Interview

Talking With
Martha Grimes

“Oh, I was inundated with mail after that book,” the author says with a throaty chuckle from her home in Washington, DC, where she is stopping between book tours for her newest Richard Jury mystery, THE GRAVE MAURICE. “I got letters from women readers saying ‘For God’s sake, surely you haven’t killed Richard Jury.’ Women told me that they had woken up crying about it.” She pauses before adding in a self-deprecating tone, “The power that I have!”

Grimes has just finished listening to the abridged version of THE GRAVE MAURICE, narrated by Roger Rees. She would have listened even if she hadn’t been planning to talk with AUDIOFILE, she says, as she is an audiobook fan.

“When I used to drive from Washington to my home in Santa Fe, I would listen to lots of audiobooks, mostly fiction. I choose an audiobook in large part because of the reader. If an audiobook isn’t read well, it doesn’t seem to make any difference how well the book is written; it sounds awful. I think that the test of a narrator is being able to slip in and out of various roles. It must be very demanding. Some aren’t able to handle it. But Roger Rees was marvelous.” Marvelous except for the North London accent he gave to Jury, she says, which came as an unwelcome surprise.

After spending twenty years in the company of Richard Jury and Maurice Plant, Grimes remains intrigued by her two protagonists, as well as the minor characters who fill her books. It’s the limitations of the mystery genre itself that frustrate her. “I love writing every scene except the ones that have to do with the actual mystery. I don’t care as much about the mystery plot.” Instead, she loves setting the scene, exploring characters, and examining the issues of fate, love, life, and death with which her characters—particularly Jury—struggle.

Grimes also uses her books to address issues that matter to her, such as cruelty to animals. Grimes was already a third of the way into writing THE GRAVE MAURICE when she learned how mares are mistreated in the production of the menopause-related drug Premarin. Grimes wrote her horror into the plot by having the character Nell Ryder abducted to one of the abusive horse farms. More than that, we will not reveal.

This love of exploring characters and using subplots to voice her passions has caused occasional nameless reviewers to accuse Grimes of digressing. “They are right to a point, but everything in the book is important and related in some way,” she says as book tour weariness in her voice is replaced with audible exasperation. “Writers of so-called genre fiction are never given credit for doing the things that mainstream fiction writers do. If [the story] gets away from plot as they understand the plot, the critics resist it.”

That response can get her down, she says, which is why she loves meeting her readers, who relish the atmospherics, the character development, the digressions. “When I am on these book tours, it’s really wonderful to see how passionate readers are, how tied up they are with the characters,” she says, her voice lifting with palpable delight. “The readers get it.” —Aurelia C. Scott

DEC 02/JAN 03
©2002 AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Photo © Richard Chapman