Sometimes we all need a little refresher in how to do something that we do constantly and take for granted in this case - reading. Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor was sitting on our bookshelf from the time I purchased it for my daughter to use in her first AP Literature course as a junior in high school (now a senior in college?!!), just tempting me to pick it up and peruse its chapters. Several chapters were devoted to the sources from which authors draw inspiration for characters, themes, symbols, plot devices, and more. Of course I knew that authors do that all the time, but it made me pause to think about the current stories that I was drawn into.
I've written before about the joys of audiobooks as the ultimate in hands free reading. Talk about multitasking: reading while driving, reading while walking, reading while doing housework, and reading while knitting. What could be better? So I found a title among the many on the library's website, downloaded it and proceeded to "read." Katherine Hall Page's amateur sleuth, Faith Fairchild, a resident of a fictional Massachusetts town, which based on all the setting clues is located not to far from where I live, was on vacation in Italy with her husband. (The Body in the Piazza) Arriving in Rome they meet a charming British travel writer who shortly gets murdered in front of their very eyes. After giving the police their statements the Fairchilds figure that the authorities will take over and solve the case so they move on to their next stop a cooking class held at the Tuscan villa of their old friends. There they meet their fellow culinary students and all is not as it seems.
Now where have I seen this before? Ah-ha! Ngaio Marsh one of the Grand Dames of British Crime writing has used this one before. In When in Rome, she plants her multilingual, sophisticated inspector from the CID, Roderick Alleyn amend a group of tourists. He is hot on the trail of a drug dealer who ends up the murdered corpse. Not all of the members of the tourist group are who they seem to be. Oh there is the innocent traveler mixed in with the drug users and victims of the murdered man's blackmailing schemes, but who among them is the killer?
She used the device again in A Clutch of Constables, this time planting Troy Alleyn the inspector's wife in the role of amateur sleuth and innocent traveler among a group of tourists who are not who they claim to be. This time it is Troy who gathers clues and impressions of her fellow travelers trying to figure out who might be the killer. Luckily, her husband comes to assist in identifying the killer before an innocent traveller is falsely accused of murder.
Agatha Christie also placed her famous detectives on holiday among people with murder in their hearts. I can think of Miss Marple resting up on an warm tropical island after a bout with illness in A Caribbean Mystery and Hercule Poirot vacationing in Egypt cruising along in Death on the Nile. The more I sit and think about it, I find that I could name many other titles where a group of tourists are under the suspicions of the police or super sleuth for having committed murder. It is certainly a favorite plot device of authors and of this reader.
