Martha Grimes Books

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Author Martha Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 2, 1931, and writes detective fiction. Her father was Pittsburgh’s city solicitor and her mother owned and operated Mountain Lake Hotel in Western Maryland; it was here that her and her brother spent a lot of their childhood. Grimes earned both her BA and MA from the University of Maryland; she has also taught at University of Iowa, Montgomery College, and Frostburg State University. She started writing mystery novels after sending a poem in to a poem publisher. With the release of “The Man With a Load of Mischief”, her fiction writing career started. Her first novel she sent to many publishers, and in 1979, a Little, Brown, Inc. editor found the book in its pile of unsolicited manuscripts meant for the editor’s assistants to read (which they call the “slush file”). The company offered to print three thousand copies in its first printing of the novel. She has one son that works as a public relations executive, and has two grandsons.

Grimes has written the “Emma Graham” series (about a twelve year old girl who solves mysteries), the “Andi Olivier” series, some stand alone work, poetry, and the “Richard Jury” series. It is the “Richard Jury” series, that she is most known for; all of the novels are named for a pub. The novels she writes are in the cozy part of the mystery genre. She tries to focus on writing about characters, rather than on violence. For the novel “Hotel Paradise”, she drew on experiences she had while staying at her mother’s hotel in Maryland during the summer time.

MARTHA GRIMES AWARDS

She was given the Nero Wolfe Award for the best mystery of the year for her novel “The Anodyne Necklace” in the year 1983.

BEST MARTHA GRIMES BOOKS

For those readers looking to get into novels by Martha Grimes, this section will help with that. It will go over the novels “The Man With a Load of Mischief”, “The Old Fox Deceiv’d”, and “The Anodyne Necklace”.

The Man With a Load of Mischief: This is the first novel in the “Richard Jury” series and was released in the year 1981. Piddleton is someone that has always kept a sharp eye out for newcomers. It shocked the whole quiet town when the very first stranger had ever died there. He was found in the cellar of a pub called The Men with a Load of Mischief.

Another body turned up swinging in the place of the mechanical man that was up above the door of another pub called Jack and Hammer.

Piddleton had a good reason to be keeping an eye on everyone; as the quiet town had become a place that people were killed and staged in strange ways.

The Old Fox Deceiv’d: This is the second novel in the “Richard Jury” series and was released in the year 1982. This Twelfth Night is chilly and foggy, made wild with a North Sea wind, when a murder disrupts the outward peace of Rackmoor (which is a small Yorkshire fishing village). The town has a past, full of a tangled maze of all kinds of things like unrequited love, murders that were never discovered, and wrongs that justice was never served in.

There are no easy answers waiting for Inspector Jury, not even the young and beautiful woman that was killed. Was it Gemma Temple (who is an impostor) or Dillys March (who is Colonel Titus Crael’s ward who left long ago). Dillys who would be returning after almost a decade away to share in his fortune. The biggest question for him, is who the killer is.

The Anodyne Necklace: This is the third novel in the “Richard Jury” series and was released in the year 1983. A bird watching spinster, a penny pinching and dotty peer, and a confounding murder makes Littlebourne (a small village) an extraordinary place to be. The local constables go from a dead body to a boggy path to a beautiful lady’s mansion is found through a severed finger, it’s quite an important and ghastly clue.

Richard goes down a less traveled path to a pub (called The Anodyne Necklace), it kind of has a bad reputation, but the booze would loosen the tongues of the people in the bar. It would link a mugging in London to the Littlebourne killing with a treasure map where another spine tingling crime could be found.

When Does The Next Martha Grimes book come out?

Martha Grimes doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is The Old Success and was released on August, 6th 2019. It is the newest book in the Richard Jury Series.

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