Hot, sticky, frayed of temper and surrounded by irritating fellow travellers (or worse, relatives), we might find it amazing that so many of us make it back alive. It wasn’t lost on them that holidays often aren’t all that. It’s also true that - more than they are often given credit for - crime writers of all periods tend to be sharp observers of human behaviour. Holiday destinations also provided plenty of means and opportunity, combining proximity to deep water and hotel balconies with the period’s entrenched suspicion of anything continental, which made it easy to pass off, say, an arsenic poisoning as an understandable response to funny foreign food. Many of the tropes of a classic crime story, such as the group of potential suspects isolated by circumstances, are extremely well suited to a holiday setting - you simply substitute an island (as in Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham) or cruise ship ( The Widow’s Cruise by Nicholas Blake) for a secluded mansion or sealed room. In part, the Golden Age writers benefited from the period they wrote in: these days, fictional detectives tend to be too busy, obsessive and gloomy to take holidays and therefore lack the free time to stumble across a cunningly devised crime while visiting the Parthenon or yachting off Cape Cod. This link between relaxation and tragedy is by no means a modern phenomenon: it was in fact the “Golden Age” detective novelists - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Anthony Berkeley and their peers, writing mostly between the 1920s and 1950s - who perfected the summer murder mystery. an untimely death? The pandemic may have been the national equivalent of one of those country-house murder mysteries where you’re all snowed in and at the mercy of a mysterious assailant, but before that the shelves of airport bookshops groaned with beach reads - all those foil-embossed titles and shadowy profiles of women who’d disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

It was as I was packing my suitcase to go on holiday, stuffing it full of books with titles such as Blood on the Tide and Escape to Murder, that I asked myself: why is it that we deem the perfect accompaniment to a summer break to be. Sunday August 08 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

The Widow's Cruise by Nicholas Blake