- The Associated Press
- January 12, 2007
- by MARY CAMPBEL
Martha Grimes' `Dust' is nothing to sneeze at
Dust
Martha Grimes is a fine writer whose new novel, "Dust," continues the series her fans seem to like most, the whodunits featuring Richard Jury of Scotland Yard.
Jury's friend Melrose Plant is in it, too, though not the rest of his pals, most of whom can be annoying. Jury says of Plant, "He's not some crazy who's running around London thinking he's Sherlock Holmes." Then Grimes chimes in: "Actually, he was, but Jury saw no reason to share that with DI Aguilar."
Detective Inspector Lu Aguilar is Jury's latest romantic interest, and the book starts as though it's about their sex life. The two are like a magnet and metal, flying together from the moment they meet.
Despite that, "Dust" is a murder mystery.
Billy Maples, 30-ish and a wealthy heir, has been shot dead in a swanky hotel room. A waiter finds him, with a a partly eaten dinner, when he delivers coffee for two later in the evening. Jury interviews people who knew Maples but seems to be getting nowhere.
Suddenly, he develops a remarkable theory involving long-delayed revenge and Kindertransport, in which German children were sent to safety in England shortly before World War II.
Jury explains who did the murder and how. His wonderfully drawn sergeant, Wiggins, isn't sure of the "who" in the motive, and some readers might have the same problem.
And something happens at the very end that seems to promise that this book will have a sequel _ and it can't come too soon.
- Washington Post
- January 8, 2007
- by Patrick Anderson
A Jury Without Peer
Dust
Viking. 342 pp. $25.95
I have come regrettably late to Martha Grimes's novels about Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard. I've only read the two most recent, last year's "The Old Wine Shades" and now "Dust," the 20th and 21st in the series. That means I have a lot of catching up to do, because both of these are delightful, surprising, even magical. They begin as police procedurals -- someone is murdered, Jury investigates -- but Grimes's love of the offbeat, the whimsical and the absurd makes them utterly unlike anyone else's detective novels. I'm not going to say much about the plot of "Dust," although it's a perfectly good one, because I'd rather report on some of the byways she takes us down. The matters she touches upon include sex, female beauty, Henry James, English eccentricity, words we should avoid and silence.
As to sex, when we first encounter Jury in his apartment, a lovely woman named Phyllis Nancy, a Scotland Yard pathologist, is stepping out of his shower. Theirs is a fine romance, but it is abruptly threatened when he meets Detective Inspector Lu Aguilar, a tall, dark, passionate Brazilian who seduces him in a matter of minutes. Their lovemaking is the kind that upends the furniture and causes the people downstairs to complain -- Jury compares Lu to a hurricane. Soon the poor fellow is asking himself " Are you[expletive] insane?" Women like Lu have been making men ask themselves that question for centuries, of course, but Grimes presents Jury's distress with rare humor and style, then finds a most decisive way to resolve the romantic triangle.
Grimes provides shimmering descriptions of the women who bedevil Jury. We're told of a creature named Angela Riffley, "She was dressed in something scandalously lightweight and translucent and she seemed to leave on wings." One woman has skin "that looked untouched by anything but dew," and another simply looked "ambrosial." Jury's neighbor Carole-anne appears clad in "lemon and what looked like meringue frothing at her neckline." Sex with Lu "was turmoil, like grabbing at air and finding flesh."
Henry James enters the story because the murder victim, a wealthy young patron of the arts, has been living at Lamb House, which was once James's home in the village of Rye. This leads to lengthy discussions of James's writing ("Violence muffled by the most exquisite and civilized conversation"). Elsewhere on the literary front, Grimes skips lightly to Proust and has Jury declare of "Swann's Way" that most people "read up to the madeleine dipped in tea and then give up." We are reminded, too, that Lord Byron once called himself "half deity, half dust."
Although Grimes is American -- she lives in Washington -- she has a wicked eye for English eccentricity. Its chief embodiment is Jury's aristocratic friend Melrose Plant, a.k.a. Lord Ardry, who has a goat named Aghast and a horse named Aggrieved and who frequents a ghastly London club called Boring's, where one employee is "a small man with a face like a walnut who looked a hundred and probably was." The feckless Plant has a circle of fusty friends who say things like: "White-Winterbotham? The only time I've heard that name was in connection with a triple murder in Clapham. A grizzly affair. Are these your people?" At another level of society, Jury's assistant, Wiggins, holds forth on the relative virtues of such food chains as Happy Eater, Burger King and Little Chefs. Grimes also pays a lot of attention to children (some spunky, some disgusting) and dogs. Mungo, the fearless four-legged hero of "The Old Wine Shades," returns for a cameo appearance.
I mentioned words we should avoid. Serious students of these reviews -- I know you're out there -- may have noticed that certain oft-heard words and phrases are not used here and will be used now only for cautionary purposes. They include "famously," "early on," "pricey" and "albeit." The reasons they aren't used include logic (if something is famous, why must we be told it's famous?), a distaste for Brit-speak and sheer perversity. Grimes seems to share my odd notions. She revealed in an earlier book that she scorns another phrase on my proscribed list: "debut novel." In this one, when Jury speaks at dinner of "veggies," the irate Melrose Plant declares: "That's a word that should be driven to the ground with a stake through its heart. One more American expression that managed to make the transatlantic trip when it should have drowned."
By now, rational reader, perhaps you're demanding, "What about the bloody plot?" Well, the young man who was murdered -- the one who lived in Henry James's house -- was mixed up with some priceless paintings that had been stolen by the Nazis, and the clue that brings the killer down is a half-eaten hamburger smeared with telltale ketchup. Interesting enough, but that's not what makes the book such fun.
Finally, silence. Jury, in a country church, reflects on its value in this increasingly ear-shattering world: "The world at large was against silence, which made it all the more restful and the more necessary when one came upon it." That's also true of the original, civilized and witty novels that Grimes concocts. They truly are novel and, once come upon, they can become necessary.
- The Washington Times
- January 7, 2007
- by Muriel Dobbin
The Hotel Detective (Age 12)
Dust
It is difficult to imagine assaulting even the portrait of the
august author Henry James with a sticky lollipop, yet that is one of the
unlikely events that enlivens and even produces a clue in this romp of a
mystery.
Charging along her path of often merry mayhem, Ms. Grimes has cooked
up a confection of a plot that includes not only musings on the concept
of a "vampire theme" in the writings of James but a murder, a
retrospective look at Nazi atrocities in World War II and a dog called
Waldo who rappels down walls whether he wants to or not.
Dogs come and go in the novels of Ms. Grimes, who seems to view them
as more perceptive than some of her adult characters. These dogs have no
claim to being cute. They seem to exist to contemplate the plight of man
with a mixture of patience and perplexity. They are especially patient
with Superintendent Richard Jury, the star of the Grimes show, whom she
leads far astray in her current chronicle of his detecting.
Jury, a reserved and introspective man, is caught up in a turbulent
affair that even he sees as involving lust more than love with the
glamorous and tough Detective Inspector Lu Aguilar. The investigation
leads them not only to bed but to Lamb House, a former residence of
Henry James in the English village of Rye, as well as the darker world
of Bletchley Park, where the British cracked German codes in World War
II, and the harrowing history of an SS officer's murder of a Jewish
child seeking to escape from the Nazis on the dreaded "Kindertransport"
that wrenched children from parents.
Ms. Grimes has a marked talent for mingling horror and humor, while
using as a base a group of wealthy English who have survived the
changing of their times. They are led by Melrose Plant, a peer of the
realm who has relinquished his title, yet still patronizes an exclusive
London club with the wonderful name of "Borings." Scenes set in the club
are small masterpieces of anachronism, as is the friendship between
Plant and Jury, men whose humor and cynicism permit them to bridge
widely differing social backgrounds.
The icing on the current Grimes cake is the reappearance of Harry
Johnson, a sophisticated psychopath whom Jury has not yet succeeding in
capturing, and who appears with jovial impertinence to dine with the
detective at various restaurants of excellent reputation for food and
wine. Not only is Johnson back, but so is Mungo, his mutt who made his
debut in a recent Grimes novel as a canine capable of helping rescue
kidnapped children while tolerating the inadequacies of his two-legged
best friends. As Jury reflects at one point, he knew that dogs didn't
roll their eyes, yet he had the strong impression that Mungo was rolling
his.
This is no bloody-minded serial-killer book, but a mystery lacked
with humor, especially in the portrayal of Henry James' residence, its
contents and those who cherished his works, who unfortunately included
the murder victim, one Billy Maples, wealthy art patron and child of a
mysterious background.
Jury threads his way through a collection of intriguing characters
between hurling himself into bed with Aguilar while realizing he is more
likely to wind up with police pathologist Phyllis Nancy.
The counterpoint of Nancy and Aguilar and their impact on Jury is
nicely gauged and evidently Ms. Grimes had decided it was time the
decorous superintendent shed some of his control and threw his celibacy
out the window while continuing to track criminals. Her plot is perhaps
more fragilely cast than usual, yet it doesn't matter because her
scenario is so entertaining.
Not to mention her continuing penchant for dogs, shaggy and
otherwise. Jury thinks to himself at one point that although he doesn't
personally own one of them, he knows "the four smartest dogs in London,"
including Stone an animal who lives in his apartment building and raps
on his door with a paw to let the detective know he needs a place to
hang out for a while. Sparky, another mutt owned by Benny, a youngster
who lives under a bridge, has a special claim on Jury because of his
role in saving the superintendent's life.
But it is Mungo, the pet of the genial psychopath, who commands the
attention of not only Jury but the reader. The question is whether Mungo
really wants his owner to be caught.
It is Mungo who knows Harry Johnson's darkest secrets and it is
Mungo who will never betray him to the police. Except by rolling his
eyes as he listens to conversation while curled under the table, of
course.
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political
reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
- Kirkus Reviews
- December 1, 2006
Dust
Scotland Yard Supt. Richard Jury is dragged into his 22nd case by the first of many children wise and meddlesome beyond their years.
Because he looks taller than 13, Benny Keegan is able to talk his way first into a job as kitchen help at the Zetter, a "restaurant with rooms" in Clerkenwell, and then into pinch-hitting for room-service waiter Gilbert Snow. That's why he's the one who finds the body of Billy Maples, and that's why his old acquaintance Richard Jury, whom he telephones, joins beautiful Islington Inspector Lu Aguilar on the case. (Joining her in bed-early, often and volcanically-is Jury's own idea.) It's hard to imagine who killed inoffensive Billy, who loved Henry James and contemporary painting and who died intestate, leaving his considerable trust fund to a wealthy father who scarcely needed it. It'll be up to Jury and his foppish friend Melrose Plant, in a role that suits him unusually well this time, to connect the dots between Billy's murder, James's novels and a long-buried WWII outrage so ghastly that it turns the heat on everyone in Billy's circle, from his confidential assistant Kurt Brunner to his ex-lover Angela Riffley to a brace of relatives who look more sinister on each return visit.
Series fans will welcome the return of plausible psychopath Harry Johnson (The Old Wine Shades, Feb. 2006) and several key supporting players that Grimes presents with sympathetic insight.
Review Date: DECEMBER 01, 2006
Publisher:Viking
Pages: 400
Price (hardback): $25.95
Publication Date: 1/16/2007 0:00:00
ISBN: 0-670-03786-9
ISBN (hardback): 0-670-03786-9
Category: FICTION
Classification: MYSTERY
