The Old Success

You forget how good Martha Grimes is.  Reading The Old Success, the most recent of the Richard Jury books, number  twenty-five, from 2019, you’re struck by what an economical writer she is, and how devious.  Nor has she hung up her spurs; pub date for The Red Queen is July 1^st, 2025.  I, for one, can hardly wait.

The Man with a Load of Mischief came out in 1981, the year of Red Dragon and Gorky Park, so the competition wasn’t chopped liver.  In the event, Jury’s debut got a cordial welcome.  There were familiar things about it, and certainly aspects of the cozy, but Jury himself gave the book a rigorous spine.  He might have reminded you a little of P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh, both characters having a somewhat chilly reserve, and Jury being of a circular disposition, taking his time and feeling out the contours of the emotional landscape before committing the full weight of his resolve.  We recognize his moral clarity, and he gains our immediate confidence.

Not so much Melrose Plant, the former Lord Ardry as was.  Or let me correct myself.  It isn’t Melrose, who grows on you over time, but the insufferable chorus of bores at the Jack and Hammer.  We’re all guilty of this - writers, I mean – you come up with a device, or a turn of phrase, or a plot mechanism, that you think is terrifically clever, and absolutely necessary, and you won’t be turned aside.  It doesn’t matter that it’s stupid, or unconvincing.  This is my problem, unhappily, about the gang Melrose surrounds himself with.  I don’t think they’re witty and eccentric; I find them wearisome.  They impede the narrative. 

There’s another trope Grimes deploys, though, that’s used to terrific effect.  The kids.  Almost invariably (and front and center, with her Emma Graham series), she’ll give you precocious and alarming children, sometimes chillingly in jeopardy, but often the linchpin of the story.  In her handling, you can get a piece of the puzzle everybody else has missed, that the child herself may well have missed, because they’re lacking the needed context.  It’s tricky to navigate, from a child’s POV, to both tell and withhold.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Old Success is its complete lack of clutter.  There’s little physical description, not even much sense of place.  It’s mostly conversation, or observation of people, and how dialogue – or silence - and body English, and the way people arrange themselves in a room, reveals their inner character.  Even at the beginning, a woman’s body found by the shore, the island of Bryher, in the Scillies, off Land’s End, you get an impression of wind-swept shingle, and that’s pretty much it.  It’s all in what they say, and how they speak.  What they leave in, what they leave out.  The environment is personal, and one-on-one, the surroundings less significant than the subjective dynamic and self-identifying drama.

The consequence this has, overall, isn’t claustrophobic.  Rather, it concentrates your attention, and presents as a kind of watchfulness.  You find yourself very alert, to movement, or discomfort, to the way people read.  Are they transparent, or are they concealing something?  This is very true of the children, in particular, who may be reluctant witnesses, not because they don’t want to say what they’ve seen, but because they’re not entirely sure if what they saw is what you, the adult, want to hear.  They have an abundance of caution.  This seems to me utterly right, as far as kids are concerned.  They aren’t keeping secrets, exactly, but guarding their privacy.  Grown-ups are intrusive, and their curiosity can be predatory.  They have a different map of the world than children, and may in fact be a different species, entirely.  What passes for protective coloration, in a Grimes novel, is more than camouflage.  It’s a survival mechanism.  When the adults practice it, a man like Jury sees evasion.  If it’s a kid, he looks for the pattern of concealment, for the thing left unsaid, or avoided.  And not necessarily on purpose. 

I drifted away, I should admit.  I wasn’t a fan of The Horse You Came In On, for one.  Why would I want to see this crew plunked down in Baltimore, of all places?  (Martha Grimes went to the University of Maryland, and now lives in Bethesda.)  Anyway, after only dipping into a couple of the intervening titles, I came back for good with Vertigo 42 – which is, actually, somewhat atypical.  I’m not sure, really, whether you have to have read all the books in the series, but I do recommend you read them in order.  They seem, to me, more stripped down, as you move forward.  That’s part of my point about The Old Success, that it delivers the essentials, and doesn’t stray.  I don’t mean that it’s confined, or lacks breathing room, but it’s tight, there’s no wasted motion.

Grimes is one of those writers, perhaps like P.D. James, noted above, who takes a little warming up to.  She’s not sunny, or confiding, like Sue Grafton.  Maybe it’s the third-person, or simply that she holds you slightly at a distance.  This being a reflection of Richard Jury’s character, a meta-fiction.  The character of Melrose Plant, then, would supposedly provide the reader with access.  I don’t imagine it’s that calculated.  I do, however, suggest you’d be rewarded, reading these eminently solid Scotland Yard stories.  They have a seamless quality, woven from the sturdy woolens of convention, with a flinty finish.