For a few years now I have been choosing the company of detectives for my travels, fictional sleuths I should hasten to add, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s book-burning gastronome, Pepe Carvalho, Petros Makaris’s henpecked but roving-eyed Inspector Haritos and John Lescroart’s bar-tending attorney Dismas Hardy in San Francisco. These days, once I’ve bought my ticket, my first thought is to find a good crime writer who will whet my appetite for the trip and add literary spice to my holiday when I get there.
So far it has been surprisingly easily done. Such is the prolificacy of the genre worldwide and the ready availability of translations (Bitter Lemon Press is a particularly good source), I think you’d probably be very unlucky to pick a country which didn’t have its own modern day Hercules Poirot or Miss Marple through whose eyes you can get a foretaste of your chosen destination.
What the authors and their detectives bring to the table is highly varied, though in a surprising number of cases (no pun intended), it is often literally "to the table". In Barcelona in An Olympic Death, Pepe Carvalho, spends more time peering in the eyes of salubrious fish in La Boqueria market than searching for clues, but while he solves the mystery he also reveals the secrets of Catalan cuisine greatly enhancing my pleasure in the city's food.
In Che Committed Suicide, it is Mrs Haritos rather than her policeman husband who provides the culinary lore, and what to eat in an Athens sweltering in 42 degrees. Constantly fretting over the detective's penchant for souvlaki the diet she puts her husband on not so much a penance as a pleasure, for a heat –fatigued tourist. I can easily turn away from the sizzling skewered pork and lamb in favour of the chickpeas dressed with spring onions, capers and olive oil counselled by Mrs Haritos. While her husband painstakingly unravels the mystery of a series of high profile suicides, I am reinvigorated for another round of archaeological sites.
Nor is gastronomy all I have gained from embracing the literary underbelly before taking off. Dismas Hardy’s obsession with topographical detail left me so familiar with San Francisco from the Mission to North Beach that I scarcely needed a map, and though the policeman turned lawyer’s own bar, The Little Shamrock, sadly proved fictional, I was also well acquainted nicely with the city’s liquor culture before ever landing in SFO.
In Buenos Aires, the architect anti-hero of Claudia Piñeiro's A Crack in the Wall woos his mistress by taking her to visit his favourite buildings in the city. Following in their footsteps took me on a wonderfully off-beat tour of art nouveau architectural gems, like The House of the Lilies and the House of the Peacocks, I would never have found alone.
I'm not sure where I'm headed next but I'm confident wherever it turns out to be, there is a an unsuspecting gumshoe waiting to guide me. Entries to The Irish Times Travel Writer competition, in association with Travel Department, are now closed. The winning writer will be announced on October 29th in The Irish Times Magazine. See irishtimes.com/travelwriter
