Martha Grimes

Background

Martha Grimes was born on March 2, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to William and June Grimes. Her father was a city solicitor, and her mother owned a hotel in western Maryland where Martha and her brother spent most of their childhood. When her father died when she was 6, her family’s finances tumbled. Her mother, June, took her and her brother to help run the hotel but it eventually went out of business and was demolished.

Education

Martha earned at the University of Maryland her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees.

Career

After earning degrees at the University of Maryland, Grimes began teaching English at the University of Iowa, as well as an assistant professor of English at Frostburg University (formerly State College) in Frostburg, Maryland. Her last teaching position was a professor of English at Montgomery College in Tacoma Park, Maryland. It was Grimes’s first poem, “Send Bygraves,” that inspired her to write mystery novels instead of poetry. Her first novel, The Man with a Load of Mischief, was published in 1981.

Grimes receives much acclaim for her ability, as an American writer, to capture British life in her novels. Grimes gets her inspiration from British pubs. The titles of her novels are the names of pubs, such as The Man with a Load of Mischief. She now says that she cannot begin a novel until she has found a suitable pub name. Grimes may be best-known for her Richard Jury series, which includes the majority of her novels. They feature a handsome, witty Scotland Yard detective, his aristocratic assistant Melrose Plant, and her obnoxious American Aunt Agatha. When it comes to figuring out “who dunnit,” Grimes professes not to know until the end of the novel.

In 1983, Grimes received the Nero Wolfe Award for best mystery of the year for The Anodyne Necklace, which is part of the Richard Jury series. In the early 1990s, the Alfred A. Knopf publishing conglomerate (owners of many publishing imprints) decided to part company with Grimes. She has published with Viking since that time. She records some of the machinations of the publishing industry in her 2003 book, Foul Matter. Though she told New York Times reporter Dinitia Smith that she was not targeting anyone specifically with the book, mystery writer Andrew Vachss called it “all out war.”

Her 1999 book, Biting the Moon, dealt with issues of animal abuse and featured two adolescent heroes. Grimes donated two-thirds of her royalty profits to various US animal abuse organizations all over the country. On her website, Grimes states: “I do not believe that people are indifferent to animals, possibly, the exact opposite is true - people are so affected by stories, pictures, accounts of animal abuse that they simply do not want to know.”

In 2011, Grimes was chosen as the Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America (MWA). This award honors “the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to the genre, as well as [to represent] a body of work that is both significant and of consistently high quality,” per the MWA press release issued by Margery Flax and Meryl Zegarek.

Since her first novel in 1981, Grimes has published a book or two each year through 2014, totaling over 30 books so far.

Achievements

• Martha Grimes has written 30 books, including eight New York Times bestsellers such as The Grave Maurice. Her worldwide sales are about 5 million. She has been listed as a notable Author by Marquis Who's Who. In 1983, Grimes received the Nero Wolfe Award for best mystery of the year for The Anodyne Necklace. In 2012, Grimes was named Grand Master by The Edgar Awards Mystery Writers of America.

Works

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  • The Old Silent

    (In the tenth murderous case for Richard Jury, the New Sco...)

    1989
  • The Old Fox Deceived

    (It is a chilly and foggy Twelfth Night, wild with North S...)

    1982
  • The Five Bells and Bladebone

    (When a dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of...)

    1987
  • Dust

    (A young friend pulls Scotland Yard’s Richard Jury into th...)

    2007
  • The Dirty Duck

    (The Dirty Duck is a pub in Shakespeare’s beloved Stratfor...)

    1984
  • The Deer Leap

    (While the puzzling deaths of village pets may raise some ...)

    1985
  • Jerusalem Inn

    (From the rough but colorful pub that provides the book’s ...)

    1984
  • The Anodyne Necklace

    (A spinster whose passion was bird-watching, a dotty peer ...)

    1983
  • The Grave Maurice

    ("Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's...)

    2002
  • The Old Success

    (When the body of a French woman washes up on a wild inlet...)

    2019
  • The Old Contemptibles

    (Following a passionate and troubled love affair with a pr...)

    1991
  • The Blue Last

    (In The Blue Last, Richard Jury finally faces the last thi...)

    2001
  • Rainbow's End

    (When three women die of “natural causes” in London and th...)

    1995
  • The Knowledge

    (Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab dri...)

    2018
  • Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism

    (Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, recognized and ove...)

    2016
  • Help the Poor Struggler

    (Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskerville...)

    1985
  • Vertigo 42

    (Despite inconclusive evidence, Tom is convinced his wife,...)

    2014
  • The Black Cat

    (Richard Jury is still dealing with the guilt of the accid...)

    2010
  • The Horse You Came in On

    (The murder is in America, but the call goes out to Scotla...)

    1993
  • The End of the Pier

    (The setting: a small, sleepy American town where secrets ...)

    1993
  • The Case Has Altered

    (The sun, smoking behind a haze of cloud, threw off a ligh...)

    1997
  • Fadeaway Girl

    (For waitress and cub reporter Emma Graham, tragedy define...)

    2011
  • I Am the Only Running Footman

    (In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found d...)

    1986
  • The Way of All Fish

    (Writer Cindy Sella is having trouble with her new novel. ...)

    2014
  • The Man with a Load of Mischief

    (Long Piddleton had always been wary of newcomers. But the...)

    1981
  • Hotel Paradise

    (A once-fashionable now fading resort hotel. A spinster au...)

    1996
  • The Stargazey

    (Saturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, ...)

    1998
  • The Lamorna Wink 1999
  • Cold Flat Junction 2000

Views

Martha Grimes is one of the few authors left carrying on the British detective mystery tradition, and doing it well. Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury and sidekick Melrose Plant are in the third decade of their clever, darkly humorous crime-solving careers.

Quotations: "I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was."

"I got into the poetry workshop simply as a lark, because all my friends were poets, and I started writing poetry. I suppose I wrote poetry for eight to ten years. And I started writing mysteries because the poetry I was writing tended to have the tone and content of a mystery - well, let’s say, of fiction. The poetry was really full of tart houses, of bodies, of rolling downstairs, of blood on the ceiling, all that kind of business. In October of this year, a book of my poetry is going to be published. The reason I mention this is because it’s a mystery. And it’s a mystery in a poetry form. The reason that this book came out was because of the first poem that appears in it. I had written this poem maybe ten years ago, and I guess that it was right after I had finished writing this poem that I began to think, given the subject matter of the poem and the tone of it - it deals with the police and so forth - I thought maybe what I really was tending toward as writing mysteries. The reason I chose British mysteries was simply because those were the mysteries that I had always liked to read."

"The nature of the research I do is simple. I visit certain places, and even this is much more haphazard than it sounds. For example, on a last trip I took, there are two places in particular that have certain pubs which I had seen or heard of, and I did purposely go to these two places to check them out. Often, I don’t even do anything as purposeful as that. I would say that the nature of the research is really more a sitting around like a sponge. It is not conscious. I don’t want to say that I never take notes. I think occasionally I write down what someone says. But it’s really much more traveling around. I never know until I get back here."

"I set page goals. The goal is somewhere around 80,000 words. I try to write in the morning. Every writer believes in some kind of discipline but in different ways. I suppose I try to meet a particular page goal. Sometimes I don’t. I’m really not a person who is very given to saying, “I think I’m going to give up, because I can’t write.” Because I realize where that can lead. I start out writing by hand, and then, after I’ve done that for a while, I turn to a word processor."

“I don’t write outlines, and I don’t write summaries. I don’t know what the end is until I get there. I have a funny feeling that the book is already in the subconscious, and I’m just sort of excavating to find it.”

Personality

In 2013, Martha and her son Kent co-wrote Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism. She told Randy Cordova of The Arizona Republic that being sober for 22 years is an achievement and daily challenge. “I find it extremely difficult now to go into a pub in England with a friend of mine who loves to drink," she says with a chuckle. "I’m bored to death, but I realize how boring I must have been when I was drinking.”

Physical Characteristics: Martha is described as tall, slender, and slightly reserved person, who possessed of a throaty laugh and a voice lightly pocked by spasmodic dysphonia.

Quotes from others about the person

• “She writes, as always, with charm, authority and ironic wit,” Kirkus Reviews said of “The Old Silent.”
  
  “She’s combined manners with mean streets into a unique blend of the cozy and hard-boiled styles, and she’s known for her humor and wonderful child characters,” says Sarah Fogle, a professor of humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the contributing editor of “Martha Grimes Walks Into a Pub”. “She’s also published other novels and a book of poetry. While her work has always been popular, it hasn’t gotten the critical attention it deserves.”

Interests

• Writers

  John Dickson Carr, Andrew Garve, Agatha Christie

Connections

In addition to her son Kent, Grimes has a daughter-in-law and two grandsons.

Father:

William Grimes

Mother:

June (Dunnington) Grimes

Son:

Kent Van Holland Grimes

References

• Author's Martha Grimes Official Website