My Weekly Book

2007 Reading Challenge: Book 64

This was an impulse grab from the library which didn’t work out so well. It’s actually my second crack at Martha Grimes, I read the one set in Stratford (I can only assume that’s The Dirty Duck) years ago and The Man With A Load of Mischief is sitting among our crime novels, although I can remember so little about it that I am suspicious that I may never have read it at all.

I picked up The Lamorna Wink because it is set in Cornwall and because I have been in that pub - once, on an ill-fated night when we had walked between Sennen and Lamorna, travelling over the extremely rocky and hilly terrain around Lands End, and got the timing completely to cock. We ended up doing the last bit, which was closer to rock-climbing than walking, after dark and coming into Lamorna at around 7pm, much later than we had planned.

We knew we were likely to scare the bejeezus out of our B&B proprietors but - guess what - no mobile phone reception so all we could do was press on. Eventually, knowing that we were in grave danger of provoking a coastguard call-out, we fell into a handy pub to drink our own bodyweight in Coke and use the phone, only to be told that our B&B was directly across the road. We arrived when our host had his hand on the phone receiver to pick it up and report us missing.

Not perhaps the best motivation ever conceived for reading a book. And so it proved - the fundamental problem I think is that I don’t much like ‘cozies,’ preferring my crime novels gritty and gut-wrenching. But, on the other hand this had elements that were about as far removed from the cozy as it’s possible to imagine and I’m starting to think that the problem here is basically one of identity.

In this book the regular pairing of police detective Richard Jury and aristocratic layabout Melrose Plant is broken up with Jury sent elsewhere so that he can, predictably enough, rush in like a Deus Ex Machina to sort out everything at the end. When Jury’s off the scene I gather that strong men cry, houseplants wilt and pine to death and dogs throw themselves in front of speeding dustcarts, so powerfully does the sun shine out of his backside.

Plant, having too much spare cash to need to make himself useful to society, slouches off to Cornwall in a sulk and finds, amazingly enough, that the exact clone of Manderley is on the market to rent. He learns about the terrible tragedy that has occurred there before the estate agent is out the door - but decides to rent it anyway. When a murder is committed and a second misfortune befalls a young man he has befriended in the village (no, not in that sense, what’s wrong with you? This is good clean fun, although Richard Jury may have turned a few agnostics into believers through sheer force of personality) he immediately starts searching for the link that must obviously be there.

You might think by now that I didn’t like this book much. That’s not really true - the crime setup and the method of its detection were extraordinarily good. What actually happens is horrible beyond words and it’s dealt with compassionately and imaginatively. The detective who’s brought in to deputise for Jury is a well-drawn character and the bits of the book that actually deal with the crime are immensely readable - with a minor frustration in the form of a few unresolved loose ends, but nothing that stuck out so far as to actually wreck it.

The problem is the scenes in which the author is trying to drive along the series arc. The regular characters, who have nothing to do with the actual crime, and who are caricatures so crude and unappealing that I could barely stand to read their dialogue, were an unwelcome distraction from the bits I was enjoying and would probably stop me reading many more.

Additionally I was unable to find anything whatsoever that was distinctively Cornish about this book that couldn’t have been gleaned from reading a volume of Daphne du Maurier or a South West Tourist Board brochure. Landscape, location and characterisation all failed to convince. And, after all this, the pub had nothing to do with the plot in any way whatsoever

Next day on our walk we set out from Lamorna and had a completely uneventful and easy stroll to Marazion via Mousehole and Penzance. And didn’t trip over any bodies whatsoever.

I think I may not be attempting any more Martha Grimes for a while.

Some links:

• Author’s website
• Wikipedia: Martha Grimes
• Book Reporter: Martha Grimes
• MysteryNet: Martha Grimes interview
• Martha Grimes on Librarything

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.