Hildegarde

The good news is that when I woke up this morning, only one of my eyes was welded shut.  It’s still an enormous pain in the rear, and it almost certainly means that I’m  having trouble concentrating, having trouble reading, and having trouble writing.

And I’m finishing a book, and I’m due to go in for jury duty tomorrow. 

Meaning that this is getting to be more than your usual distraction.

But in the meantime–

I wrote here several months ago about a Martha Grimes novel called The Old Wine Shades, about which I had a few complaints, not the least of which was the fact that the murderer was not caught and brought to justice.

We know who he is.  He is supposed to be a crimnal mastermind, and in a lot of ways is.  The basic story was very interesting.  But it bothered me–and it doesn’t always–that the man got away clean.

It turns out, however, that I may have spoken too soon.  The last day or two, I’ve been reading a book called Dust, also by Martha Grimes, and, I think, the sequel to The Old Wine Shades.  In it, our criminal mastermind murderer is back, apparently as a continuing character in what will be a set of subplots where Grimes’s detective, Richard Jury, tries to find some way to pin his crimes on him.

The idea of a criminal mastermind who continually thwarts the detective’s attempts to bring him to justice isn’t new.  Conan Doyle did it with Moriarity, and if I remember correctly there was something like that in the early Ellery Queen.

Okay, don’t quote me on that one, because I don’t really remember.  But you see what I mean.  It’s been around a while.

And yet, for some reason, I find it difficult to accept in this particular set of books.  Maybe the setting is too realistic. 

“Realistic” is the best word I can come up with here, but I don’t exactly know if it’s the one I want.  Grimes’s books are neither terribly realistic nor cutesy-cozy.  No police department in the world would allow Jury’s collaboration with an amateur detective named Melrose Plant, but the relationship is kept very low-key and it doesn’t jar with the more factually-based aspects of the stories. 

And there’s nothing unrealistic about the one that got away.  That happens to real policemen in real police departments all the time. 

The idea of a cop who won’t give up on the one that got away isn’t inherently unrealistic either.  There are enough true crime books out there about just that to make it practically a trope of real life, if real life can have tropes.

And, I have to admit it–I kind of enjoyed having the guy back.  He’s an interesting character on a lot of different levels.

I am, I know, sounding very contradictory and conflicted.  Maybe that’s the eye thing.  I don’t know.

I just know that this isn’t working for me, and I don’t know why. 

And the character does continue to the next book, which seems to be the one that’s out now.  And I’d read that one, except that I had a look through it in the store, and it did that thing with the extra-wide margins and the extra space between lines and the bigger print that publishers do when they want to make a book appear longer than it really is.

I coule have principled objections to something like that, but I don’t, really.  I just find books designed that way to be hard to read, and I’d rather wait forthe paperback and be comfortable.

Of course, sometimes they do that with paperbacks, and then I don’t read the book.

Ack.  My eye is still all gunked up, and I want to go somewhere and put ice on it.

Jury duty tomorrow, which, in Connecticut, lasts only a single day.

Some things, this state does do well.