Fadeaway Girl

Fadeaway Girl by Martha Grimes  --

This book is the most recent installment in Grimes’ Emma Graham stories. I’m so fond of this series - Emma’s one of my favorite young girls in literature. She’s twelve and smart - just at the border of her childhood, she’s believably self-aware and believably dramatic enough to mourn the loss. She’s a romantic and a dreamer, but also curious, clever, stubborn, and willful. Grimes does such a wonderful job expressing these aspects of Emma while expertly laying out the story that’s been unspooling for the whole series. (There is a long-ago murder, there are old secrets, new secrets, stolen babies, mistaken identities, and characters with wonderful names like Carl Mooma, Fern Queen, Ree-Jane Davidow, Mr. Butternut, etc. Grimes has always had a way with character names.)

Emma’s an intrepid cub reporter, detective, cocktail inventor, waitress, busybody, sneaky prankster, and cinephile. Her world is pretty large, considering that she’s too young to drive; I love her friendships and sometimes adversarial relationships with the adults around town - she’s taken seriously because she takes herself seriously.

The setting of these stories is a faded family-owned resort hotel in a small town near the water (in Maryland? Yes! I just found it - “This is a little town on the tag end of Maryland, nearly in West Virginia—“ ). Emma’s mother, Jen Graham, is the chef and everyone will tell you (particularly Emma) that no one can cook like she can cook. Food is a feature and I’m always hungry when I read these. Emma’s older brother Will is some kind of showbiz prodigy who is always putting on entertainments in the barn. (I love the comic glimpses we get of his spectaculars, which almost always involve pulleys, fake beards, and explosions.)

The year is never explicitly stated, but I’d guess the books are set somewhere at the end of the 50s or early 60s. It’s not a big deal as the stories happen almost out of time, but it helps explain the cost of things (Emma takes taxis and is a regular at the Rainbow Cafe, among other eateries) and the pace of things, which is slower than a lot of mystery stories. (Not that the late 50s or early 60s were inherently slower in some sort of olden times walking in molasses way, just that there’s not that modern technological internet cell phone soccer practice hustle bustle.) I think they must take place in summer, because Emma’s never in school. This also allows for lots of daylight investigating. However, Emma being Emma, she does manage to get herself into some scary after-dark scrapes.

Here’s a pull quote from the back cover from the New York Times Book Review: “Grimes saves her loveliest writing for the gloomy images of empty train station and tumbledown houses in which Emma takes such a melancholy pleasure…. an explosive comic exuberance.” Emma really does have a connoisseur’s appreciation of the melancholy pleasure.

If you decide that this sounds like something you’d like to read (it’s not for everyone), definitely start with the first book - there is one central mystery that keeps spiraling out and you’d miss a lot not to begin at the beginning. (FOUR STARS, read in March 2011.)

Here’s the order of the previous books:
#1 Hotel Paradise
#2 Cold Flat Junction
#3 Belle Ruin

Book cover bonus: both cover art and title refer to artist Coles Phillips who did a lot of work for magazines and advertising. Click on the link to see more.

If you like looking at book covers in general (I really do), check out Book Covers Anonymous  and CoverSpy.