The Man with a Load of Mischief (Richard Jury Mysteries Book 1)

I've decided to give myself a treat with my summer reading by indulging mostly in my guilty pleasures - that is to say mysteries. And in so doing, I plan to delve into some of the series which I haven't sampled before, starting with Martha Grimes' Inspector Richard Jury series.This has been recommended to me at various times over the years, but, for some reason, I just never got into it. Maybe because I was busy reading several other series. But time to break new ground and meet some new characters.One would think that a book featuring a New Scotland Yard detective inspector as its main character would be a police procedural type, but this, I think, falls more in the "cozy" category. While Inspector Jury may be the main character, the story is set in a small village and there are various eccentric villagers who "assist the police in their inquiries," and we see much of the story through their eyes.The village is Long Piddleton - Long Pidd to the locals. It is a quaint little place that has recently been discovered by Londoners seeking a refuge from the hurly burly of city life. It is a village where nothing of note ever happens. And then the murders start.First, the body of a stranger to the village is found with his head stuck in a barrel of beer in the cellar of one of the village pubs. But before he was put in the barrel, he was strangled with a wire. This all happened while the pub was busy with patrons, but nobody saw a thing.Within twenty-four hours, another body is found at another village pub - this one stuck on a beam over the pub's name sign. And then the whole thing just gets silly. People are dropping like flies and there are few clues to indicate what is going on.The thing is that all of the victims at first are supposedly unknown to the villagers and seem to have no connection to Long Pidd. But Jury is quite sure that there must be a connection if only he can find it.One of Long Piddleton's own, Melrose Plant, a former lord who gave up his title, then finds another dead body. But this one breaks the pattern. It is a local girl, maid to the vicar, who had recently left town (she said) to visit her family. Plant becomes fascinated by the murders and turns into an amateur sleuth, helping Inspector Jury root out the source of evil in his village. Comic relief is provided by Plant's overbearing Aunt Agatha who fancies herself a modern-day Miss Marple.In fact, one of the most fun things about this book was its gentle humor. Several of the characters are quirky to the point of peculiarity and they provide a lot of leavening for this essentially straightforward tale of greed gone wild.I found The Man with a Load of Mischief to be a very light and pleasant read, almost perfect for a summer day. True, the last 15% or so of the book began to drag just a bit, after Jury had already solved the mystery and the culprit had been arrested, but, overall, I enjoyed it and I'm moving on to the second entry in the series. There are twenty-three Inspector Richard Jury books in total and I expect to continue reading my way through them in coming months and years. Fun times ahead!

I've read the first 10 books in the series and thought it was time for to come back and leave a review. What I like and dislike has remained very consistent for all of the books. I'm still reading, so clearly the likes outweigh the dislikes!What is great: the main characters. Jury and Plant are very well developed, believable, and likable characters. Their interactions are always fun and believable. Wiggins could have been nothing more than a caricature with his extreme hypochondria, but he has enough useful insights to contribute to all the cases that it balances out the constant medicating. Agatha is the relative everyone loves to hate. The author is wise enough to keep doses of Agatha to a minimum, which let's you enjoy her without getting sick of her. I like that the interactions among the characters always seem genuine. I like that, at least so far, these books have not turned into romances. There are occasional love affairs, but nothing that has distracted from the main focus of the stories.What I dislike: as with Wiggins, the author tends to make secondary characters so over the top that it can be a little grating. Another example, without too much of a spoiler, involves Plant and Trueblood meddling in Vivian's life to the point where it passes funny and goes into the realm of just wanting everyone to move on already. The author also tends to spend a lot of time describing in pages worth of detail the thoughts of characters that are extremely minor. For example, you might be treated to ten pages of the ruminations of a cab driver who is driving Plant to a location. You might listen to a suspect talk forever about some particular interest of theirs, and all the ramblings have nothing to do with moving the story forward. When it's a main character, I can see it as development, but in these cases it feels like the author is padding the book to try to meet some kind of minimum page requirement.The cases themselves vary. Some have been great, but some have been uneven in believability. Fortunately, so far only one has been so unbelievable as to be ridiculous, and that one at least was good up until the big reveal. I've found them all to progress well- the ones that do go south at least keep you following until the end.I hope as I continue through the books, the author will spend more time on the main characters, Plant and Jury (and Wiggins), and a bit less on so many side characters and all their ruminations on things neither relevant or interesting.

I began reading these mystery novels centered around English pubs in the early 1980s. This is the first Richard Jury, published in 1981, so I decided to spend some time reading this one again to see how it stands up for me after such a long time. I'm glad to say it was every bit as satisfying today as it was then. Martha Grimes gave me so much information regarding the historical meanings of pub signs. I love learning the origins of things such as the pub signs and seeing how they have been changed through history so that their original meaning is almost gone. Richard Jury is the Scotland Yard man who comes to Long Piddleton to investigate the murders of two men who were strangers in the village but who died in very unusual circumstances at two local pubs.Once more I connected with Jury and Melrose Plant - who acts as Jury's Watson - as well as Plant's Aunt Agatha, American and obnoxious to boot. Jury's interactions with the Doubles children puts him firmly in the category of approachable policeman and gives the reader lighter moments to enjoy while not completely abandoning the hunt for the killer. This is one of those *timing* mysteries so the only niggle I had was that the intricate timing wasn't fully revealed in the solution. Not to worry though, I'm still looking forward to reading the second in the series. Included with the digital copy of this book is an excerpt from Vertigo 42, another Richard Jury novel which was released in 2014.

I remembered Martha Grimes recently, and like a forgotten scent, it summoned up memories of a snow-dusted village in Northants, the murmur of conversation in old rural pubs with smoky eaves, and there, in there midst, the lovely Inspector Jury and the fabulously entrancing, emerald-eyed Lord of Ardry End, Melrose Plant. I scoured bookshops occasionally, wondering if I'd imagined them, going from 'Gresham' to 'Grisham', but no 'Grimes', and coming away every time with a sense of disappointment, like a door to another world that had closed forever. It seemed so sad that so endearing a series should just melt away into obscurity, rousing no more than a confused frown from bookshop staff who didn't even know what this moderately young woman was talking about, as if the span of the fifteen years or so since I'd last accompanied Jury and Plant in their latest adventure were echoes of a different epoch. And then came Kindle. Over and over I searched, determined to find them, for if I loved them, someone else must have. And finally, here they are.Read them, dear reader. They are not exceptional. They lack the wit of Agatha Raisin, are more contemporary than Christie, are cozy to the point of saccharinity and a little ridiculous, and very dated, in places chauvinistic for a female writer and in others... Wonderful. You will fall in love with the lead cast, they will be your best friends, your partners against crime, your affectionate friends, and England in all her gentle hills and simple streets will unfurl before you in their tranquil nostalgia, and the mysteries will do what all good mysteries should, keep you guessing and entertained. Martha Grimes, Jury and Plant do not deserve to be forgotten. A gem of a writer these are well worth your time, and when you do finally close these pages, or turn their last electronic page, you will miss them, then one day too recall them, and return again, passing the message on as you do so.

Looked through other reviews to decide if I was reading a parody of English detective novels after persevering through first chapters of what was promised to be, by one excited reviewer, a series of novels I would love returning to again and again. As soon as you learn Grimes is American, the spellings and ideas about typically English customs in an quintessential English village make sense. Is Northamptonshire renowned for its lavender hills? The Piddle is in Dorset, I am sure. Would a member of the aristocracy be called Melrose Plant? Less than fifteen minutes for the Times crossword EVERY day? And what are buttered eggs? Has ingesting dried mice and moles formed part of any cure in Britain in living memory? Really, really odd.

I heard of this author via an elderly, elegant American lady that I met briefly on a river cruise. She had read all her books and loved them as she said they captured the flavour of English life. Knowing the author was not British stayed in my mind the entire time I read it. I would say maybe she tries too hard, and it seems rather false. I wasn't convinced. The story was fair, but it seemed incongruous that although written to be quintessentially English, the spelling was American (and 'Hatsfield House'? Ouch). I don't think I will be reading any more.

Having read most of the Richard Jury series, except for the first, I decided to go backwards in time and read The Man with a Load of Mischief. The introduction to the characters I already knew and loved was wonderful. The humour and humanity of Richard and Melrose, Aunt Agatha and the rest makes this book, like the subsequent ones, absolute lovely reading. Now, having read the first, it is time to reread all the rest and wait eagerly for more in this delightful series.

This is the first of the Inspector Jury mysteries. My own debut with the series was one of the most recent books, Winds of Change. I enjoyed that greatly, but I found the large cast of characters a bit of a strain on the memory, so I next chose the first of all, expecting to be introduced to the main characters in a systematic way. To some extent I have been, but Ms Grimes doesn't really do systematic introductions. Jury, Melrose Plant and the others ease their way on to the scene rather than make any highlighted entrance. However with another volume in the series behind me I was better attuned to what to expect, and I coped better with the extensive character-list this time.One thing that helped was that so many people in this story are murdered that there are fewer to keep tabs on as the book progresses. Indeed unless I'm mistaken the author herself loses count of exactly how many. Another intriguing feature is that the story has actually two heroes, Jury himself and the elegant aristocratic dilettante Melrose Plant, formerly Viscount this and Baron that before he resigned his titles out of boredom. Otherwise the style is a rather brilliant pastiche of the traditional English whodunit, as practised most famously by Agatha Christie. American spelling is used (vise, gray, fiber, checkbook) but otherwise it would be hard to tell that the author was not another English Rose herself, except for an oddly nonchalant attitude to geography that I had also noticed in Winds of Change - she appears to think that Northamptonshire, which is in the south Midlands, is somewhere in northern England. Like Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle she has a penchant for bachelors as making the best detectives, although there is one solitary reference, never elaborated, to some one called Maggie who haunts Jury's memory, and I have to hope that this was someone who had formed part of his personal life and not the prime minister at the time of the book's creation.The book is light reading, but there are one or two good phrases and more than one or two striking perceptions that suggest to me that Grimes has depths to her that may be more apparent in her other kinds of fiction. The story-line is a genuine page-turner, I found, and the final denouement is an excellent specimen of the over-the-top genre, more familiar these days from detective series on television than from Christie and her generation. The atmosphere evokes the picture-postcard kind of English village, still without ethnic minorities or cut-price housing developments, that Christie's Miss Marple would have recognised, and the place-names are at least a brave attempt at English nomenclature. As far as the dialogue goes, Grimes seems to me to have a very good ear indeed, to the extent that even Plant's American whodunit-writing aunt talks in the general English manner, despite her difficulties with some people's names.This is a more straightforward detective story than the much more recent Winds of Change. The narrative is all focused on the plot-line without diverging into the deeper recesses of Jury's or anyone else's personality and deeper thoughts, although there are a few displays of erudition just to give a distinctive feel to it all. I'd say that a genuine distinctiveness is what I like best about Martha Grimes, so far as I have got to know her by this stage, and it appears likely that she values this quality herself, to judge from the scorn heaped on the derivative efforts of one author in the course of the story. Her large following do not need me to tell them what to look for or what to admire, but for newcomers like myself I would say start at the beginning - with this book. Apart from anything else, I found myself admiring the adeptness with which this American writer has captured a particularly English type of style without affectation or artificiality. If you like this sort of thing, you should find this a fine example of the sort of thing you like.