Put the Scooby Doo gang in this category then. Zoinks!
Hitchcock actually does this a LOT, as I think on it:
Hardware store owner (PSYCHO)
Advertising agency (NORTH BY NORTHWEST) – although, arguably, he’s not the one who solves the mystery, he just resolves it
Tennis player (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN)
Artist (THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY)
Menial Laborer (SABOTEUR)
Business Exec (MARNIE)
Geologist - Em Hansen
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Forensic Anthropologist yet!
DEATH, though that was under questioning from a police officer.
Astronomer. I remember this SDMB thread about mystery novels involving astronomy. I still haven’t read any of the books and stories mentioned there. Not all of them are murder mysteries, and not all the mysteries are solved by astronomers. It looks like Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer would qualify.
He was a friar, not a monk (and the difference is really quite significant in this context).
Anyway, anyone can think of a class of people who are not (yet) known for solving murders, probably has the basis, right there, for pitching a new, long-running television series to a major network.
Wrongfully convicted vascular surgeons (Dr Richard Kimball)
Don’t forget about that one detective who solves crimes in his spare time.
Rabbis. Harry Kemelman’s novels.
How can we forget?
Robots (not cyborgs): Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw
A Greenwich Village coffee shop owner.
A bored Australian socialite and her companion (Phryne Fisher)
I’ve thought of a few one-offs:
Oxford Don (Gervase Fen)
Brother of a duke (Lord Peter Wimsey)
Another scion of a great (but never revealed) family (Albert Campion)
Professional French wine expert (M. Lebel from a French TV series called Blood of the Vine)
No one has mentioned the obvious: witnesses–I just saw my next door neighbor murder his wife.
Woman who own a place somehow connected with cooking who are always falling over corpses and who have homicide detective boyfriends or husbands who can never figure out who done it, so the woman ends up capturing the murderer. AND fixing a great meal at the end.
Google “culinary mysteries” if you don’t believe it.
Ed McBain got the inspiration for his 87th precient mysteries when he realized that if he were to be murdered, he would want his wife to call the cops, not Miss Marple.
Re the first sentence . There’s a fish friar and a chip monk.
A star baseball player/manager, with a bad bowl haircut and a predilection to head first slides. Partnered with homeless singer who used to be of the international jet set.
Elton & Rose
Tuesdays at 7, 8 central
Blind men — Max Carrados
And this one may be cheating, since the heroes may frequently have been coppers, but Anoraks who really, really, love railway timetables: see Freeman Wills Croft.
[ Actually, apart from he, there seems to be an entire ‘Gaslight’ genre of Victorian ( mainly ) Railway Detective Fiction in Britain — not totally disassociated with the earlier Victorian Railway Ghost Fiction, that sprang up pretty much alongside the first tracks; or even the non-fictional, but not unsensational accounts of Great Railway Disasters by such practitioners as the admirable O. S. Nock. ]
Elizabeth Peters had 3 different series with amateur detectives.
Librarian/romance writer: Jacqueline Kirby
Egyptologists: Amelia Peabody and Emerson
Medieval art historian/museum worker: Vicky Bliss
Who they gonna get when you’ve out-foxed the cops?
Here’s my card I’m the Continental Op.