The Traveling Detective Show

Among the numerous blogs I enjoy regularly are several that are dedicated to international crime fiction. Those include Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders, Karen Meek’s EuroCrime, Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays, and Barbara Fister’s Scandinavian Crime Fiction. But there are others. Many others. Readers apparently relish fictional crimes perpetrated on foreign soils, if only because such thrilling tales give them armchair travel experiences.

But there are other attractions too, as journalist-turned-author Tobias Jones explains today in an article for Britain’s Sunday Observer. You may recall that I wrote about Jones last year, in a Rap Sheet piece about UK publisher Faber and Faber, the house that will be publishing his first detective novel, The Salati Case, in July of this year. For The Observer, Jones (shown above) seeks to explain “why crime fiction travels so well”:

The appeal of such books is that, as well as a good yarn, they offer the traveller the longed-for “feel” of a country. They serve up digestible slices of culture and history at the same time as giving you the pleasure of an old-fashioned page-turner. The marriage works well because in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters. Ross Macdonald told his readers far more about the underbelly of California than he ever did about Lew Archer. We read Scandinavian crime fiction largely because we’re fascinated by countries simultaneously so similar yet different to ours. And people turn to Alexander McCall Smith or Ian Rankin in part for the same reason others sit on an open-top bus: they want to see the sights and sounds of Botswana or Edinburgh. Add to that the fact that we live in an era of cheap air travel and quick continental breaks, and it’s hardly surprising that there’s a demand for crime set in exotic locations.

The ubiquity of these books also says something about market forces. Pete Ayrton, publisher of Serpent’s Tail, which has an enviable crime list, says: “A lot of these writers are good journalists, and in the old days they would have written political novels like Graham Greene. But the bottom has fallen out of that market and so they turn to crime.” Contrary to the stereotype of the writer as the lone crusader with a unique voice, most writers are actually fairly adaptable in their styles. When McCall Smith started enjoying superstar status a few years ago by writing enjoyable and gentle books about Botswana, a lot of hard-up scribes took note. The bottom line is, as they say, that crime pays. If writers want to pay the rent, they have to put a dead body and a detective into their travel books.

Crime also pays for publishers because it’s a genre that lends itself to repeats. It offers the possibility of sequels in which the detective is coaxed into case after case, slowly building up a faithful readership. This works in the writer’s favour too. In the old days writers living abroad could only get away with one book about that country. Now they can write a dozen.

Another appeal of the genre for publishers is that it allows them to bring out “foreign” titles without the difficulties and costs of translating a local writer. And it’s this, according to Ayrton, that makes the whole phenomenon slightly dubious: “It’s unfortunate that the success of these books is normally at the expense of the indigenous writers. In Britain we publish very few books in translation, so readers tend to turn to books that have a slightly imperial take on the countries they’re in.” It is, in short, a reflection of our laziness that we read English-speaking writers on foreign countries, rather than the foreigners themselves.

The alternative argument is that these books actually whet the appetite for the hard stuff: the indigenous writers. It’s an argument that can be backed up by sales figures. If you take crime fiction set in Japan: David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero has sold 9,200 copies in this country; Natsuo Kirino’s Out has sold 60,000. Take fiction set in Italy: Donna Leon’s bestseller Friends in High Places has sold 50,000 copies; Niccolò Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared has sold 75,000. Of two books set in the Middle East, Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game has, so far, outsold Matt Rees’s more recent The Bethlehem Murders. These figures suggest that the British public isn’t only reading the English-language take on foreign countries. Rather than being a reflection of the much-lamented parochialism of British publishing, these foreign-based crime novels could actually be a reflection of our longing to understand “abroad” that bit better. With both Stieg Larsson and Roberto Bolaño breaking into the top 10 of the hardback fiction lists recently, it might be that our reading tastes are simply becoming more cosmopolitan.

You will find all of Tobias Jones’ Observer piece here.