With borders just starting to open, one of the best alternatives to traveling is immersing yourself in a book that transports you. Detective novels, in particular, allow us to recreate a completely different world. From the moors of Yorkshire to the souks of Marrakech, their settings often become as important as a main character, capable of rivaling any protagonist.
These novels take you beyond your armchair. The best of them can even serve as a travel guide to prepare for your first post-pandemic excursion. They offer advice on the best places to go and the most beautiful sites to visit.
Agatha Christie, the most famous author of detective novels, helped define this form of writing. His writings are both masterful detective novels and tourist guides to England.
Miss Marple, the master detective featured in twelve of his novels, is totally attached to her fictional home in St. Mary Mead, a simple English village. There is a church, a pub, a row of cottages and a stately manor house. This village is so well described that it is easy to map. In this sense, Agatha Christie offers a rather clear representation of the main street of this hamlet in the first novel featuring Jane Marple, The Protheroe Affair. This is an English village, essentially rustic and quite frankly kitsch, but lively enough to appeal to any Anglophile looking for a typical getaway to Great Britain.
Visit England, a British travel agency, has decided to take advantage of the bucolic poetry of Agatha Christie to offer a self-guided itinerary through South Devon to the English Riviera. Along the way are twenty iconic locations from the famous author’s detective novels, including the country roads that inspired her image of St. Mary Mead.
His novels don’t just offer tourist tips for visiting the English countryside, however. At the Bertram Hotel is one of those detective novels where the environment is the most urbanized. Miss Marple stays at an imposing hotel in London offering a tour of the capital that tourists can easily replicate.
For many crime writers, setting is not just a representation of local color. Mister Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, the first novel featuring Tom Ripley, offers a classic excursion through Italy, from Naples to Rome via Venice. Yet it embodies more than just an evocative portrait of sweet life fellinian from the 1950s.
