Nashville Tennessean
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
What's in a name? For author, a whole tale
By ALAN BOSTICK
Staff Writer
You'd certainly expect a writer to enjoy words. But mystery novelist Martha
Grimes has an unusually high interest, she says, in names.
''For some reason, and I've never figured this out, names ‹ pub names,
village names, street names ‹ are forever fascinating. There's something, I
don't know why this is, but names are particularly potent where I'm
concerned.''
No wonder, then, that Grimes, who's due here today to promote her latest
book, The Grave Maurice, has written a long series of mystery novels
inspired by ‹ and even made possible solely as the result of ‹ names of
actual English pubs she happened to encounter.
During any one of her annual two-week trips to England, where she will
typically rent a car and simply hit the road, Grimes will be intrigued by a
pub, its location or its name and know at once that she has a book to
write ‹ even though she then lacks ''any idea of what the story is going to
be.''
''For example, I was in Salisbury, which is in the west country of England,
and I was driving from Salisbury to, I think, Bath. And I happened to look,
when I was driving, on the left, and saw a pub called Rainbow's End. I
jammed on the brake. This was definitely it. The pub is very near
Stonehenge, and I thought, with a name like that and a setting like this,
this must be the next one.''
(And yes, Rainbow's End ‹ in which three women, with apparent links to Santa
Fe, New Mexico, die suddenly in England ‹ appeared from Grimes in the
mid-'90s.)
''I usually find the pubs accidentally, or someone tells me about one with a
very interesting history,'' Grimes says.
But don't assume from this that Grimes, an American living in Washington,
D.C., is some research freak. Quite the contrary. Beyond discovering her
pubs, Grimes admits to doing very little research indeed, other than soaking
up the local atmosphere.
Her latest, The Grave Maurice, is named for a pub and, in part, set in a
pub, where a conversation that's overheard eventually prompts Scotland Yard
superintendent Richard Jury, returning here in his 18th Grimes mystery, to
get involved. The story involves the disappearance of one Nell Ryder as part
of a plot that's tied to horses and the racing world.
In a review published Sunday in The Tennessean's Life section, Julia Gambill
Ledyard, wrote that ''Grimes' considerable narrative skills are evident in
this compelling story. Most of the violence takes place 'offstage' and the
language never is off color. However, beneath the charming innocence are
deeper psychological undercurrents. Obsession, greed, revenge and loneliness
are recurring themes, and Grimes always manages to present believable
villains.''
Grimes says this book has been selling particularly well, and she thinks she
knows why. She almost killed off Jury in The Blue Last, leaving him with
gunshot wounds on a dock on the Thames and leaving his fans extremely
concerned for his welfare.
Every time Grimes has written books without working Jury into the tale, she
says, she has heard about it. So The Grave Maurice should pacify the more
rabid Jury fans, not only because he has survived but also because he is
back at all.
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, famously killed off his
beloved sleuth, only to be forced by popular outrage to revive him. Grimes,
for her part, doesn't shrink from talking of dismissing Jury ‹ permanently.
''It's certainly a possibility,'' Grimes says, adding that one option might
be to write a last Jury book that would be published after her own death.
''That way,'' she says, ''I probably would keep someone else from continuing
with the character.''
