It Takes A Village

“The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
Sherlock Holmes, ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES

“Do you know what Sherlock Holmes said about the countryside?”
“No.”
“’The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”
“The great detective never came to Trafalgar, sir. I think he’d find it peaceful here. Most of the time.”
“I’m not interested in what happens here most of the time.”
Sergeant Dick Madison and Constable Molly Smith, NEGATIVE IMAGE


HANK: Where do you live? Could there be murderer next door? A long-term, seething hatred at the fish-mongers (Okay, the Stop and Shop)? A murderous secret-revenge plot hatching at the patisserie? (Okay, the Burger King.)

It happens in Cabot Cove, right? And St. Mary Mead? So we went to our resident residence expert, Vicki Delany--to let us in on

The Continuing Appeal of the Village Mystery

Since the time of Agatha Christie, the village setting has been a staple of a certain type of mystery novel. A novel that is as much about the personal and family life of the protagonists as their jobs, that is more about human relationships and love and loss than international terrorism or guns-for-hire, thrives in the small town environment.

There are plenty of advantages to setting a crime novel in a small town.

People really do know each other in a small town, and they know each other’s business. Not good if you’re wanting to keep a secret.

And secrets, criminal as well as personal, are the life blood of the mystery novel.

I write the Constable Molly Smith series from Poisoned Pen Press (among other books). The Molly Smith books are police procedural novels, meaning that police officers are the protagonists of the books and they solve crimes in the context of doing their jobs. In these books I want to explore the personalities and families and relationships of the two protagonists as well as the nature of their job and the solving (or failing to solve) of crimes that are committed there.

The small town setting allows the characters’ families and friends – and enemies – to be involved in the drama without having to employ unbelievable coincidence.

The plot of AMONG THE DEPARTED, the fourth book in the series, revolves around what happens when human remains are found in the British Columbia wilderness by a police dog out searching for a lost child. Because it is a small town, and a close-knit community, it is not too much of a stretch that the police dog handler should be Constable Molly Smith’s boyfriend, and thus she is with him when he gets the call, or that the bones are discovered to be those of one Brian Nowak who disappeared without a trace fifteen years earlier. The last person to see Nowak, other than his family, was a young girl by the name of Moonlight Smith., best friend of Nowak’s daughter who had spent the previous night at a sleep-over and joined the family for breakfast the next morning.

In my novels, the small town setting has the added advantage of allowing me to give the main protagonist of the series, Molly Smith, a young, keen, somewhat naive new police officer, a role in criminal investigation. In a big city she would be directing traffic and issuing speeding tickets, but a small town force does with what it has. The 20-member Trafalgar City Police department allows her to become more involved in major crimes, plus the fact that she’s a local and Detective Sergeant John Winters is a newcomer, means he sometimes has to rely on her for local knowledge.

It isn’t always easy for Constable Smith, trying to be a police officer in a town where, as she thinks in the first book in the series, IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLACIER: It was hard, sometimes, to be a cop in a town where a substantial number of the residents had seen you performing as Number Two Wise Man in the Grade Three Christmas pageant.

The problems Smith runs into while policing in a town where everyone knows her so well, and where her mother is a prominent rabble-rouser and political troublemaker, is part of her appeal, I believe.

The town of Trafalgar is based, not at all loosely, on the real town of Nelson, British Columbia, population 9,000. But Trafalgar is not Nelson, and sometimes, of course, real-life has to take a back seat to the interests of a good story. No one in Nelson can quite remember when the last murder was. In Trafalgar, there are rather a lot.

As Sherlock Holmes pointed out, countryside does not always mean peaceful.

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Do you believe such treachery can exist in a small town? Authors, do you fear that too many bad things are happening in your series town? Readers, do you wonder how so many murders can happen in just one little village? Or do you shrug and say--it's only a story!

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Among the Departed was released by Poisoned Pen Press on May 3nd. If you’d like to read the first two chapters, please go to: www.vickidelany.com. Most of Vicki’s books are available in Kindle and other electronic formats as well as hardcover and trade paperback, large print and audio. Find Vicki on Facebook: www.facebook.com/vicki.delany and Twitter @vickidelany