“Too busy to write until retirement, but a voracious reader of crime fiction since finding A Study in Scarlet at the age of 8,” M. R. D. Meek was 65 before she published her first mystery novel, With Flowers That Fell, in 1983. Her second, The Sitting Ducks, appeared the following year, and she produced 13 further novels in 20 years, signing off in 2004, at 86, with the appropriately titled Kemp’s Last Case.
Margaret Reid Duncan Gilloran was born in Greenock in 1918. She left Birkenhead Girls School at 18 and worked for two years as a shorthand typist in Glasgow before joining Rolls-Royce. She remained with it until 1944, having by then married her first husband, Donald Gregory.
After the war they lived in Germany for four years, where Major Gregory, a doctor, served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, tending to the survivors of concentration camps.
When Gregory died of cancer at 40 in 1959, his wife worked as a clerical assistant with the Civil Service, then became indentured as an articled clerk with a firm of solicitors, Smith and Harrison, in Waltham Cross and studied at the Lancaster Gate branch of the College of Law in London. She obtained the London University bachelor of laws degree in 1966, at 48. In 1970 she joined Macmillans, a solicitor’s practice in Wadebridge, Cornwall, retiring at 60 in 1978. She was married to Colin Meek the same year.
Flowers that Fell appeared five years later, initiating Meek’s second career as a mystery novelist much admired for her economy, verbal precision and even-tempered prose, and favourably compared to P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. She drew on her legal background for her plots and for her detective, Lennox Kemp, whom she made a lawyer because “lawyers tend to see people at their most vulnerable”.
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Kemp has been struck off from the Law Society for, as one sympathetic critic put it, “an action as foolish as it was vulnerable”. The early novels — including Hang the Consequences, The Split Second, In Remembrance of Rose, Worm of Doubt and A Mouthful of Sand — chart his progress from private eye, employed by an agency that liked to identify its operatives with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, to fully rehabilitated solicitor.
By the eighth book in the series, The Loose Connection, Kemp, older and wiser, is running his own office but still being consulted for his detective skills. He continued his investigative activities in seven further titles: This Blessed Plot, Touch and Go, Postscript to Murder, A House to Die For, If You Go Down to the Woods, The Vanishing Point and Kemp’s Last Case.
Meek was a voracious reader of books and newspapers and an avid solver of crosswords. Her prodigious memory made her a formidable adversary in debate. Her politics were loosely Liberal but she had an array of red and blue hats of varying hues depending on the company she was in. She enjoyed holding court and challenging listeners to voice their opinions. Her inquiring mind, love of humanity and sense of fair play were the keys to her success in the law.
Meek’s husband predeceased her and she is survived by her son and daughter from her first marriage.
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M. R. D. Meek, crime-fiction writer, was born on March 19, 1918. She died on November 27, 2009, aged 91