When a story begins with a character saying some variation of “Nothing good comes from . . .” or “Nothing ever happens in . . .” you know they’ll soon get their comeuppance. Nathaniel discovers that fact in the gospel of John when his brother suggests he come and meet Jesus of Nazareth. His laugh-out-loud response is, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Three verses later he’s bowing at Jesus’s feet.

And when Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury tells a worried father “Nothing ever happens in Stratford,” he’s yet to discover the first of several murders that are in the works in Shakespeare’s beloved town.

The Dirty Duck (1984) by Martha Grimes is the fourth in the 25-book series of Richard Jury mysteries written by the best-selling author. Superintendent Jury is just passing through Stratford for a “glimpse of the intriguing Lady Kennington” when he is brought into a murder investigation and a missing person report that puzzle the local police and his old friend Detective Sergeant Sam Lasko. The Dirty Duck is the name of a Stratford pub that generally teems with tourists following performances at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. One of those tourists on this fateful night is Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, fresh from a performance of As You Like It, who is drinking too much gin with an unnamed companion.

The companion offers to walk her back to her small English hotel (no Americanized Hilton for her!) and the frumpy Gwendolyn, who “realized long ago that she was painfully lacking in sex appeal,” is giddy when her companion leads her into a public toilet with an “Out of Order” sign on the door. When she felt that “funny, tickling sensation somewhere around her breast, she almost giggled, thinking, The silly fool’s got a feather . . .“

The silly fool had a razor.

The only clue left by the murderer is a theatre program with two lines from an unknown poem printed across the cover. Over the course of the novel, Gwendolyn is just the first of a group of rich American tourists traveling with Honeysuckle Tours who end up murdered, either in Stratford or London, all slashed with a knife and all left with two more lines of the mysterious poem. Jury and his friend Melrose Plant, a British aristocrat who has given up his titles, work together to learn more about the tourists who are dying as they also scramble to become more familiar with “the bloodier side of Elizabethan verse.”

My friend Oakley, who gifted us a box of Agatha Christie novels that set off my year of reading dangerously in 2023, recently passed along The Dirty Duck suggesting that I’d enjoy Martha Grimes’ take on the English murder mystery. He was right. Despite her choice of over-the-top names (in addition to Miss Bracegirdle, two other tourists are named Amelia Blue and Honey Pot), Grimes is a good writer whose book moved swiftly towards a satisfying conclusion. Along the way the reader learns more about these two unmarried sleuths — Jury, very much a professional, and his friend Plant, the smart amateur — and a wider cast of characters. There’s “Jury’s pompous and irascible superior,” Chief Superintendent Racer, and Racer’s secretary and Jury’s ally in irritating the Chief, Fiona Clingmore. (Yet another of those names.) In one scene, Fiona was “dressed in what should have been a negligee, but was apparently a summer dress,” and though Jury knows she had recently topped forty, “she was going down fighting.”

As with any good murder mystery novel, Grimes has the reader considering almost all the main characters as prime suspects at one point or another. Yet Jury and Plant, racing against time as the murder nears the end of one stanza of the poem, eventually discover the mystery, which is unveiled in a quick but appropriate ending.

While I will not read a murder mystery each month, I suspect that when I’m looking for a quick read to change the subject and tickle the mind, I’ll go back to my box and see what else these clever writers have up their sleeves.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of street in Stratford-Upon-Avon by DJB