Martha Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but spent summers at her mother's hotel in western Maryland, obsessing, like the narrator of Hotel Paradise, over local theatricals and her mother's cooking. After earning both her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Maryland, she found a publisher—Little, Brown—for the unsolicited typescript of her first novel, The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981), initiating a long string of classic British mystery novels, most of which feature Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury and his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant.

While she writes in the tradition of such English writers as Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie, Grimes remains thoroughly American although she does take frequent trips to England to conduct research for her novels. Grimes's reputation was cemented by her 1987 novel The Five Bells and Bladebone, which takes its title, as...