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Journalism of Courage
The mapping of venice and edinburgh is complete. But crime fiction has been marking out new territories, and for armchair travellers the genre is fast becoming the most popular way to know of foreign lands and cultures. The capacity of the detective framework to capture interest in faraway lands became evident by the runaway success of Alexander McCall Smith8217;s No. 1 Ladies8217; Detective Agency books set in Botswana. Donna Leon has, with similar success, been studying the darker side of Venice, with her Guido Brunetti books. And Edinburgh has gained a new popularity with Smith8217;s Isabel Dalhousie books and, of course, Ian Rankin8217;s Rebus installments.
But a lot of other writers are enlarging the geographical reach of the novel. Take Qiu Xiaolong, in whose telling the glitzy newness of Shanghai is made real alongside the grimy crimes being investigated by city police. Qiu8217;s latest, A Case of Two Cities, provides an insider8217;s view of the corruption and regulation that have come with rapid prosperity.
Barbara Nadel, meanwhile, has been using her detective, Cetin Ikmen, a member of the Istanbul police force, to explore the city8217;s underbelly.
Italy remains a favourite, with an army of tough talking and cynical detectives providing a pragmatic counterview to the rapturous travelogues about food and villas in Tuscany that keep being published. Andrea Camilleri8217;s Inspector Montalbano series set in Sicily is the most recommended of the lot. A good book to start with is The Terra-Cotta Dog, which begins with a conversation with, who else, a Mafioso. For those keen on linguistic authencity: Camilleri, who as opposed to Leon writes in Italian, is immensely popular in Italy. In fact, till a couple of years Leon8217;s books had not even been translated into Italian, though they have always sold well in Germany.
Then there are the colder countries. Henning Mankell8217;s Kurt Wallander series is set in Sweden, while Karin Fossum8217;s Inspector Sejer mysteries are located in Norway.
So what is it about the crime genre that draws such interest? The very nature of the whodunit genre provides a known 8212; or knowable 8212; structure. It is a constant that gives the writer ever greater latitude to take her explorations into foreign territories. And the very paces of the detective form 8212; with the investigator compelled to reason through clues, proof and motivations 8212; provides an unobtrusive way to slipping into foreign cultures.
In addition, with human emotions and perversions at the core of any crime story, detective fiction breeds its own kind of cosmopolitanism. That is perhaps why so much detective fiction is by authors writing not about their native lands. For instance, Leon on Venice, Smith above on Botswana, Nadel on Istanbul.
