Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

If you know England only through crime novels, you're probably terrified to set foot in the country, despite it having a murder rate way below that of the US. The most dangerous place, according to those novels, is the quaint English village. The blog Crime Reads is all about the literature of crime, whether it's true crime, novels, mysteries, or related genres. They have some advice for fans of these books, if they were to travel to such a village. First of all, you must avoid these things:

The village fête

The village fête is a fair, a celebration on the village green. They toss coconuts, judge cakes, drink tea, and whack toy rats with mallets. It’s a nice way to spend a summer’s day and thin out the local population, because where there is a fête, there is murder. If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead. The tea urn is filled with poison. The sponge cakes are full of glass. There’s an axe in the fortune telling tent. The coconuts are bombs. It’s like the Hunger Games, but dangerous.

Anywhere with a vat

In English villages, vats only exist for drowning people—in beer, in pickling brine, in whiskey, in jam. This is doubly true if the vat was built by 14th century monks. If anyone offers to show you a vat, say you need to get something from your car, then start the engine and run them over. The police understand this sort of thing. Tell them about the vat.

There are a lot more dos and don'ts to memorize if you want to survive your sojourn in a quaint English village, which you can read here. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dennis Turner)


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I'm reading this and remembering that "Murder She Wrote" took place in the States, but also wondering if Angela Landsbury was American or English and what the chances would be of finding her in an English Village.
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