10 detectives & their cities

1.    Harry Bosch – Los Angeles

2.    Guido Brunetti – Venice

3.    Maisie Dobbs - London

4.    Marcus Didius Falco – Rome

5.    Harry Hole – Oslo

6.    Jules Maigret – Paris

7.    John Punter – Melbourne

8.    Matthew Shardlake – London

9.    Kurt Wallander - Ystad

10. Aurelio Zen – Milan

Harry (Bosch) retreats to his A-frame perched precariously above a canyon. Guido goes home for lunch with his family. Maisie has a cold flat. Marcus avoids his father and Nux, his dog that smells. Harry (Hole) and Jules like a drink in familiar bars. John is forever looking over his shoulder in case his former wife and other adversaries catch up with him. Matthew, with crooked back, just about keeps on the right side of Thomas Cromwell. Kurt forgets his demons with whisky and opera. And Aurelio contends with fog in northern Italy. All detectives and all at home in their own particular milieu.

From Maigret’s First Case in Paris, through Echo Park (where Harry Bosch made a grizzly discovery) via Harry Hole’s encounter with The Snowman in Oslo, millions of contemporary readers have been transported to authentic city streets in modern crime novels. It is only our imagination that is transported. Ten of my best-loved crime writers, Michael Connelly to Jacqueline Winspear, brilliantly superimpose their fictional detectives onto real places to give us a compelling mixture of fabrication and fact.

Why is contemporary crime fiction so widely read in the last thirty years? Firstly these ten detectives always operate at the centre of good stories; I love a good story. Good stories are an  essential of life. Secondly the books are populated with an assortment of believable characters; although made up they are not of fantasy. A further attraction of a crime novel is the progression from chaos and violence in the first chapter to a restoration of order and calm at the denouement. At the conclusion all loose ends are tidied up, the city streets are safe again. The character and personality of the author’s detective is crucial too. If we like them, are drawn to them and enjoy their idiosyncrasies we stick with them through a series – with Georges Simenon it is through a staggering series of seventy-five short Maigret novels.

There is a further dimension as to why modern crime novels (of the mid twentieth century until today) are so fulfilling. This is the intense sense of landscape that pervades the plot as the detectives go about their work. Having visited all the locations where these ten authors have planted their imaginary sleuths (observant readers will note that nine of the ten detectives listed are male although three of their creators are women), I know these cities by their policemen.

Why so few women writers in my list? Don’t women today occupy the bestsellers lists predominantly? It is no coincidence that of my ten detectives, men script seven. Detailed descriptions of place, urban landscapes, cars, bars and buildings are important to men. A place and their geographic orientation are important. We like to know where we are and how we got there and how we get to the next place. Men navigate by impersonal objects; the majority work and play near them. Women writers of crime fiction tend to focus more on the psychology of crime, the human interaction, what’s going on in the minds of the bad guys as well as the policemen. They also include lots of gory detail of shattered body parts, the blood and the guts. To my favoured female exponents of crime novels - such as P.D. James, Patricia Cornwell, Dorothy Sayers, Natsuo Kirino, Ruth Rendell and Josephine Tey – placing the lead detective firmly at the centre of the action and having them expose the frailties and secrets of the cast of characters is the main plank of the writing.

Men born after 1942 in the UK are in the first generation since 1898 that has not been conscripted for military service. Save for those that went voluntarily to Viet Nam and those serving in the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, my generation has not experienced warfare first hand. Yet it is hard wired in to the male psyche to enjoy a bit of danger or organised action, even the threat of a glorious death. This can be experienced vicariously through the pages of a crime novel, especially if the lead detective gets beaten up or his life is endangered – see Falco, Hole and Punter, these are unequalled survivors.

The authors of my chosen list are notable for the affection and appreciation of the urban landscapes of which they write. Harry Bosch’s creator, Michael Connelly, was a police crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times before becoming a highly successful book writer. He knows his L.A. intimately and, for all its current challenges and downsides, clearly loves his city. Bosch’s L.A. is not the glitzy tinsel town of Hollywood but a teeming metropolis that draws people from all over the USA, looking for a quick buck, with some open to murder those that get in their way. Here is Bosch revisiting an old L.A. neighbourhood:

“Echo Park was about four minutes and forty years from downtown. Close enough for the shiny new spires of the city center to invade its horizon, yet it was a neighbourhood that had seen little change in decades within its small scale business district and surrounding residential streets…Largely populated by immigrants and young people hoping to catch a gentrifying wave on the early side, it was a quiet community nestled against the hills below Dodger Stadium.”

Donna Leon’s Brunetti, Jo Nesbo’s Hole and Maigret all have a yen for small city bars and cafés. None will hurry to an appointment with a corpse (or their tiresome boss) if a familiar drinking hole will provide temporary distraction from the job or just time to reflect on the likely criminal. Jo Nesbo (and of course Hole) frequents Schroder’s, a dimly lit bar in central Oslo where the beer is cheap (for Oslo); and the sausage and mash fills you up. Peter Klein’s John Punter racing mysteries centre on the Flemington racetrack in Melbourne, Australia but play out in the urban sprawls of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane where drugs, bad money and corrupt business are never far from Punter’s investigations.

Lindsey Davis breaks the mould of women crime writers unconcerned with a sense of place. To Davis the landscape in which the scruffbag, Marcus Didius Falco, drags his entourage around is the primary and essential element of each book. The series starts with The Silver Pigs, set in AD 70. Kicking off in the eternal city private eye Falco, like Harry Bosch, is intimate with the backstreets and low life of Emperor Vespasian’s Rome. Once the story moves Falco (and his fragrant amour, Helena Justina), to the godforsaken land called Britain, Lindsey Davis gives full bore to a vivid imagination of how our island was governed, how it smelled and looked nearly two thousand years ago. Through her Falco series Davis employs the device of alternating the settings for her stories between Rome and another landscape in the empire. Readers remain with this brilliant, comic and original series as much to be transported to exotic locations that include Cordoba, Palmyra, Germany and North Africa as to learn of what life was like for the ruling classes and the dispossessed in Rome.

The aftermath of the First World War – and all that that means about the horrors played out on a foreign landscape, how both men and the land were blown to smithereens – provides the time for another female writer to place London centrally in the descriptions of intrigue. Maisie Dobbs introduces the eponymous private detective of author Jacqueline Winspear. Early in the book Maisie walks across Westminster Bridge on a cold spring day and then “descended into Westminster underground station and took the District Line to Charing Cross. The station had changed names back and forth so many times…” and then we are carried away on a detailed journey filled with historical descriptions of old buildings and their architects. This could almost be a man’s writing.

Nearly twenty years into this millennium, across the world urban landscapes attract more and more people. Rural communities  - in North Yorkshire, in India’s Utter Pradesh and in California – are experiencing a decline of social interaction and religious observance. Younger workers, with fewer rural jobs to attract them and little prospect of affordable houses, move to town. The city is where it is all at, where developing and different behaviours are unfolding. All life exists and is contiguous with conflict, stress, division and violence as well as new art forms and cultures. Despite its high living costs, threat of earthquake damage and bush fires Los Angeles continues to attract more incomers because there is work, even the hope of riches. Melbourne just builds extra housing, sucking incomers from the countryside. Aurelio Zen’s hometown is Venice (La Serenissima is slowly sinking into the sea yet attracting increasing numbers of tourists – read Dead Lagoon) and he sleuths around Milan (Italy’s commercial powerhouse – read Medusa).

Jacqueline Winspear (with her private investigator Maisie Dobbs), Lindsey Davis (Marcus Didius Falco) and C.J. Sansom (Matthew Shardlake) write about cities in bygone times; London after the First World War, Vespasian’s Rome and London in the reign of Henry VIII respectively. The streets, smells and intrigue are no less real for being set so long ago. These authors too are clearly attached to these cities. They are fascinated in what makes them great cities and enjoy their beloved creations surviving war, treachery and poison.

Sitting atop my assembly of diverse crime fiction writers is Henning Mankell. Less a lone and brilliant  detective, more a leader of a team operating in a wild and inhospitable landscape. Kurt Wallander’s mood is usually in tune with the environment, both natural and political. I have written before about Wallander and his base of Ystad in Skane, southern Sweden. Anyone watching the screen adaptations will recall vividly both a self-immolation in a field of oilseed rape and bodies washed up in a boat on a harsh Skane beach. Readers of The Fifth Woman can imagine graphically the body impaled on stakes in a remote dell. Above all others Mankell holds readers spellbound with a rich mixture of landscape, plot and human terror. Ystad and it environs wreaks of horror and desolation.

Occupants of the low life reach out for survival in a city. There are opportunities to exist that the country cannot provide. The rich and powerful people too operate at their peak in a city. Temptation, corruption, and greed flourish in cities, where all men have learned since even before Vespasian’s reign that monetary gain can be easy at the expense of another. To a few, murder is just another part of that zero sum game.

Kurt Wallander's beach

If you would like to share your experiences of the places discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.  

Books by the authors referenced can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk