Martha Grimes
The Richard Jury and Melrose Plant series is the body of work most closely associated with Martha Grimes, an American writer of detective fiction. The series, which works within the cozy mystery genre, follows the two central characters through multiple installments and remains the defining feature of her career as a novelist.
Grimes was born on May 2, 1931, in Pittsburgh. She studied at the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa, and over time built a working life that stretched across several roles. In addition to writing fiction, she has worked as a poet and as a university teacher, placing her among writers who have carried on both a creative and an academic life in parallel.
Her output in fiction sits within the detective genre, and the Jury and Plant series accounts for the work she is most strongly identified with. Alongside that series, her identity as a novelist, poet, and teacher reflects the range of her professional activity over the course of her career. She writes in English and holds American citizenship.
Grimes has received two notable awards in recognition of her work. The first is the Nero Award, and the second is the Grand Master award. Both honors point to the sustained body of work she has produced as a writer of detective fiction, and the Grand Master award in particular represents a career-level acknowledgment from within the field. Those two awards together provide a concrete measure of what her years of writing have earned her.
Quotes by Martha Grimes
They’re an idea of home, I think. Words are. It really is like opening a door, isn’t it, to open a book. If that’s not too sentimental to say. Books, words, stories are a kind of solace.
Old willows trailed veils of wet leaves across his path. Moss crawled up the headstones. The place was otherwise deserted.
If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had lain a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves – I swear, I would have heard it, that’s how silent it all was.
He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty.
Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.
And so it continued all day, wynde after wynde, From a room beyond came the whistle of a teakettle. Now, you really must join me. I’ve some marvelous Darjeeling, and some delicious petit fours a friend of mine gave me for Christmas.