If you missed NPR’s recent Crime in the City series featuring four of today’s hottest mystery authors giving guided tours of the places they and their characters inhabit, the good news is that you can play them on-line.
Join Donna Leon as she reflects on Venice in A Tale of Two Cities.
The narrow alleys and wide squares of the Cannaregio district, where Leon lives, are also the world of Commissario Guido Brunetti. Happily married to a university professor of English literature -- who is also a great chef -- the fictional police detective is an intellectual and reflective man who visits museums and buys out-of-print books.
Leon agrees with Henry James' observation more than a century ago that "In Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors."
In Loving a Flawed Place, Laura Lippman, who writes mostly about Baltimore strong-willed former reporter turned PI Tess Monaghan, takes us on a tour of “Charm City,” starting in Fells Point, where Monaghan used to live in a row house above her aunt's bookstore.
According to Lippmann: “A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws. Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience."
In Real People Inhabit Michael Connelly's Fictional L.A., we spend a day with Connelly as he shows us the City of Angels the way he and his protagonist Harry Bosch -- a relentless, modern-day homicide detective with the LAPD -- see it.
"To use a cop term, it's a suitcase city. It's a transient place,” says Connelly of L.A. He based Bosch on Raymond Chandler's character Phillip Marlowe, a 1940s private eye. "He's an outsider with an insider's job. He's got a badge."
John Burdett's Bangkok is revealed in Beyond Sex and Tourists. Bangkok is at the heart of Burdett's novels, a city which, he explains, exists on many other levels alongside the bizarre murders, corrupt cops and big-hearted bargirls of which he writes.
The bargirls, he says, are the real protagonists of his stories, and his character, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep -- the son of a former Thai bar girl and an American soldier, with a foot planted firmly in both cultures -- is their mouthpiece.