Send Bygraves

Martha Grimes

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781476732992
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

In Send Bygraves, Martha Grimes has given us her most fascinating book, a dramatic mystery poem that uses the conventions of the traditional British mystery to explore the very nature of crime, the criminal, and the criminal investigator. Illustrated with thirty-five line drawings by acclaimed artist Devis Grebu, it is an elegant, darkly humorous work—a tour de force of chilling wit and brilliant literary imagination.

The Beginning

1.

AT THE MANOR HOUSE (I)

He was there again today. End of lane.

Knee-deep in leaves, just by that stand of ash.

The same Burberry, furled umbrella, gun

Mirroring light. I have seen him reflected in

Shop windows, over my shoulder—commonplace,

Anonymous on park benches or under

Lampposts at the ends of passageways.

He never leaves, except for a meal or a wash.

After forty years, I have almost ceased to wonder:

Who is supplying the cash?

At first I thought (who wouldn’t?) it was the folks

Wanting me out of the way. I lay in bed

Sweating it out at night with the fangs and cloaks

They called just shadows. No one ever comes clean

About murder or sex. They can leave you there for dead,

Tied up in an attic, or down in some ravine.

“Mum, someone’s trying to kill me.” “Don’t be absurd,

Dear,” she’d say, washing the blood from the basin.

“If we can’t have a butler, how could we ever afford

To hire an assassin?”

And his turning up was not mere accident

In family snaps of hatchet-faced old hats,

All looking ghastly gray and prison-bent;

Nor there, in tiers of black-robed graduates,

Does he seem out of place, funereally

Indistinguishable from the rest.

He joined our summer outings by the sea,

The unidentified and unknown guest;

Wedding days, church socials, birthdays—he

Attended all, unasked.

I have seen him through the windows of stopped trains

In village stations, hamlets, market towns,

Cathedral cities, ends of country lanes

Like this one, where the autumn’s rolling down

The hillside, and it won’t be very long

Before the leaves are stacked up window-level.

Has something in his master plan gone wrong?

Or is the whole idea wearing thin?

Has death become, for both of us, less novel?

And should I ask him in?

But, no. It has to end with the police,

Getting the neighbors out of bed to make

Inquiries: Had she many enemies?

Ever run foul of the law? What was she last seen wearing?

They will stand in the rain with torches, they will rake

Over the gravel, measure a footprint, scrape

Blood from the sill, file a nail paring

In a paper cup. End up dragging the lake.

It will be so deadly boring.

But I won’t be there to see.

Neither will he.

2.

AT THE C.I.D.

I

“Send Bygraves!” barked the Chief Inspector.

The walls went ghostlier white, the chairs

Jumped. And from the portrait the eyes of the Queen

Stared.

The Superintendent paled. “Bygraves?

Man, are you daft? You know his reputation!

Scares witnesses. Hides evidence. Plants clues.”

“That’s as may be. But no one else can solve

This queer affair in Little Puddley, Surrey.

The lady at the manor found a body—”

“What’s queer in that? We’re always finding bodies.

Bygraves finds bodies no one knew were missing.

Last year: that spot of bother on Blackheath—

Bygraves kept finding bodies where no bodies

Had been reported!”

“Still, he got his man!

Some lunatic, some Bedlamite escaped . . .

I think. Well, that’s who Bygraves said it was.

Damn all! I can’t keep tabs on all of London!

But this body in Little Puddley’s different:

No one knows who it is. It comes and goes

Like old shells that the sea keeps tossing up

And dragging back . . . ”

The Superintendent yelled:

“I’m not in the mood, old boy, for metaphysics,

Or poetry. We deal in facts, man, facts!

You’re round the twist; you need your summer hols.

A week in Bournemouth, Brighton, somewhere. Now,

Get down to Little Puddley straightaway—”

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• The Beginning
• The Middle
• The End
• Epilogue: Untitled Parchment Found Among the Ruins of Crunchley Abbey, Nr. Mordant-In-Marsh, Surrey
• “The Way of All Fish” Excerpt
• About Martha Grimes and Devis Grebu
• Copyright