Book review: The Red Queen by Martha Grimes

The Red Queen by Martha Grimes only arrived in my NetGalley review folder Friday morning and I allowed it to leap-frog over EVERYTHING else and read it that night in a sitting. Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury / Melrose Plant series used to be my ultimate comfort read. Most of which I read pre-2014 before I started reviewing books on this site.

I used to say that if I could live in ONE book world it would be Melrose Plant’s Long Piddleton with the aristocrats who spend the day at the pub when when they’re not helping Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury solve cases. I’ve always found it kinda fascinating that, though the series is quintessentially English (with each book named after a pub and many references English life), Grimes is American.

One calm night in Twickenham, a businessman named Tom Treadnor is shot off his barstool at The Queen pub. Superintendent Richard Jury is called in to investigate, and quickly realizes that everyone in Treadnor’s life—from his widow, Alice, to the staff at his manor, to his business partner had differing opinions of him. And to complicate things further, Jury has just happened upon a photo in a newspaper of a man in the United States, who is a dead ringer for Treadnor.

Meanwhile, Wiggins, Jury’s partner at New Scotland Yard, becomes sidetracked by an investigation of his own: His sister, missing for years and presumed dead, has just sent a postcard to their mother. When Wiggins takes off in search of his sister, the two investigations begin to converge.

It’s unsurprising that this series has dissipated over the last two decades as Grimes is 93 years old. It kicked off in 1981 and she wrote the early books at such a pace that she had to slow down her characters’ ageing process… little did she know that septuagenarian / retirement village detectives would be the rage in the 2020s.

I was disappointed with the last book in this series and unfortunately – despite my enthusiastic greeting – it was a bit the same here. Enjoyable but not the experience I remember.

Here Jury is called in to a case where a wealthy businessman has been shot in a crowded pub. There are no shortages of suspects as he seems to have had very few fans. His wife is nonplussed and we learn a divorce was imminent. Added to that his business partners disagreed with some of the recent business moves he’d been making.

As is so often the case Jury has Melrose Plant (who ditched his ‘Lord Ardry’ title years before) go undercover as something called a Stable Master and Melrose has to have his own stable boy accompany him given he knows nothing about looking after horses. Like 2019’s  The Old Success, we don’t actually see / hear much from the usual Long Piddleton crew here or Jury’s neighbour Carole-Ann though we do spend a bit of time at Melrose’s private London club (Borings) and I’m always entertained by the witty banter Grimes offers up through her two lead characters.

It was slightly strange that Jury’s offsider Wiggins went off on his own adventure here, in search of a lost sister, roping in series regular Brian Macalvie. This book is only just over 250 pages so it felt that that side plot was unnecessary – and a little strange that Wiggins had never mentioned a missing sister in forty years of novels (ie. 25 previous books in the series).

Grimes adds complexity to the plot through the disappearance of a man who’s the dead businessman’s doppelgänger… but there was just something missing that this series used to offer and I’m not sure what that was/is. I suspect (at the time) I sometimes grew frustrated by the extraneous characters in this series but the very brief return to Long Piddleton and exposure to the off-beat shenanigans (involving a goat and piglets) of Melrose’s eclectic aristocratic friends reminded me of earlier books in the series. So perhaps those regular characters – and their droll banter – grounded Jury and Melrose. That said I will continue to go back for more Melrose and Jury while I still can.

The Red Queen by Martha Grimes will be published by Grove Atlantic in early March 2025.