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shewhomustI'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.
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.
