Mystery books are replete with many types of protagonists—working police officers, FBI agents, military police, private detectives, shop owners, retired grandmothers, and stay-at-home moms. I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I have some suggestions for professions for amateur sleuths. If you know of any books or series that have such protagonists, please chime in and let me know what they are.
In the health care field, state health departments have employees whose responsibilities include notifying people who test positive for certain kinds of diseases, monitoring their treatment, and when necessary, doing contact tracing. Contact tracing is where the health worker interviews people diagnosed with a contagious disease, such as measles, and tries to trace who else may have been exposed to the disease so that efforts can be made to find these additional people and help them. And if people in that second tier also get sick from the contagious disease, then the contact tracing continues through the third round, and so forth. In Alabama, we call these people Disease Intervention Specialists. I think a contact tracer, especially one who monitors the medicine that people take to be sure the treatment is completed (quite common when someone is treated for tuberculosis, for example) would make an excellent amateur sleuth. Epidemiologists are already real-life sleuths, just not in the criminal world. They work to figure out the origin of disease outbreaks. People who can do that should also be able to solve mysteries they stumble across. And they can properly pronounce all those impossible latin names for the various germs that ail us.
People who work around others but tend to be overlooked also make excellent amateur sleuths. What about a janitor, or someone who works for a cleaning service? Janitors and cleaners are everywhere and see the conditions we truly live in, not just the image we put forward to the public. Waitstaff fall in this category too. They can learn a lot about a person just by the way that person treats them. A human resources manager, who often is a combination referee, life coach, den mother, and hall monitor, knows human nature and how to read people. He or she would make an interesting amateur sleuth also.
What type of professions do you think an interesting sleuth might come from?
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