Word: strugglers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...traditional metier of her countrymen, the novel of action, in favor of dead-on English-village mysteries of the kind wrought by Britons a half-century ago. Her seven novels have all been named for actual pubs, most of them in the English countryside, and until Help the Poor Struggler they have involved a quirky trio: a stereotypically literary, sensitive bachelor detective from Scotland Yard, a fey, scholarly nobleman who has eccentrically given up his titles, and, usually, the nobleman's meddling, Wodehousian aunt. That arch setup proved charming in her early books but has worn a little thin...
...effort features a more pedestrian detective along with her stock characters, a deadly earnest tone and a climactic burst of violence befitting its story of long-calculated revenge. Although the setting remains British, Help the Poor Struggler is rather an American novel, with brooding and cynical overtones of Raymond Chandler ("It wasn't the pale skin of a man who'd not seen enough of the sun. It was more as if one had put a paintbrush to an emotion -- despair, desolation, whatever -- and tinged it in that sickly whitishgray"). Depth of characterization is not Grimes' strong suit...
Like last year's Absence of Malice. The Verdict casts Newman in the role of a struggler, rather than a winner. The courtroom drama that unfolds promises a dramatic still life rather than an action packed film, which director Sidney I time makes poignant by drawing parallels between the down-and-out lawyer's efforts to pull together both his case and his personal life...