Reading Martha Grimes

Every year I read Martha Grimes' Richard Jury novels.  I don't read them because the mysteries are taut and hard to solve, although they are taut and hard to solve.  I read them because they are thoughtful and well written—sometimes lyrical, sometimes humorous, but always insightful and deftly crafted.  I read them because I can turn a page and find a fortuitous sentence like this:  "...they came upon a man in a gray coverall, flat leather cap and garden gloves so stiff they could have stood by themselves with the boots in some corner," or like this, "He thought of what she'd said about John McAllister and shivered, as if a door had suddenly opened on rain." 

Like a master artist, Grimes can, with a slight line here, and a shading there, create a world with a tonality and poignancy which extends beyond her scenes and characters.  This is because, I think, Grimes imaginatively lives with her characters.  She takes the time to resonate with their feelings.  She knows, for instance, that a detective friend of Jury's never takes off his coat because he was tragically late one time and failed to save a child's life.  Now he's always ready, always about to rush out the door on a mission of rescue.  She knows about the missed chances, battered ideals and hidden experiences that mar each of us and drive the engines of our follies.  Sometimes she expresses this knowledge with a tenderness and desperation that unshutters haunting emotional truth. Take the time when Jury discovers a colleague has betrayed him.  "...Jury felt something leave him....  He thought it was hope.  And it was gone for good.  If he lived, something that looked like it would come back:  a poor imitation, a shadow, but not the real thing."  Such insights make the reader feel like he's been scraped to the bone.

There are twenty-three novels in the Richard Jury Series, beginning with The Man with a Load of Mischief and ending with (so far) Vertigo 42. All but two take place in England.  I recommend reading them in order for, as Jury's subordinate, Sergeant Wiggins, says of another mystery series, "It's best to go back to the beginning and get to know the characters."  And Grimes' characters are absolutely wonderful.  There's Jury, of course, the Scotland Yard detective who, although struggling with his past as a war orphan, is nonetheless compassionate, charming, and beloved by children and animals.  There's Melrose Plant, a Lord who has given up his title for mysterious reasons, and who enters into the solving of Jury's mysteries with a sort of reluctant enthusiasm.  There's Carole-anne Palutski, Jury's young, beautiful, neighbor, who has her own brand of street wisdom, and there's another neighbor, Mrs. Wasserman, who quadruple locks her doors against her memories of the Holocaust.  There's the sophisticated Diane DeMorney who dresses in white, drinks designer martinis, and knows one impressive thing about almost everything.  There's Marshall Trueblood, an antique dealer with a flare for justice and fashion, and the blush-prone Vivian Rivington, sometimes in love with Jury and sometimes in love with Melrose....

These friends of Jury's, while not quite the "equal temper of heroic hearts" of Ulysses' sturdy crew, are still true to their bond of friendship and to their own code of honor.  They are unstintingly supportive of one another and unstintingly tolerant of one another's foibles.  They are comfortable people to spend time with, and one would wish them for one's own companions.  That is another reason why I am always reading Martha Grimes.  I enjoy being with her characters, and her books feel like home.

Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See

Nancy Willard

            I am the kind of reader who underlines.  I underline fine sentences, and  paragraphs that nudge my thoughts in new directions.  I am choosey about what I underline.  Usually I underline only one or two sentences in a book, but with Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See I had to give up underlining altogether.  There are so many sentences to savor in the novel that I would have had to underline eighty percent of every page. 

            This is not to say that the novel isn’t fast-paced.  It is, and the reader has such a vested interest in the characters and the predicament they’re in that he races to the end.  But I’m in my fifth reading now, and I linger over the deft and evocative passages.  One of my favorites is Willard’s description of a baseball glove. The “old Rawlings (was) made for a giant sloth; Ben could fit his whole face in the palm.  He loved the smell of leather and sweat and that other smell he could not name which made him feel sad and powerful at the same time, the smell of games played and won by his father long before he was born….”  Another favorite is Willard’s depiction of a house settled into mysterious night.  “The living room was dark, yet everything Clare saw wore a skin of light….  In the dining room, behind the glass doors of the three china cabinets, the rims of plates and cups and saucers shone like planets.  Everything was shining in its own radiance, humming in its own dance.”

            This is a writer who cherishes the things of this world, and who sees them as animate participants in its movements.  She reminds me a little of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot who hid magical beings in the background of his luminous landscapes.  Like Corot, Willard blends magic and the subtle beauty of every-day things within the tapestry of her novels.

            Though her story falls loosely into the category of magical realism, Willard has little in common with other heavy-handed practitioners of this genre such as Allende and Marquez.  Instead, she has a lyrical, light touch, reminding the reader, always, that there is more to this world than that which meets the senses.

            The novel begins just before World War Two during one of those endless summers that seem to promise eternity.  It ends with a high-stakes baseball game.  On one side are the mothers and sweethearts of the enlisted men, playing for the soldiers’ lives.  On the other side is Death, with his star-studded team of ghostly players — Lou Gehrig, Joe McGinnty, Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, Rube Waddell, Hughie Jennings and Moses Fleetwood Walker.  It would seem that the home team doesn’t have a chance, unless, maybe, they have some secret power that Death cannot reach….

            How Nancy Willard gets from the beginning pages of the novel to this charged denouement is a journey of sheer delight, involving a vacuum cleaner that sulks in the closet, a root doctor named Cold Friday, sisters who can hear snow falling and smell scents before they happen, an ancestress who can slip into the skin of others, a coin with a winged Mercury on one side and a skull on the other and, of course, baseball.  This is one of the best novels I’ve read (or reread) in twenty years.  I’d highly recommend it.