Writers who set books away from home — and why they do it

I started Detectives Beyond Borders in 2006 with a wariness of crime writers who set books in countries other than their own or where they did not live. They must be arrivistes, I suspected, tourists in search of tax write-offs who had no more understanding of local conditions and attitudes than does CNN. Americans (or Brits) parachuting in to tell the locals how to solve their problems.

Over the years I've asked such authors what they see in their chosen settings that a local might miss, or what they might miss that locals take for granted, and I wrote the introduction to a book of essays on the subject (Christopher G. Moore's The Cultural Detective). But not until last night did I think to ask such a writer why she had chosen the country she did.

Turns out that Cara Black, currently in Philadelphia for an American Library Association convention, has ties to France that long predate her Aimée Leduc novels. Her father introduced her to Jacques Tati movies. An uncle had literary ties to the country. Nuns from the Society of the Sacred Heart taught her a mildly archaic French that would later bemuse the children of her hosts on visits to France. There's more to her attraction to Paris, that is, than the Eiffel Tower and bargains on designer clothes.

So now I'll assume that every such writer has stories of his or her own, that there is a reason he or she writes about the Greek islands rather than the south of France, or Italy rather than Spain, or vice versa.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Bouchercon panel waiting to happen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What's your favorite fiction set at the beach?

I'll mark the arrival of August's dog days with the opening of Marco Vichi's Death in August, set in Florence, 1963:

"Inspector Bordelli entered his office at eight o’clock in the morning after an almost sleepless night, spent tossing and turning between sweat-soaked sheets. These were the first days of August, hot and muggy, without a breath of wind. And the nights were even more humid and unhealthy. But at least the city was deserted, the cars few and far between, the silence almost total. The beaches, on the other hand, were noisy and full of peeling bodies. Every umbrella had its transistor radio, every child a little bucket."

That got me thinking of my favorite fictional renderings of beachside holidays. Two come to mind: West Coast Blues, Jacques Tardi's graphic-novel adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel Three to Kill (Le petit bleu de la côte ouest in the original French), and the greatest of them all, Jacques Tati's movie comedy Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

What are you favorite fictional depictions of life at the beach?

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 The novel's translator from Italian into English is Stephen Sartarelli, known best to crime fiction readers for translating Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano. So I confess to smiling when I read the following exchange in Vichi's book. Those who love Salvo's sidekick and nemesis, Catarella, will know why:

"‘You sent for me, Inspector?’ 

"The intonation was typically Sardinian: bouncy, proud, almost aggressive.

"‘Are you Piras?’

"‘In person.’" (Highlighting mine)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012