There’s nothing like a murder to really set a vacation off right.
At least, this is what I imagine other mystery authors think when they plant a body on a beach or in a museum or at the luxurious resort where their sleuth just settled down for a nice rest. When I sent my heroine, Saffron Everleigh, to Smyrna, Turkey for an expedition exploring the ruins of an ancient marketplace, I waved farewell to her with eager anticipation of the murder she would soon discover in A Botanist’s Guide to Tradition and Treachery.
Am I cruel to ruin her exciting trip abroad? Perhaps. But it’s a longstanding tradition of serial mysteries to interrupt travel with a crime. And there’s a good reason for it: moving our beloved characters from their familiar territory to new theatres abroad increases the possibility and consequences of failure to solve the crime and catch the bad guy, thus upping the stakes for the book and the entire series.
By removing characters from their usual sphere, we separate our characters from a large piece of what makes them successful. In long-running series, such as Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell Mysteries, we watch the nascent sleuth build up their resources book to book, collecting a brilliant love interest with a special set of skills (her beloved Stoker), friends with unique and convenient interests (the indominable JJ and reluctantly cooperative Mornaday), and a home that both shelters and nurtures (the fascinating Belvedere).
When Raybourn says “bon voyage” in An Unexpected Peril, it strips away all of these hard-won advantages so readers can see what Veronica can do after solving five other mysteries. It’s an opportunity to show readers that these sleuths have learned, and are still growing.
Often, our sleuths are forced to learn the ropes of a new system of law. A common trope of murder mysteries is the friendly—and occasionally competitive—policeman or inspector. These characters reveal information and even lend their authority to our sleuths, sometimes unintentionally, and ultimately function as another resource, guiding our sleuths through crime scenes, autopsy reports, and what the law actually means, even if it still gets broken in the process of solving the crime.
In new climes, our sleuths are fish out of water, floundering in legal systems unfamiliar and occasionally dangerous to misunderstand.
Parveen Mistry finds herself in a remote kingdom negotiating laws she’s learning as she goes in The Satapur Moonstone, and Saffron Everleigh faces the unsettled legality of a new country when she ventures to Turkey just two years after it established itself as a country, before detailed laws were settled. Readers are left ripping through the pages, wondering what will happen when our sleuths stumble over lines of society and the law.
This is one of my favorite parts of the mystery abroad volume of a long-running series: the social faux-pas. It can run from humorous—I think of fussy Hercule Poirot complaining of dust in the middle of Egypt in Death on the Nile—to more serious mistakes. Robert Jackson Bennet’s A Drop of Corruption takes place in a magically suffused land where many people have been gathered into one empire, and Ana and Din, the sleuths, almost miss the intricacies of culture that their solve relies on.
And what does become of our beloved sleuths when they do run afoul of the law or social niceties? Any allies they might have won over might be alienated. They might be shunned, blocking them from carrying out their investigation. They might even end up in a jail cell, as Saffron Everleigh is when her expertise in poisons is seen as proof against her, rather than a skill the local inspector could use to help solve the crime.
Mysteries abroad also throw into relief the vastness of the world. Being so far from home—surrounded by alien beauty and new cultures—emphasizes how easy it could be for the villain to flee into the big, wide world to avoid justice. Without the usual resources, sleuths feel that there is no net to draw down around them to prevent escape, even those in remote locations. Failure to capture them not only means a failure to attain justice but to prevent future crimes at the villain’s hands, compounding the stakes further.
Alas, no vacation is a true rest for our favorite sleuths. Murder and mayhem follow them wherever they go—a damnable coincidence, isn’t it?—but it gives them the chance to prove yet again why they are so good at what they do and challenge them to reach new heights of investigation.
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