Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Send Bygraves
    Send Bygraves
    Send Bygraves
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Send Bygraves

    By Martha Grimes

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9781476732992
    Send Bygraves
    Author

    Martha Grimes

    Bestselling author Martha Grimes is the author of more than thirty books, including twenty-two Richard Jury mysteries. She is also the author of Double Double, a dual memoir of alcoholism written with her son. The winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

    Read more from Martha Grimes

    Related to Send Bygraves

    Related ebooks

    Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      SAPPHIRE & STEEL

      Aug 14, 2019

      SAPPHIRE & STEEL
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Man I Should Have Married

      Dec 29, 2019

      The Man I Should Have Married
      11 min read

    • Article

      Restless Souls

      Mar 6, 2018

      Restless Souls
      8 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      J. Jezewska Stevens

      Dec 15, 2017

      The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by

      15 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      Hello, Grim Reaper

      Dec 15, 2021

      She was a babe. A fully paid-up, card-carrying babe. There was absolutely no doubt about it, and she was heading straight for me. She was almost sprinting towards me across the recently reimagined lobby of Claridge’s. She looked up, her scarlet-anoin

      3 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2024 Whiting Award Winners

      Apr 10, 2024

      The 2024 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Below are excerpts from their work.

      19 min read

    • Article

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men

      Sep 10, 2020

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men
      8 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      I Met Myself Coming Back

      Oct 6, 2022

      I Met Myself Coming Back
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Escape Of Koravitch

      Sep 30, 2019

      The Escape Of Koravitch
      16 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      And it’s down another corridor—Keep moving, keep up,the guide telling us again. It’s easy to get lost in here.Folks go missing all the time.—weaving our wayto the ballroom that inspired Disney’s Haunted Mansionwith its parquet floor & ivy-laced words

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Penalty

      Nov 5, 2020

      The Penalty
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS

      Nov 19, 2020

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Walking On TheWild Side…

      Jul 17, 2023

      Walking On TheWild Side…
      3 min read

    • Article

      Last Saturday Night

      Dec 7, 2023

      Last Saturday Night
      6 min read

    • Article

      Perv-O-Shine And Sleep Vaping: 23 Things I Learned About The World – And Myself – At Glastonbury 2023

      Jun 26, 2023

      Sure, sure, it’s hot, and you’re not going to shower, and this will force some choices at Glastonbury that you wouldn’t make in regular life: shorter shorts, for instance, or a hat. This doesn’t even come close to explaining the wild precision, the c

      7 min read

    • Article

      I Saw Plenty

      Jun 1, 2020

      I Saw Plenty
      6 min read

    • Article

      Marco

      Mar 1, 2022

      THE ALLEY STANK . Marco could feel the damp soaking into his tunic as he pressed his back against the wall, trying to seem like part of the shadows. He cursed himself. How could he have been so stupid? He knew if he stayed out after dark they might f

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Send Bygraves

    4/5

    2 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Murder Mystery poetry?! Yes, Please! This very clever, original & lots of fun!
    • 3/5
      There's poetry that aims as art and poetry that is simply entertainment. Send Bygraves by Martha Grimes, a mystery author, falls between the two, leaning more toward entertainment. I would never have heard of this book, let alone picked it up and read it, if I hadn't been systematically going through the American poetry section (811) of my local library. To judge a book, I would usually read a few poems randomly. Very few books pull me into taking the time for a full read but this one did and I was thoroughly charmed. I was delighted when I found it at another library's book sale so that it now sits on my bookshelf to be shared with others or reread whenever I'm in the mood for a bit of humor mixed with mystery and psychology.The title character, Bygraves, is a detective that no one has ever gotten a good look at but is none-the-less ubiquitious.From the first poems "At the Manor House (1)"And his turning up was not mere accidentIn family snaps of hatchet-faced old hats,All looking ghastly grey and prison-bent;Nor there in tiers of black-robed graduatesDoes he seem out of place, funereallyIndistinguishable from the rest.He joined our summer outings by the seaThe unidentified and unknown guest;Wedding days, church socials, birthdays--heattended all, unasked.Under the pressure of being observed by someone who remains a phantom (the detective sometimes conflated with the murdered one) everyone becomes paranoid because nearly everyone is guilty of something and if they're not, then they suspect the shadowy detective is an assassin. The book introduces us to a town's cast of characters and significant places with names like Madrigal, Whipsnade, Snively, Dredcrumble Moor, and Cobweb Tearooms. Along the way, Grimes pokes fun at various mystery conventions and stock characters and plays with poetic forms. The book's middle section starts with several poems titled "Murderacrostic," "Murderconcrete," Murderanaphora,"Murdersonnet," "Murderpantoum." And near the end, there's a "Bygraves Sestina." Just the idea of a "Murdersonnet" tickles me. Most of these she pulls off wonderfully, the clunkiest being the pantoum (though its last line makes a very clever turn via altered punctuation). One of my favorite poems in the book is "Murderacrostic" that ends:The spectre follows kings and fools;The spectre comes to all in time.The spectre! How you dread to seeThe spectre here, and in dark poolsThe spectre mirrored endlessly.This book never becomes any one thing. I wouldn't classify it as light verse, though many aspects of it are humorous. And it isn't strictly narrative, though the second poem assigns Bygraves to solve a crime and near the end we have more than one ending scenario. It's partly a meditation on guilt, our uneasy relationship to mysteries of all kinds, and petty animosities between people.I've read Send Bygraves twice now and was charmed both times. It's a quick, delightful read even for people like myself who have never taken to mystery fiction and who normally read poetry that leans more strongly on the art end of the scale.

    Book preview

    Send Bygraves - Martha Grimes

    To Katherine Harris Grimes

    wherever you are,

    send Bygraves

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1