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.