Page "Detective fiction" Paragraph 59

For series involving amateur detectives, their frequent encounters with crime often tests the limits of plausibility.

The character Miss Marple, for instance, dealt with an estimated two murders a year ; De Andrea has described Marple's home town, the quiet little village of St. Mary Mead as having " put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah ".

Similarly, TV heroine Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote is confronted with bodies wherever she goes, but over the years corpses have also piled up in the streets of Cabot Cove, Maine, where she lives.

It is arguably more convincing if police, forensic experts or similar professionals are made the protagonist of a series of crime novels.