Sun 29 Aug 2010
MARTHA GRIMES – The Black Cat. Viking, hardcover, April 2010. Reprint paperback: Signet, February 2011.
Superintendent Richard Jury is called in by the Thames Valley Police when a woman is found shot to death in the outdoor seating area of a pub called The Black Cat in Chesham.
The woman is identified as Mariah Cox, a local librarian, but she was found wearing designer clothes and very expensive shoes and with her hair dyed as if she was attending a party given by the local hoi polloi being held that night.
It’s soon discovered she was leading a double life: during the week a librarian engaged to the local florist, on the weekends, usually spent in London, a highly paid professional escort using the name Stacy Storm. Which woman was the intended victim?
Jury discovers that one of the guests at the party was Harry Johnson, a man Jury knows but cannot prove is a murderer. Jury knows that Harry is the sort of man who might commit murder just to get under Jury’s skin. Did he commit this one?
Meanwhile, the little girl whose aunt is working at The Black Cat claims that her black cat has been kidnapped and replaced by another black cat and wants Jury to find it.
Then another escort, Kate Banks, is shot to death in London. Though two different guns were used, Jury is convinced the killings are connected. Then a third escort is murdered.
It’s a satisfying and well done mystery for the fans of Grimes’ Jury series except for a couple of drawbacks. Steve Lewis said in his review of The Case Is Altered that if you don’t start by reading Grimes’ Jury series from the beginning you won’t know the background of some of the recurring characters who, again, make an appearance in this novel.
The other drawback is that several chapters are devoted to a dog and cat communicating with each other, so be warned if that sort of thing irritates you.
August 29th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
I don’t remember exactly why I dropped out of the Jury series. For a while, easily ten books in, I never missed a new Jury novel, and then just as suddenly I grew tired of them. It may have been when I discovered Elizabeth George (ironically another American writing British mysteries) and her Thomas Lynley novels, which do much the same thing as Grimes only a bit better written in my opinion.
And the problem is, as stated here, once you miss a few books it is hard to get back into the groove since so many plot threads and characters continue from book to book and aren’t always introduced or explained for newcomers. It’s a bit like trying to figure out twenty or thirty years of a soap opera’s plot by watching a single episode.
I liked the Jury books and Grimes, but they didn’t really grab me after the first book or two and at some point I just moved on, and haven’t really been tempted to start up again.
The same thing happened to me with Robert Parker and Spenser, though I stuck with him a bit longer than Grimes.
It’s funny about that, because there are series I have stayed loyal to for much longer and through as much complicated background, but this one just dropped off the list for some reason.
But it is no drop off in the author’s skills, just some minor sea change in my taste. I just wonder how many readers suffer these same effects.
And it isn’t as if I haven’t stuck with some series through a lot more books than Parker or Grimes — after all I’m a Simenon and John Creasey fan, and loyally read every new Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell as they come out, and the recurring characters and back story couldn’t be much more complicated than Sharpe’s.
Oh well, to paraphrase Red Skelton, I just read ’em, I don’t explain them.
August 30th, 2010 at 11:29 am
I’m just the reversse. I gave up on Elizabeth George after a few books because I though she was being hypocritical. In her first book she has a chapter wherein Lynley berates a Cathoilic priest for not telling the police what he had heard in Confession. Then a few books later, while investigating the death of a schoolboy in which an old school friend, now a teacher, is a suspect, Lynley discovers that friend has a collection of paedophilic pornography. When the case is solved and the friend is cleared Lynley says nothing to the school authorites about his friend’s predilections. If a priest tells what he heard in Confession, he is defrocked. What’s Lynley’s excuse?
August 31st, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Ray
You are likely right about the hypocrisy, but strictly as a writer I found George a bit better and deeper than Grimes overall, as did the British since the Lynley books inspired a BBC television series.
Again, though I’m not saying anything against Grimes. I liked Jury and the background cast, but suddenly it just didn’t seem worth the effort. Maybe it was one of those seven year taste change events.
But if we are going to judge writers based on the hypocrisy and other personality flaws of their characters there aren’t going to be many great detectives left on the list to read about.
And I can’t help but think in this case and with Lynley, George may well have been making a point about hypocrisy and human nature, and you may be objecting to something she wanted you to feel — that Lynley isn’t superhuman and that he is guilty of the same sin he condemned another for.
She’s a good enough writer for that, and that was what I got from the book. Lynley may be handsome, gifted, and titled, but he has also been shown to have feet of clay. In various books he has been vain, snobbish, oblivious, self-centered, and doesn’t work well with others, save for his prickly relationship with his tough smart sergeant. I honestly think George means him to be a warts and all sort of character.
September 10th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
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