Superintendent Richard Jury

Richard Jury is the Scotland Yard Superintendent protagonist of Martha Grimes's series of novels, each titled after a British pub — a detective whose particular melancholy and deep compassion for the people he encounters give the series its emotional texture. Jury is one of crime fiction's more introspective detective heroes: genuinely wounded by his own past losses, drawn to the specific kinds of damage and loneliness that the cases he investigates often reveal, and sustained by a network of improbable friendships that includes the eccentric aristocrat Melrose Plant.

Grimes writes the British setting with an American's romantic appreciation for its atmosphere — the village pubs, the country houses, the specific social rituals of English rural life — combined with enough ironic distance to avoid pure fantasy. Each novel's pub title establishes the setting and community around which the investigation is built.

Jury's friendship with Melrose Plant, who is theoretically the Watson to Jury's Holmes but who consistently proves more useful than the comparison suggests, is the series' most enduring relationship. Plant's wealth, his sardonic wit, and his genuine investigative curiosity make him Jury's most valuable and most amusing resource.

Begin with The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981) and read in order.