No Tidy Whodunits for This Mystery Writer : Books: Martha Grimes isn’t satisfied with plotting a run-of-the-mill urbane thriller. Her last one, in fact, is written in verse.

WASHINGTON —  Martha Grimes absolutely loves a delicious story. She talks as she writes, keenly picking out the whimsical, the ironic, the absurd.

It is not true, as some readers and critics maintain, that she misses no detail; rather, she selects the precise ones that buttress a story, an observation. In her mysteries, the reader can almost imagine Grimes rubbing her hands with glee as she skewers another pretentious character or deflates the sacred and the generally accepted.

In person, when she leans forward in her chair, her eyes lighting up as she gathers in her quick mind the mot juste, the just-right inflection, the anticipation starts to build: This will be a story well told.

On this day, she has a doozy.

She is seated in her modest ground-level Capitol Hill condominium on an appropriately gray day, talking about the just-published “Send Bygraves,” a marked departure from her 10 earlier books. Those were all mysteries, set in England and featuring the urbane Inspector Richard Jury of Scotland Yard, along with an unconventional cast of accompanying players. But “Bygraves” is sure to throw even some die-hard fans. It is what her publisher, Putnam, is calling a “mystery in verse,” and it is precisely that.

The setting is still the moors of England, brooding and dark and chilling to the marrow. The subject most definitely is murder. But the saga of the mysterious Inspector Bygraves is told through any number of verse forms, including the Petrarchan sonnet, the pantoum and the anaphora.

So what is a nice, best-selling author like Martha Grimes doing running around with pantoums and anaphoras? Well, she has been writing poetry for decades and is hardly the literary equivalent of the soap-opera star who suddenly announces, “What I really want to do is direct.” And sure, you get bored with writing the same kind of book year after year. But poetry?

What will people think?

She ponders this question for a moment, then begins with a smile and a characteristicly oblique observation. “I was supposed to have an interview with someone from UPI. She had read all of my books and had really liked them. And she understood I had written a mystery in verse. So she told someone in the publicity department at Putnam, ‘I would love to interview Martha Grimes when she comes to New York.’ ”

There is just enough of a dramatic pause to fuel the interest. She leans even closer to her questioner and picks up the narrative. “Shortly afterward, she called up the same person and said in a quiet voice, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t understand this book.’ ”

And as her laughter becomes a full-throated expression of merriment, it is possible to see that, yes, Martha Grimes is indeed rubbing her hands together in glee.

Perhaps this insouciance springs from having a run of several best sellers; Little, Brown, her publisher of the Jury books, doesn’t release sales figures but does allow that “The Old Silent,” which came out this fall, easily sold out its first printing of 100,000. Success does bring confidence, and besides, Grimes has always been one to mix things up a bit, to turn the conventional inside out; this is, after all, someone whose first Jury novel, “The Man with a Load of Mischief” was accepted over the transom, and who didn’t even get an agent until a year ago.

Grimes, who is tall, slender, with somewhat blondish hair, has refused for years to give her age; she appears fiftysomething and has a son, Kent, who is 25 and lives in New York (she has been divorced for many years). A ready wit accentuates her bright eyes, and when she smiles, the good humor sometimes travels through her whole body; she may clutch her elbows and rock back in her chair while savoring an especially good anecdote.

At times her speech is slowed by a stammer, but a few minutes into conversation it isn’t noticed. One mostly is struck that, as in her writing, Grimes is constantly seeking the best possible expression of that which lies in her mind. In speech, she frequently pauses for reflection; in writing, “I’m constantly battling writer’s block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.”

Surely this quality befits one who writes for a living, and who taught English at the college level for more than 20 years, primarily at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Md.

“I wrote ‘Bygraves’ because I thought it was fun,” Grimes says simply. “It’s certainly a departure, but I never thought to myself, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do this because no one would want to publish it or nobody would want to read it.”’

Of “Bygraves,” Grimes says, “Certainly the whole thing can be read on the level that I’m satirizing the kind of book I write. But there are certain other things going on. In the middle, clearly it’s the sort of thing in which form comes before substance. I wanted to use every form I could think of.”

This willingness to take on new challenges sets Grimes apart from most writers lumped in the genre category.

“What I admire about her as a writer is her style,” says Andrew Vachss, a friend and highly regarded thriller writer (“Flood,” “Hard Candy”). “Martha uses language as a master musician does with only a few notes.”

In “The Old Silent,” Grimes took on an entirely new field, rock music, and not only did she write about it convincingly and wittily, she also became a fan.

“I didn’t know one damned thing about rock music,” she says rather proudly.

“But for some reason, I don’t know why, there was a guitarist who walked into my mind. I thought, gee, it would be fun to have something different. You have Yorkshire, you have this very sort of quiet, very still, very dark background, and wouldn’t it be fun to have as a large part of this novel a lot of noise, a lot of lights, a lot of theatrics?”

It is pointed out that perhaps it’s not so surprising that a 50ish woman who writes English-style mysteries and a rock-and-roller immersed in the mean streets of New York have something in common: Dark undercurrents are consistently found in both of their works.

She stops for a moment to consider this. “Yes, well, I certainly hope so. If there’s anything I want these folks to be, it’s depressing. People do not understand that there’s nothing wrong with feeling bad--that the book depressed them or that the writer is negative.

“There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or at least not be depressing. But if you’re writing mysteries--oh, no, you can’t have an ending like that. It must be tidy.”

And though Grimes insists she has no intention of stopping writing her Jury books, with no real prompting she cheerfully acknowledges a bit of heresy: “For some reason, I can’t read mysteries any more. Now I can understand why people say, ‘I never read mysteries.’ I don’t think they should say that to me, but mysteries are boring. I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot.”

That is perhaps one reason she is also at work on another novel, this one not set in her beloved England but in the mid-Atlantic United States, and not intended as a mystery. The writing has been difficult, Grimes says: “It’s not turning out as I intended it to be. It centers on the relationship between parents and children, specifically between sons and mothers.”

But she can’t seem to get murder out of her mind. “Now there is something else, and I don’t know why,” she says slowly, and then continues quite loudly: “There is a serial killer in this book!”