"A lot of people read
crime fiction in advance of visiting a new city. Once there, I think
it's natural to see how the real place aligns with the one on the page,"
says best-selling crime novelist Laura Lippman, whose main character
Tess Monaghan is a reporter turned private investigator living and
working in Baltimore.
A sense of place is vital
to creating realistic crime fiction, but writing about a place people
know and can visit presents challenges, notes Lippman, a former
Baltimore Sun reporter. "If you want to write about a real place, you
better get it right, or you'll hear about it," she says. When authors
succeed, their books and characters can become forever linked with the
locations in which the books are set. Here are five destinations whose
local authors get it right.
Baltimore
Thanks to her Tess Monaghan series, including the Edgar Award-winning "Charm City," Laura Lippman has become an ambassador for her home city of Baltimore. When the city hosted the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in 2008, a self-guided tour of "Laura Lippman's Baltimore" was developed for fans who wanted to see the sights the way Tess sees them.
One destination is the Fell's Point neighborhood where
Tess lives, and even manages to detect crime while bedridden, "Rear
Window" style, in 2011's "The Girl in the Green Raincoat." Other tours
cover neighborhoods north and south of Baltimore's Washington Monument
in downtown Baltimore and include local landmarks such as the Enoch
Pratt Free Library, which Lippman mentions in most of her books.
Among the qualities that
endear Tess to fans are her unabashed love of food and her loyalty to
her favorite neighborhood haunts. They include the Daily Grind and Kali's Mezze in Fell's Point, Lexington Market south of the Washington Monument and Matthew's Pizza, where Lippman recommends the crab pe.
Brattleboro, Vermont
Mention Vermont and the mind fills with images of bucolic farms and snow-covered mountains. Crime novelist Archer Mayor,
who also works as a death investigator for Vermont's Office of the
Chief Medical Examiner and as a detective for the Windham County
(Vermont) Sheriff's Office, sees those things and others. His police
detective protagonist Joe Gunther is more than likely to gaze out at the
Connecticut River near Brattleboro and find a body floating on the
surface, as was the case in Mayor's 2007 novel "Chat."
Brattleboro,
Joe Gunther's home turf, embraces its position as Vermont's fictional
crime center and the entire state of Vermont embraces Archer Mayor. At
12 Vermont Welcome Centers,
including Guilford on I-91 near Brattleboro and Williston North and
South on I-89 between Montpelier and Burlington, a new lending library
program lets visitors pick up a print or audio edition of an Archer
Mayor novel to enjoy while they travel and to return when they're done. Lodging packages with an Archer Mayor/mystery fiction theme are available in Brattleboro, Burlington, North Bennington and Waterbury. The Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place in October.
The past year has not
been kind to Brattleboro. A fire severely damaged the historic Brooks
House hotel and much of the town's Main Street, and rains from Hurricane
Irene flooded the downtown area. But Vermont's natural beauty remains
unblemished.
Edinburgh, Scotland
Five years ago Ian Rankin
retired his Edinburgh detective John Rebus when the fictional character
reached mandatory retirement age for Scottish police. Yet after 20
years and 18 Rebus novels, Rankin and his hard-driving detective had
become indelibly linked to Edinburgh. Since 2000, Rebustours has
offered two-hour guided walking tours that start at Rebus' favorite
pub, the Royal Oak, and incorporate readings from the Rebus novels plus
mentions of other local writers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Lewis
Stevenson among them.
Ian Rankin has his own interactive Rebus' Edinburgh map at his website, and he recently updated his Ian Rankin's Edinburgh app,
available on iTunes and Google Play. One reason for this flurry of
activity is the hotly awaited return of his detective. "Rebus: Standing
in Another Man's Grave," a new Rebus novel, will be released in the
United Kingdom in November and in the United States in January 2013.
Rankin fans visiting Scotland in September should also take advantage of Doors Open Days,
an annual program that offers access to buildings and sites not usually
open to the public. The scheme inspired Rankin's 2008 stand-alone art
heist novel "Doors Open." A TV adaptation of that novel, starring
Stephen Fry, is in production.
Gaborone, Botswana
Alexander McCall Smith helped devise the tours based on his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels that have been run by Africa Insight
since 2003. The novels, which feature Precious Ramotswe, a
"traditionally built" woman of unspecified age, are so charming and
gentle it might be surprising to learn that many of the characters and
places mentioned in them are drawn directly from real life. Stops on the
tour vary but typically include Mma Ramotswe's house on Zebra Drive (a
private residence), her birthplace in the village of Mochudi, and a
visit to the "orphan farm" where Mma Ramotswe meets Motholeli and Puso.
(Mma and Rra are the formal terms of greeting and respect for women and
men, respectively, in Botswana.)
The full-day tours have
changed over the years as more books have been written — the newest in
the series, "The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection" was released in
April — but the core tour stops come from the earlier books and a cup of
Mma Ramotswe's favorite red bush tea is always on the itinerary.
Half-day tours, walking tours and two-day tours that include a visit to
the Mokolodi Nature Reserve also are available.
Sweden
We can thank Sweden for
the current popularity of crime fiction tours; the country is rife with
them. Even the beautiful, tiny fishing village of Fjällbacka in the
Bohuslän region of West Sweden, which typically sees its population drop
to 1,000 individuals in the off-season, now receives a steady of flow
of visitors who want to see the locations mentioned in Camilla Läckberg's best-selling Erica Falck novels, starting with "The Ice Princess."
Henning Mankell's
Inspector Kurt Wallander is resentful about working in Ystad, a small
city in the Skåne region of southern Sweden that he considers a
backwater. Yet visitors now flock to Ystad from all over the world for
the "In the Footsteps of Wallander" self-guided tour. (You can follow the route by map or by app.)
The tours feature locations from the books and from both the Swedish
and British TV series based on them. ("Wallander Series III," starring
Kenneth Branagh, will air on PBS "Masterpiece Mystery" in September with
episodes based on "An Event in Autumn," "The Dogs of Riga" and "Before
the Frost.")
Not surprisingly perhaps, the most popular crime fiction tours in Sweden are the Stockholm tours based on the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. The Stockholm City Museum sells
maps for self-guided Millennium Tours and conducts two-hour guided
tours focusing largely on the residential Södermalm neighborhood where
fictional journalist Mikael Blomkvist works and where fictional computer
hacker Lisbeth Salander lives. It hardly matters that Blomkvist and
Salander don't "work" or "live" in a real sense; "The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo" and its sequels made them real enough for travelers to
want to visit them.
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