Exciting news from the world of science via the Telegraph website.
Proving that their parents’ contribution to university fees were not wasted, ‘Open University statisticians’ have worked out the comparative murder rates for two long-running hotbeds of homicide.
Midsomer, home to the cosy adventures of Barnaby and Troy, manages a measley 32 victims per million people per year, compared to a staggering 1,490 per million recorded in Cabot Cove, cozy stamping ground of Jessica Fletcher. The ‘real-life murder capital of the world’, Honduras, comes somewhere between the two with 910 murders per million.
I suspect Camilla Läckberg’s Fjällbacka, with just over 850 inhabitants according to Wikipedia, would be an even less desirable place to set up home. Are there any other suggestions?
Past Offences: Classic crime, thrillers and mystery book reviews 
Rich – Hence the Cabot Cove Syndrome, when cosy series depend too much on the unlikely likelihood of a lot of murders in the same small town. Lilian Jackson Braun had a cosy series for many years in which lots of murder and mayhem took place in and near Pickax, a small town in Moose County, “400 miles north of nowhere.” I don’t think I’d want to live there… 😉
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Oh RIGHT I remember that! Murder victims popped up wherever Jessica Fletcher turned up! Even back then I thought it was hilarious.
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Visby and Ystad seem pretty dangerous….
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Oxford is a big city, but I still feel that the deathrate must be unnaturally high, with all those murder stories set there…
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That Devon village where Belinda Bauer set her first three novels is pretty notorious, I think it has exceeded the national murder rate pretty easily by now. (To echo Moira, I’ve heard it said that the rate in the Morse books is amusingly (?) high – so yes, if you add in all the other Oxford-set books you are in for a very dangerous time).
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