Which masterpiece should I plagiarize... ahem, pay homage to?
Seeing that everyone was waiting for him, Lorry's mind began racing.
He read novels of every kind and had a habit of rereading them, so he thought of seven or eight widely acclaimed classic suspense novels almost instantly.
There was Dracula, hailed as the "bible of vampire literature," Psycho and The Shining, whose film adaptations had become classics, as well as Ugetsu Monogatari, The Silence of the Lambs, and others.
Of course, when it came to suspense, Agatha was an unavoidable towering presence.
Her And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express were classics among classics, and for a time Luo Rui loved them so much that he would steal a few moments to read a few pages even while eating.
Her And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express were classics among classics. At one point, Lorry had been unable to put them down, even finding time to read a few pages during meals.
He instinctively moved to choose one of them, but suddenly thought of a problem:
I can't do that. It would break the rules!
Both novels were representative examples of the isolated-country-house mystery, but Dylan, the first storyteller, had already used a similar approach.
That counts as a real-world element everyone knows about... no, wait!
In a flash, Lorry remembered something else.
Before the contest officially began, Walker the butler had come to report to Falk, and the owner of the Manor had told everyone that a stretch of the road down the mountain had been washed away.
In other words, they could only stay at the Manor for now.
In a sense, wasn't this a real-life isolated-country-house mystery?
That counts as a real-world element everyone knows about!
*But Dylan didn't