Mystery Strains to Mix Comedy and Caper

Martha Grimes’ 16th Richard Jury mystery has an air of confidence about it--the confidence of a chef who has her customers hooked, who can even deprive them of their favorite dish for most of the evening because there are so many other goodies on the menu.

Jury, her charismatic police superintendent, doesn’t appear until two-thirds of the way through. Scotland Yard has sent him on an unrelated errand to Northern Ireland. When a woman is murdered in a seaside Cornish village and another woman disappears, it’s up to Commander Brian Macalvie of the Devon and Cornwall police and Jury’s aristocratic friend Melrose Plant to do the honors in his absence.

The wealthy Plant is a bachelor and a layabout, bright and decent enough, but with no purpose in life except to follow detectives around and help solve crimes. Weary of his ancestral pile in Long Piddington, he has rented a cliff-top house in Cornwall that is swathed in 1940s movie atmosphere and proves to have a real, tragic history.

Four years ago, Plant learns, two children wandered down the cliff and drowned. Their grandfather, American fast-food billionaire Moe Bletchley, also owns a stately home in the village that he has turned into a hospice for the terminally ill.

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Plant befriends teenager Johnny Wells, waiter, cab driver, amateur magician and fount of local knowledge. Johnny’s aunt, Chris, co-owner of a tearoom and caterer to the hospice, is the woman who disappeared. Because she once quarreled with the murder victim, porn actress-turned-viscountess Sada Colthorp, she is also a suspect.

The fate of the children reminds Plant of his own unhappy childhood. It compels the brooding, intense Macalvie (who considers their deaths and the new murder somehow related) to relive a previous case in which he was indirectly responsible for the killing of a little girl. But for Jury’s sidekick, Sgt. Alfred Wiggins, a world-class hypochondriac, the hospice--where no expense is spared and the ebullient Bletchley, so as not to lord it over the patients, rides around in a wheelchair--is a kind of paradise.

In Grimes’ mysteries, police procedure is largely kept off stage. Inspired deduction, not computer profiling or DNA analysis, will finger the culprit. Meanwhile, time and space are left for social comedy, which the author serves up as thick and sweet as Cornish clotted cream.

This comedy has several focuses. One is the hospice. Another is Scotland Yard, where Grimes, in the sort of gratuitous flourish her readers must love, even enters the mind of a cat hanging around doorways, waiting for Jury to return. Another is the Cornish scene of real estate agents and charwomen and pubs (one of which, the Lamorna Wink, gives the novel its title: a Grimes tradition). Yet another is the Long Piddington scene Plant tries in vain to escape--his meddling Aunt Agatha; clotheshorse and antiques expert Marshall Trueblood; elegant, airheaded Diane Demorney; and the indecisive Vivian Rivington, whose friends have to conspire to keep her from marrying an Italian fortune-seeker.

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Most of this is fun. Grimes’ prose is supple and witty, and she has a way with characters--the ambitious, vulnerable Johnny is a gem. We don’t miss Jury while he’s gone, although it’s nice that he shows up in time to set things right.

But his arrival is also a reminder that “The Lamorna Wink” is a mystery, and mysteries have to be solved. The machinery of explication clanks into action, not always convincingly. The problem is that the comedy is set against much nastier stuff: kiddie porn and snuff films and calculated, sadistic revenge. In Grimes’ hands, the two universes don’t illuminate each other, don’t blend, like sweet-and-sour sauce; they remain separate and inviolate yet leave a bitter aftertaste, like candy followed by a shot of grapefruit juice. Maybe the chef should be blamed for this. Though maybe it’s the recipe.