Mystery Women Authors

A Pint with Detective Jury, Scotland Yard
by Martha Grimes

From Amazon.com

No, I'm not English, but nothing quickens my imagination more than a fog-bound moor, a windy heath, the river mist in an old fishing village, and the names of British pubs like the Stargazey (the title of the 15th mystery in the Richard Jury-Melrose Plant series). The villain in this book is, for my money, the most interesting one I have ever created. In books, if not in life, I have unbridled admiration for malice and mendacity and am generally unhappy with myself when I can't get those qualities down on paper. Readers ask me where I get my ideas. Ideas come in the form of images.  It's the need to verbalize or explain the image that ultimately comes to be what the book is about. Writers (at least this one) do not say at the outset, "I want to write  a book about--." One of the most potent images for me is the sign that sways in one of those gauzy English rains outside the public house. It's hard to ignore a place called the Five Bells and Bladebone. It's almost as hard to resist lifting a pint of Old Growler or Old Peculiar once inside the pub.

All of my books are named after pubs and, yes, the pubs are for real. I might move a pub from, say, Somerset to Dartmoor, or use a pub that's defunct, but the name of the pub is always authentic. The titles are not randomly chosen; indeed, I can't begin a book unless I have the name of it. It is the story that follows from the title, not the title chosen later for the story. I never know how a book will turn out when I begin it. I don't know why these  bodies are adding up or who is killing people, but I do know the feelings I want to bring about on the part of the reader.

The Yorkshire moors have always seemed cradled in silence; when I passed a pub called the Old Silent out in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, I was smitten. I wanted the reader to share the feelings of desolation and mourning that are stirred by a landscape so bathed in silence. The first chapter of "The Old Silent" (the 10th book in the Richard Jury series) is almost wholly description. There is minimal action and no dialogue until the end when the silence is shattered by a gunshot. This contrast between
stillness and tumult is also true of the first half and the second half of the book, where the stillness and emptiness of the Yorkshire moors are set against the commotion and
clamor of London and a rock band.

I am not overly concerned with plot as such. Obviously, if you start with a chapter such as the one above and intend the story to proceed from it, you could write yourself into
a corner. I always do. In "The Case Has Altered," I didn't know until I was nearly finished with it who had killed these women or why. I can still remember the street corner I stood on, wondering about the murderer, waiting for the light to change, and--Eureka!--I thought, Oh, of course! Who else? This must sound like a sloppy way of going about the
writing process, but it's really the only way I can do it. I recall a decade ago when I got stuck half-way through a book, telling myself, For God's sake! Write and outline! I set out to do this and when I came to the point in the outline where I'd got stuck in the story, I got stuck in the outline, too. The reason I give anyone who expresses surprise that I don't know the plot until the book is almost written is: there is no plot until the book is written.
Plot, to my way of thinking, grows out of all the other parts--character, description, atmosphere, dialogue. It can't exist free of them any more than a person can exist as
a skeleton, free of blood, muscle, tissue.

Pub names can actually be the crux of a story, since these strange names are so suggestive of character and atmosphere. I wandered through the streets of London's East End--Whitechapel, Ratcliffe, Wapping, Limehouse--and came upon a pub called the Five Bells and Bladebone. It has the dubious distinction of having once sat atop an abattoir where animals were slaughtered to furnish meat for the ships; it was one of the back-street boozers that served as stop-offs and tap houses for fishermen, dockers and blue-collar workers. The setting was so atmospheric that I couldn't resist having a character walk through Limehouse while "images of the bloody East End flashed like knives in and out of Sadie Diver's mind each time she heard the sound of footsteps behind her on the dark walk from Limehouse. She was still thinking of it as her heels clicked wetly on the fog-draped pavement of Wapping." Poor Sadie might well be thinking of knives flashing, since she's going to meet up with one in her walking to Wapping Old Stairs.

My characters in their little English village always gather together at the Jack and Hammer. This is one need that pubs serve: a regular meeting place. You can find the same people there at the same time of day. Pubs really are homes-away-from-home in England. They can also be the place where you entertain your guests (instead of sitting around the living room staring at the telly). And a pub is especially good at breaking down social barriers. Clerks and farmers can stand cheek-to-jowl with a lord of the manor or a nobleman.

Do we have gathering places over here that approach the British pub? Not bars, certainly; not our faux French cafes; not the places that cater to the cappuccino crowd. I can imagine the end of British hope and glory, but not the end of the British pub.

Page created by Leone Moffat.

Last updated 03-Mar-2002