Immediately after graduating from college, Miranda Morton suffered a severe illness. Now she has 100 dollars in her bank account and is on the verge of homelessness. That’s why she accepts a job she’s totally not qualified for: personal chef to rock god Michael de Bracy at a remote mountain retreat. Although Miranda expects to face challenges in cooking for de Bracy and his five friends, her real problems turn out to be much more serious: three people are viciously murdered with an ax during a freak snowstorm, and no one sees or hears a thing.
Now Miranda finds herself stranded in the mountains with a killer. Even worse, she thinks the killer might be the man she’s fallen head over heels for, Michael de Bracy. Can Miranda protect herself and her heart until the police arrive?
Today I'm happy to be apart of the blog tour for The Aspen House by Ellis Drake! She is here today talking about Real Life Amateur Sleuths!
Real-Life Amateur Sleuths
Every mystery reader is familiar with the
amateur sleuth. This character type can be extraordinary and odd, like Sherlock
Holmes, or ordinary and sweet like Miss Marple. They can stumble unwittingly
into a tale of intrigue or search out crimes to solve like Harriet the Spy.
Either way, they're not the police, FBI or private detectives. They don't stand
on the law but on conscience, and solve mysteries more through their knowledge
of human nature than forensic evidence.
My fascination with amateur sleuths started
when I read The Man In Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Rinehart was an
early 20th-century writer who's often called America's Agatha Christie, even
though she anticipated Christie by about 20 years and wrote much more than
mysteries. The term "the butler did it," originated with Rinehart's
novels, and her burglar character of The Bat was the inspiration for the comic
book hero, Batman.
Even though a lot of Rinehart's mysteries
are over a century old, they still feel very modern, and they're a blast to
read. Like classic Alfred Hitchcock movies, Rinehart often inserts a character
who self-identifies as an amateur sleuth—you know, as a hobby. Such is the
hobby of Mr. Wilson Budd Hotchkiss in The Man In Lower Ten, who keeps an eye
out for mysteries on which he can apply the deductive reasoning of his heroes,
Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The other characters treat this as a
perfectly normal and acceptable hobby.
Which got me wondering… do amateur
sleuths like Hotchkiss actually exist? After exhaustive research (read: a few
hours of Googling), I discovered that they do. They tend to be professionals
from research-related fields like librarians, archivists, and lawyers, who
stumble across a mystery in the course of their jobs. But by far the most
common profession for amateur sleuths is… wait for it… mystery writers!
You thought the TV shows Murder, She
Wrote and Castle were total fantasies, didn't you? Nope! Mystery writers from
Arthur Conan Doyle to John Grisham have tried their hand at solving real-life
crimes (in fact, Grisham was sued over the lengths he went to while trying to
figure out who was sending the wife of a friend harassing letters [link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011202221.html]),
and Rinehart was no exception. In one instance, she looked into a series of
deaths on a ship, multiple murders that included being shoved off the boat and
hacked with an ax. When the boat pulled into port, one of the crew was
summarily arrested and convicted, but doubts remained as to whether or not that
crew member had actually done it.
As Rinehart investigated the case, she
found out that another member of the crew had been previously jailed for
murder, and several years after the trial was caught trying to kill someone on
another voyage (clearly a psychopath). She figured it had been this member of
the crew who was the actual killer, but she was never able to prove it. So what
did she do? She wrote a novel based on it, of course! Called The After
House—the title makes sense once you've started reading—it's a creepy, intense
mystery about a doctor who is unexpectedly hired to crew a summer yachting
trip, only to bumble around like an idiot after a series of grisly murders
(he's actually quite likable, but still. Washing away evidence, really?). As
with the man he's based off of, Ralph Leslie is arrested when the boat pulls
into port; but through a series of legal entanglements and coincidences, the
true killer is revealed. The same can't be said of the real-life case Rinehart
based the story on, for the wrongly convicted man died in prison.
I have to admit I have a mild ambition to
become an amateur sleuth myself now. Like, if a mystery landed in my lap I
wouldn't say no to doing a little investigating. And I'd LOVE to join the Vidoq
Society, a small organization dedicated to investigating cold cases. Do you
know any real-life amateur sleuths?
Author Bio:
Ellis Drake worked in museums as a curator and researcher for several years before she realized that she wanted to write mysteries.
Buy Link: Amazon
