Déjà lu

[shewhomust]

I've been reading, and enjoying - not raving about, but enjoying - Louise Penny's Still Life. It's on the cosy side of crime fiction (which is fine by me), a murder mystery solved by a likeable detective, set in a picture-postcard village south of Montreal.

Many of the people who live in this idyllic village are artists of one kind and another, and that includes the murder victim: a single woman of 76, a retired teacher, but someone who has painted all her life without ever showing her work to anyone. Now, finally, she has submitted a picture to the local art show: it's a detailed, naïve, perhaps, in a technical sense, painting of the local fair, in which a large number of local people are recognisable.

And this is the thing that's bothering me; because I feel I've met this plot before, and I can't place it. I'd guess it was in a short story, rather than a novel, but all I remember is the idea of the picture which holds the clue: a crowd scene in which someone is where they shouldn't be, or isn't where they should be...

I hope this isn't a spoiler for Still Life; the problem is, I'm spoilering myself. The painting is only one of a number of strands in the novel, but I can't help fixing on it as important - and having a preconception about what its importance is - because I half remember it from some totally other story. Which is infuriating.

This is not an accusation of plagiarism, or of lack of originality: it's a plea to the world to put me out of my misery, and tell me what it is that I can't quite remember.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There's an Agatha Christie story where the clues are contained in a painting. I think it's called By The Pricking of My Thumbs. It certainly contains a witchcraft element. It was televised recently with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple- though I believe Miss Marple doesn't feature in the original.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, I've read a fair amount of Agatha Christie in my time, and remember very little of it, so that's certainly possible...