Grimes, Martha (1931-…), is an American author famous for detective novels with an English background. Her novels feature Inspector Richard Jury of Scotland Yard and aristocratic amateur detective Melrose Plant. Each novel has a colorful title that is the name of a public house (bar).
The first Richard Jury novel was The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981). Later novels in the series include The Dirty Duck (1984), The Five Bells and Bladebone (1987), The Old Contemptibles (1991), Rainbow’s End (1995), The Lamorna Wink (1999), The Winds of Change (2004), Dust (2007), The Black Cat (2011), Vertigo 42 (2015), and The Knowledge (2018). Grimes’s first book with an American background was The End of the Pier (1992). It concerns a small-town police chief’s search for a mass killer. She also wrote the “Emma Graham” detective novel series (1996-2011), about a 12-year-old girl who lives in a small town in the American South during the late 1940’s. The series began with Hotel Paradise. In addition, Grimes wrote Send Bygraves (1989), which satirizes the classical detective novel. She satirized the New York City publishing industry in Foul Matter (2003) and The Way of All Fish (2014). Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, co-authored the nonfiction Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism (2013).
Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 2, 1931.
