Dimensions
111 x 177 x 32mm
'It was an emotion no kid should have to feel . . . Yet he wondered if it weren't the legacy of childhood. At some point in the game, you would come to it . . . Desolation was inevitable, it ran beneath everything, the always-available unbearably adult emotions that clung to one's still-breathing body like drowned clothes.'
The vagaries of memory, the legacy of war. The last thing in the world Richard Jury wants to think about is the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood, and made orphans of so many of the gaunt and sad-eyed children pictured in this handful of snapshots his old friend Mickey Haggerty shoves towards him on the desk.
Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the City police, has asked for Jury's help: two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bombsite, where once stood a pub called The Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for over fifty years as a child who didn't. The grandchild of brewery magnate Oliver Tynedale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing . . . but did she?
Mickey also has another murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City broker, and son of the one-time owner of The Blue Last, is found shot to death in his Thames-side house. But the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg has disappeared.
Jury wants to get eyes and ears into Tynedale Lodge, and looks to his friend, Melrose Plant, to play the role. Reluctantly, Plant plays it, accompanied on his rounds of the Lodge gardens by nine-year-old Gemma Trim, orphan and ward of Oliver Tynedale, and Benny Keegan, a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy.
"We're all orphans," says Mickey.
"Leftovers," says Gemma.
A stolen book, a stolen life? Or is any of this what it seems? Identity, memory - provenance - these are all called into question in 'The Blue Last'. This is vintage Grimes - crowded with eccentric characters, atmospheric, humorous, and hauntingly sad.
