinter The Birthday Party 9 Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabler  10  Everyman  11 Aeschylus Agamemnon  12 Edward Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  13  William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream  14  Peter Shaffer Equus  15  Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Fowler's Bryant and May Tackle THE LONELY HOUR

 

Let me admit from the start that I love Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May mysteries. His latest entry, titled Lonely Hour does nothing to change my preference for his dazzling, violent, esoteric fact filled, and dryly humorous depiction of that great city of which you can only be tired of if you are tired of life. Arthur Bryant and John May are aging or elderly, or really old London detectives depending on how you feel about the mantle of years. They work in the Met’s Peculiar Crimes Unit along with an ethnically diverse group of mainly devoted assistants. Bryant follows cases with his heart and an intellectual breadth that both confuses and boggles the mind of his fellows. He is a loner who often appears befuddled with his lint-tinged pockets filled with candy, his distressing disappearances at critical times, and his conversations with the strange and occult minions of underground London.  For Arthur the city has more dark alleys and tunnels than the tube itself.  Mr. May's sleuthing takes a more rational and technological path, but the mysterious killer who strikes viciously only at 4:00 AM in the morning, confuses both detectives.  Finding a motive when there appears to be no connection between the victims make this a particularly difficult case. 

Solving the crime is imperative in order to keep the Peculiar Crime Unit from extinction.  It is always under fire in the earlier books as well because the higher up's on the command chain cannot tolerate the Unit's ability to manage high solution rates in spite of their unconventional and often illegal methods. 

The plot reveals the identity of the killer early-on though the motives for the killings are obscure. The reader is left with plenty of time to concentrate on the disparate solution methods used by each partner. I will avoid narrating the full carnival of twists and turns that arrive as the finish nears as they depend on the introduction of two modern and difficult social problems.  Talking about them now would let the surprising denouement  out of the bag too soon.  

What I will say is that Fowler peppers his tale with an encyclopedic knowledge of London history and street geography and combines it with an equally deep familiarity with the history and nature of London’s historic theatre scene. As a theatre historian myself, who has written his own book on theatre history walking tours in London*, I can only say that my research background looks like P.T. Barnum’s Tom Thumb in comparison to Fowler’s Paul Bunyan. The only quibble might be that unless you have at least some working knowledge of London you might be lost in the amount of detail. For instance, only someone who has actually traversed those London streets can fully appreciate the wild Bullit/Steve McQueen like vehicle chase that takes two cars and a motorcycle careening along the Embankment, then cutting into Queen Victoria Street, and finally tearing up St. Andrew’s hill toward St. Paul’s . 

In sum, I highly recommend this book. If you like it as much as I do, there are several others in the series waiting to give you many hours of pleasant entertainment.   

*London Theatre Walks by Jim De Young and John Miller was last updated in 2002 and is now out of print, but can be found on Amazon. Some of the streetscapes have changed, but most of the sites covered are still there and the streets themselves remain. It remains the only book that concentrates solely on theatre related sites.