The Cartographic Journal

The World of Mapping

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Topographical Fiction: A World Map of

International Crime Fiction

Eva Erdmann

To cite this article: Eva Erdmann (2011) Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International
Crime Fiction, The Cartographic Journal, 48:4, 274-284, DOI: 10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000027

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000027

Published online: 22 Nov 2013.

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The Cartographic Journal Vol. 48 No. 4 pp. 274–284 Cartographies of Fictional Worlds - Special Issue November 2011
# The British Cartographic Society 2011

REFEREED PAPER

Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International

Crime Fiction
Eva Erdmann
Romanisches Seminar, Platz der Universität 3, 79098 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Email: eva.erdmann@romanistik.uni-freiburg.de

This contribution describes the evolution of the crime fiction novel into a genre which over the past decades has become
characterized by its internationality. This characterisation applies both in terms of its dissemination and in terms of its
narrative subject matter. How crime fiction novels convey local, touristic and geographical knowledge throughout the
world, modify it, and create topographical fiction, is described. The maps of cities, countries and neighbourhoods that
provide a pictorial element to crime fiction novels are symptomatic of the transformation of the genre from a literature of
crime into a literature of geographical and cultural orientation. The evolution of the genre makes possible the drafting of a
crime fiction world map in order to examine the international range, examples of gaps and significant clusters. A crime
fiction atlas can, in addition to this, form a collection of fictitious and narrative descriptions of localities.

Keywords: literature, internationality, crime fiction, crime novel

INTRODUCTION phenomenon and its symptoms are to be supplemented in a

It may be assumed that if one were to conduct a readers’
survey on the most important ingredient of the crime
fiction novel, one would receive to date the spontaneous
answer that it must first and foremost fulfil one of two
criteria: to be gripping and to track down the murderer.
This cliché of the suspense-packed solving of violent
fictional murder cases is also kept alive in many blurbs
and advertising texts. However, this constantly reiterated
preconception does not stand up to an attentive reading of
contemporary crime fiction.
When one reads through the mass of crime fiction novels
on the international book market, a continuity with regard to
suspense is less striking than a continuous affinity to the
subject matter of geography. The literature of enigmatic
bodies, murders and crime scenes has developed into a
geopolitical genre that conveys primarily one thing to the
general public: an extensive knowedge of geographical
orientation. Contrary to the current classification of crime
fiction into thriller and mystery novel, it is apparent that the
development of the genre over the past 50 years has
produced a pivotal new feature: the description of geogra-
phical cultural settings. Symptomatic of this development
and new genre feature is the use of maps in crime fiction.
In the following, the geographical subject matter with
which the genre increasingly engages will be elaborated
upon, and examples will be presented of map material
provided by crime fiction from the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. This purely descriptive account of a literary
DOI: 10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000027
third section with a discussion of the possibility of a world
map of crime fiction (which may already exist in the
imagination) as a panoramic conception of an international
genre, and also of the possibility of depicting this in reality
as a map of a fictional and criminalized world.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE OF CRIME FICTION
The geographical setting of a crime fiction novel is of
considerable importance for its success today for two
reasons. On the one hand, the settings chosen for the
serial production of crime fiction novels are used a number
of times for the individual cases in a series, so that the
reading public is given the possibility of becoming more
familiar with an unknown geography each time. The
settings and topographical references that are highlighted
are also important for the success of the crime fiction novel
in its development from the twentieth century up to the
present because they go much further than merely
providing colour, contributing also to the process of
solving the crime. The analytical method of solving a
criminal case, as practised by the heroic detective Dupin in
the nineteenth century while sitting in his winged armchair
reading the paper, has been superseded by a method
consisting of fieldwork, the search for clues and the pursuit.
Murders are no longer committed in locked rooms and
solved as theoretical mysteries, but in public spaces, which
stand out as a result of their geographical characteristics and
Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction
create location in a complex way through the geographical
units which they present.
In series such as the Shanghai mystery novels by the
Chinese writer Qui Xiaolong featuring Chief Inspector
Chen, the Newark crime fiction novels by Valerie Wilson
Wesley, in which the hard-boiled private detective Tamara
Hayle investigates, or the Viennese crime fiction novels by
Wolf Haas, cities throughout Europe and the world are
topographically revealed. Regions such as the Eifel, by
Jacques Berndorf, or the reservations of the Navajos, by
Tony Hillerman, have, through the crime fiction novel,
been made known beyond their provincial borders and
delimited terrains. Specific national traditions of criminality
and their historical dimension are reworked in country-
based crime fiction. Marek Krajewski sets his crime novels in
Breslau before the First World War and from this historical
perspective revisits current German–Polish relations.
Although crime fiction set in cities and regions has the
greatest circulation, the country-based crime fiction novel
still holds its own. No European country wants for a
national crime fiction author and indeed has often found its
most important representatives of post-national historical
writing in crime fiction series1. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
has criminalized Spain, Henning Mankell has done the same
for Sweden, Elizabeth George for England, Batya Gur has
founded appropriate crime stories for Israel.
The geographical agenda of crime fiction is apparent
from a glance at their titles and frequently finds visual form
directly on the cover. In the English-language and
international market, crime fiction novels have titles such
as A Small Death in Lisbon, in the German market German
Angst (sic) or Mainhatten Ice (sic). By relocating the
financial metropolis of Frankfurt on the insignificant
German river Main to the centre of the American world
metropolis, multilingual language games also associate such
crime fiction novels, which are confined to locally known
settings, with the internationality of the genre. Crime
fiction novel covers show photographs of gondolas on the
swollen canals of Venice (Donna Leon), the Kremlin
(Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva) and Big Ben. The book
market eyes a target readership interested in the cosmopo-
litan and focuses on the export of familiar topoi and on a
desire to conquer unknown and exotic territories, which, in
an age of civilized postcolonialism, is limited to a reading
experience. Crime fiction that addresses the Middle East
conflict (by the author Matt Beynon Rees) testifies how
closely the genre is connected with contemporary political
developments. It can be understood as a continuation of its
tradition of raising awareness and encouraging curiosity
that crime fiction constantly endeavours to provide access to
unknown regions and consciously gravitates towards so-
called hotspots. A striking number of recent crime films on
German television have featured the Hindu Kush, admit-
tedly from the point of view of the returning soldiers and
not of the Afghan agents2.
The narrative focus of the genre has shifted away from the
study of the social to the study of the topographical
environment. Crime fiction no longer presents an analysis
of social conditions in the local prostitutes’ district or
nouveau-riche villas in the exclusive suburb, but a
topographical panorama that even includes underground
275
geographies, such as Manchester’s sewage network
(Michael Robotham) and extends to risky and internation-
ally shunned locations such as the border crossing on the
Gaza Strip. In between, investigations are carried out in
international crime fiction on the bleak North Sea, in the
picturesque Bavarian forest or on the Breton coast. Crime
fiction today is once again situated somewhere between
local studies and investigative journalism.
THE CRIME FICTION NOVEL: LITERARY REALISM OF
MOBILE SOCIETIES
For mobile societies, the use of maps has become a part of
everyday life. This observation applies not only to tourists
or so-called non-locals, but equally to locals, who move
around in urban, regional or country districts either on foot
or with technological means of transport with the aid of
printed or digital maps, of navigational devices or distance
counters. This real-life practice is reflected in contemporary
crime fiction. Crime fiction novels give the topic of
orientation a great deal of space.
In the extremely standard format and development of the
crime story, the identification of the location has its
recognized place, not only with regard to the sealing off
and securing of the crime scene where the corpse met its
death. Specific to the ascertainment of geographical data in
the crime novel is the ritual of the question asked of the
suspect: ‘Where were you… (‘yesterday at midnight’ or
‘between 12.45 and 3.45’ or ‘during the concert’ or ‘last
Friday’…)?’ The investigation entails the determination of
the location and begins with the collection of individual
pieces of data.
In the light of its expansion as a genre, crime fiction may
even claim to be world literature. The proposal to consider
crime fiction as a universal genre is suggested by the literary
examples of the past masters of crime writing themselves.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s series about the detective
Pepe Carvalho is, in the post-Franco era and internationally
popular since the 1970s as a result of translation, no longer
a Spanish-language crime fiction novel set in the Catalonian
capital of Barcelona, but addresses an international dimen-
sion of crime. The satirical crime fiction novel Sabotaje
Olı́mpico (Vázquez Montalbán, 1993) already involves
international masterminds in a plot involving the 1992
Olympic Games in Barcelona and Carvalho in the solving of
an absurd world conspiracy. With this book, Montalbán
comes full circle back to his first crime fiction novels, in
which he investigates the conspiracy of Kennedy’s murder
in Spain (Vázquez Montalbán, 1972). In a later case,
Carvalho and his assistant Biscuter go on a world trip which
draws them into the illegal intrigues of a supposed sect with
the name Nueva Argentinidad/New Argentinity) and
which the reader can duplicate on the attached map
(Figure 1: Vázquez Montalbán).
MAPS IN CRIME FICTION NOVELS
It is not only a question in contemporary crime fiction
literature of detailed narrative descriptions of locality and
surroundings. The reader of a crime fiction novel does not
276
Figure 1. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: Milenio Carvalho
have to look far in order to come across an actual map. The
most popular editions can be taken from the bestseller
shelves in order to find a map inside the front cover or by
using a flip-book technique. This applies equally to the
most recent thrillers and to the classics among crime fiction
novels, and is clearly evident in both European and
international crime fiction. Stieg Larsson used maps,
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán has used them since the
1980s, and Minette Walters dispenses with a map compo-
nent in few of her British-based crime fiction novels.
From the perspective of genre theory, the appearance of
maps in crime fiction novels should not cause surprise when
one recalls the genres that are related and historically
connected3. As a pictorial element, the map is an established
component of both the adventure story, for example, as a
treasure map, and the travel report, from the autobiogra-
phical travel novel to documentary genres, particularly
conquest literature. The crime fiction novel continues,
through its discursive descriptions, to have close links with
these text types (Ascari, 2007)4. However, the crime fiction
map is becoming increasingly autonomous, and does not
stop at an associative recall of literary predecessors. The
crime fiction map fulfils a more far-reaching function in the
The Cartographic Journal
international crime fiction novel of today than that of
decorative illustration and accompanying artwork. It is a
signboard of topographical intention, which crime fiction
has appropriated over recent decades. To the stereotypical
narrative elements on which the crime fiction novel is based
in an all but lyrical rigour of form (at the beginning the
body, an investigator, a puzzle, in the middle a suspect, at
the end a solution and a motive…), may now be added as
the typical element of the map. The characteristics of crime
fiction maps have a broad scope, and they may be found in
enough quantity and variety that it is possible to draw up a
modest typology of their function. Their placement in the
book and in the narrative plays a role in this. One kind of
crime fiction map introduces the narrative and is similar to a
prologue which replaces the description of the environment
with a map, thus replacing the narrative description with a
visual image. On the inside of the front cover, a map
transforms a crime fiction novel into a tourist guide, which
may be conveniently consulted by the reader at any time in
order to provide an ongoing orientation of new informa-
tion. A third place for a crime fiction map is in the middle of
the narrative flow, where it becomes an informational
building block for the narrative development of the solution
to the crime.
Categories of maps may also be identified from an
individual examination of crime fiction maps and analysis of
the topographies depicted on them. Alongside the dimen-
sion of the areas depicted, the two most important
distinctions are those of real as opposed to fictitious maps,
and cartographically detailed maps as opposed to hand-
drawn sketches. One category of map depicts an identifiable
topography, whether of a country, the district of a city, or a
street. Other maps portray purely fictitious places. While
some maps show continents and countries in order to
remind the reader with an outline of Nepal that it lies
between northern China and southern India, others are
limited to an urban neighbourhood or even more local
spaces such as streets. The degree of conformance to an
imitation of cartographic accuracy also varies. While some
maps omit no detail and show the orientation, scale and a
legend of topographical symbols, vegetation such as forest
and hedges, a cemetery, a wall, a tower or a chimney,
stretches of water such as lakes or springs, others are
unlabelled sketches that resemble the genre in their
mysteriousness. It goes without saying that in the first
volume of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, there is a map of the
island from which Harriet Vanger disappeared as a girl and
to which the journalist Mikael Blomkvist withdraws in
order, among other things, to solve the mystery of her
disappearance decades later (Larsson, 2006). On the simple
map are to be found all the island’s important places, the
‘supermarket’, the ‘boat harbour’, which are not in the least
useful for the solving of the mystery (the girl had left the
island, on which a search for her body lasting for decades
had taken place, unnoticed). The map is there purely for the
sake of aesthetic realism and represents a prop, as if pulled
out of the protagonist’s jacket pocket. Only a few crumbs or
simulated folds are needed as a sign of its authentic wear
and tear. Yet the map also misleads the reader, serving in
equal measure to orientate and confuse. In addition to the
map of a private neighbourhood drawn with a ruler, there is
Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction
Figure 2. Minette Walters: Acid Row, London 2001
the manually drawn sketch: the site plan. The extent of its
improvisation is in direct proportion to the radius of the
area shown. The sketchier the plan, the more private and
smaller the place.
In Minette Walters’ map from The Icehouse (1998), a few
double lines and geometric shapes show the buildings of
the country house and neighbouring paths where a murder
took place. In another crime fiction novel of Walters, the
layout of some unmarked streets is shown (Figure 2). An
example from Petra Hammerfahr (1999), a typical regional
crime fiction novel that destroys a village idyll, shows even
more clearly the improvisational, pseudo-realistic effect of
the hand-written labelling. The map shows fields, a ‘country
road’ and ‘apple orchard’ (Figure 3).
A systematic examination of crime fiction maps differ-
entiates them according to their placing, their positioning
within the narrative. The design style and the degree of
complexity provide a second criterion for differentiation.
To the prologue and to almost anywhere in the flow of the
narrative may be added as a third possibility the puzzle map,
which leads to the solution of the case. This map is usually
found at the end of the novel (provided that the dead victim
was not holding it as a note in their rigid hand right at the
277
beginning). This taxonomy from the literature can be easily
transposed to films. The office desks of the Cologne police
officers from the German TV series on crime scenes Tatort
stand in front of an illuminated city wall map as high as the
room, which serves as a panorama. It is like the prologue,
which the officers continually refer to when they check out
their on-site research.
It has been shown that it is precisely the authentic
features that can be produced with the aid of imported
images. Footage from the neighbouring city of Essen is
inserted into the Cologne Tatort (Bollhöfer, 2007) in order
to evoke the atmosphere of a working-class district. Die
Prüfung/The Inspection (Germany 2005), an episode from
the German television series Polizeiruf 110/Police Alarm
110, is located in Munich and uses alphorn playing as a
would-be symbol of Bavarian authenticity. The alphorn,
however, was not played in the Bavarian Alps, but in the
Allgäu. The misplacing of the historical practice of alphorn-
playing by approximately 200 km, its relocation from
western Allgäu to the southeastern boundary of Germany,
is, however, scarcely noticable in the overall broadcasting
area of Germany, the target audience of the programme. As
a pars pro toto, the alphorn fulfils its role of referencing the
mountains and the south of Germany. In Italian crime
fiction, it is enough to write a dialogue for the investigator
that includes a few Italian words (‘‘‘Presto’, said the
inspector as he knocked on the door’’) to make the
character authentic. The insertion of foreign words is an
established technique of literary realism. In Robert Wilson’s
Sevilla crime fiction novels, which were first published in
English, central concepts and descriptions are, true to their
context, in Spanish and are used like proper nouns as
foreign language fragments. The main character is called
commissario Falcón and in every translation works in a
jefetura. The feigned realism also occurs in the maps
attached to the Wilson novels. In the factually accurate map
of Seville, the main fictional points of reference, for
example, the commissario’s house, have been added. The
fact that alongside the untranslatable proper nouns, the
river Guadalquivir, the Parque de Remedio, the streets,
public squares and tourist attractions, English annotations
(‘Falcón’s house’) suddenly appear, increase the realistic
pretence (Figure 4). The suggestion is that the crime fiction
novel is a tourist instruction manual for foreign and
linguistically incompetent readers who find themselves in
unknown territory.
The multilingual layering, the play with foreign and local,
is repeated in a geological layer which provides the genre,
exhausted in its inflexible course, with renewed suspense.
The Wilson crime fiction novels, like other crime fiction, is
written from an external point of view. The novel, set in
Spain, and written in English by a British writer, may be
assigned geographically to the multiple category ‘Spanish
literature of British origin’5. The narrative locations, too,
become multi-cultural settings. Seville, or at least the
wealthy district of Santa Clara, in which a murder occurred,
is depicted with a backdrop of Southern Californian
bungalows and swimming pools in the style of the
American painter Edward Hopper, with no sign of
Spanish folklore. The locus amoenus is tainted by the crime
and loses its Spanishness. The resolution of the mystery
278
Figure 3. Petra Hammersfahr: Der Puppengräber, Reinbek 1999
leads from Spain via the USA to Chile. Anyone who was
expecting a Spanish, let alone an Andalusian novel, is
confronted with a Hispano-American denouement that
fulfils the cosmopolitan agenda of the genre.
That it is not just a question of visual text enhancement,
that crime fiction maps have more than decorative
purpose6, providing a visual sign and pointer in the
direction of a modified, more complex understanding of
the location, is further demonstrated in investigations of
Vietnamese Mafia, European-African human trafficking and
Ukrainian prostitution in the local neighbourhood.
Through this subtle and often unnoticeable disassociation
and displacement from the location, crime fiction becomes
connected to transnational and postcolonial literatures. In
its discrete transitions from native local knowledge to
external spaces, crime fiction is able to form connections
with the literatures of travel, migration and exile. A
yardstick for this was set by Jean-Claude Izzo’s trilogy,
which, based on three Marseilles investigations, brings alive
the history of the ‘Mediterrannée’ (Braudel, 1966) and
reconstructs Marseilles as a base for a community of
seafarers. In the recall of its history, the milieu study of
the young Arab immigrant generation at the end of the
twentieth century transposes the city in the south of France
to northern Africa on the atlas.
The Cartographic Journal
FROM THE WORLD MAP OF THE INTERNATIONAL
CRIME NOVEL TO THE WORLD ATLAS OF CRIME
FICTION
World literature and the internationality of the crime novel
The genre of the crime novel fulfils the function of a world
literature in the sense in which literary history determined
this concept in the early nineteenth century: its plots can be
placed anywhere in the world even if its narratives are
limited to local, narrowly restricted settings such as a district
of Seville. The degree of internationality of the crime novel
may be gauged from internal and external criteria in
individual examples, in which topoi ranging from local or
regional knowledge to national stereotypes are playfully
used in narrative and language. Translations of crime novels
are scarcely ever retrospective additions to successful crime
series in other languages. Rather, crime novels are
transposed into other language contexts from the perspective
of their translatability and export potential. Certain crime
novel series are intended solely for the belletristic export of
local cultural and geographical narratives. The internation-
ality of the crime novel, unlike that of world literature classics
of single works of genius, however, applies to the entire
genre, which is developing into the dominating literary
Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction
Figure 4. Robert Wilson: Die Toten von Santa Clara (City-Map of Sevilla)
discourse of a global local knowledge. The settings of this
genre may be localized worldwide.
The world map of the crime fiction novel – narrative and visual
In order to test this proposition, literary crime fiction
research can turn to cartographic means in order both to
collect the available visual map elements of crime fiction
novels, together with the narrative, geographic surveys of
locality displayed on them, and to present these on a world
map. The quantitative listing can verify empirically the
international emergence of geographically focused crime
fiction and can present it visually in the clearest way.
Globally scattered crime fiction locations may be recorded
and cited in individual entries on the background of an
outline that schematically reproduces the countours of the
continents and the world as we know it. These locations
have either already been depicted as crime fiction maps,
appear in titles or provide detailed descriptions of localities
in literary form. As Friedrich Ani’s Munich investigators
generally move through the city on foot and sunk in
thought, like, for example, the former monk Polonius
Fischer, these crime fiction novels can be read as guides for
city walks.
Such a collection of narrative locality indicators and
cartographic materials would demonstrate the international
range of crime fiction and, not least, would show up the
gaps in a universal crime-scene world. Does Kenyan crime
fiction exist? Does Korean crime fiction exist? If not, why
not? And if it does, how is it characterized? How big are the
279
clusters of crime fiction novels set in London, in Shanghai
or in Tyrol? Criteria that allow a measurement of the extent
that a crime fiction plot will be more successful in a setting
of Ukrainian scenery than of Swiss mountains, and which
unknown crime terrains can still be tapped, are interesting
for book market analyses.
As a simple anthology of the locations of international
crime fiction culture, a crime fiction map does not need to
enforce completeness, but can accumulate topographical
indicators as a collection of geo-cultural crime fiction
information, whether these are interwoven in the criminal
action or in the surrounding activity. The reader of
international crime fiction literature has equal access to
detailed Catalan cookery recipes, to explanations of Chinese
characters (‘jang’ or ‘dong’, Xiaolong), to historical
commentaries on Chilean dictators, to exotic items such
as an architectural explanation of a shikumen house, and,
according to the location, to nearby local knowledge that
may have been forgotten.
THE WORLD ATLAS OF CRIME FICTION
The entry of individual crime fiction settings on the world
map as we know it unearths a result which goes beyond the
cartographic record of a location marking7. Of course, some
entries portray our known world as reproduced in crime
fiction novels. That Venice is a city situated on water is
included in the narration of every criminal case that
Inspector Brunetti has to solve. However, it is apparent
280
Figure 5. Portal World Atlas of Crime Fiction
that a collection of maps extending beyond the one-
dimensional world map for the collection of cartographic
knowledge of crime fiction is necessary. The reason for this,
on the one hand, is that individual locations are described
belletristically in multiple and fundamentally different ways.
A second reason is that the literary geography of the crime
fiction novel often deliberately deviates from the cartogra-
phically familiar topography. For this reason, a cartogra-
phically accurate map is less useful as a basis for the portrayal
of the world of the crime fiction novel than an outline
which allows us to recognize the diagrammatic outline of
our known world and leaves an open space for fictitious
locations (Figure 5). A suitable basis for the pre-
sentation of the crime fiction world takes the form of an
improvised map background, which differentiates itself
from hyper-precise contemporary illustration and map
standards, especially of digital map material. A World
Atlas of Crime Fiction does not aspire to the precision of
the navigation systems put to everyday test, nor does it seek
the virtual adventure of flying over a distant Google Earth
landscape, nor a GPS location system. The crime fiction
world map begins with a wilful improvisation, a ‘bricolage’
(Lévi-Straus, 1962), and thus adopts an ethnological con-
cept that has as its starting point a manual fabrication of
cultural – in this case, geographical – knowledge.
The Cartographic Journal
It is the intention of many crime fiction plots to outline
stereotypical local knowledge not only in extenso, in order
to produce an atmosphere of ordinariness, but also in order
to make unfamiliar. Provided that crime fiction novels do
not content themselves with conceding to the everyday
surroundings of their intended public and reproducing
these, crime fiction increasingly succeeds in introducing
topographical innovations as literature. This happens to the
extent that comprehensive political visions of territorial
spaces are conceptualized in unnoticeable location changes.
The fictitious aspect of a crime fiction atlas is based from the
geographical point of view on the supposition formulated by
Gregory (Gregory, 1994) of ‘Geographical Imaginations’
and accordingly introduces imaginary maps.
An example of the creation of a new geographical
perspective, which works for a whole series of crime fiction
novels, is the trilogy from the 1990s of the ‘Mediterranean
World’ by Jean-Claude Izzo. The fact that the supposedly
Spanish private detective, the successful investigator Pepe
Carvalho, and his assistant Biscuter, were invented by a
Catalan author whose anti-Franco attitude informs the series
and whose central metropolis was relocated, as if taken for
granted, from Madrid to Barcelona, also differentiates our
international studies of location and country. That the
Carvalho novels nevertheless fulfil the function of a late
Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction
Figure 6. Portal World Atlas of Crime Fiction
example of national literature by recapitulating, among other
things, Spanish history up to the Olympic Games of 1992,
provides a role model for a topographically differentiated
literature for the whole genre.
In addition to the empirical intention of providing com-
prehensive international documentation of crime fiction
localities, the representation of the concentrations and
displacements of cartographic and fictitious local knowledge
presents an exciting challenge in the interdisciplinary
development of a World Atlas of Crime Fiction. The major
concern of this second task, of entering pseudo-realistic and
fictitious locations on a familiar world map, is in the
demonstration of genuine literary scholarship, namely, the
literary representation of imaginary worlds and their
functions. A World Atlas of Crime Fiction will, on its part
become, through its attention to fictitious crime worlds, an
equally pseudo-realistic as fictitious World Atlas of Crime.
The image of the world map as it is known to us does not
have to be altered for a World Atlas of Crime Fiction. But
the locations will have to be entered several times,
additional imaginary locations will be created, and local
connections and topographical links produced, which are
281
purely imaginary. The resolution of the case in A Small
Death in Lisbon leads from Seville to Chile, Izzo brings the
reader in the boat of the pseudo-Italian Fabio Montale from
Marseilles to the North African coast.
At times the connections are purely rhetorical: the
Palestinian Omar Jussuf carries out his investigations with
the aid of a certain Magnus Wallender, who is just one
vowel away from his colleague Kurt Wallander, and thence
from the Swedish Ystad. The features of the Swedish
Wallander crime fiction novels, their resigned moralistic
tone and the disappointment that is in store for a liberal
(Swedish) society whose politically proclaimed openness
collides with real-life fundamentalism of both Christian and
rascist origin, are not only alluded to, Jussuf/Wallender
continue the solving of the crime in Palestine, where
Wallander failed in Europe.
A World Atlas of Crime Fiction works with a patchwork
of various kinds of maps, images, paintings and quotations,
in order to enter the locations of crime fiction novels, their
authors and titles (Figure 6). Both fictitious maps and those
with immediately recognisable territories are used as a basis.
The boot of Italy provides a pertinent example for many
282
Figure 7. London map, Scotland Yard, Board Game Ravensburger Spiele
unmistakeable geographical shapes. Some readers recognize
New York even from the unlabelled plan of its subway,
while others recognize Paris from the bend in the Seine and
the breakdown of an apparently arbitrary space into a snail-
shaped spiral. As contemporary readers are used to
geographically precise information on the latitude and
longitude of their location, screen shots of Google Earth and
relevant existing street maps will also be used. However,
these will be supplemented by imaginary topographies from
crime fiction literature.
The selection of fictitious maps has no limits. The map of
the experimental poet Georges Perec, entitled Archipelago,
is of a white square. Coloured drawings by Paul Klee that
resemble maps on account of their structure of spaces and
lines, provide a background. The board game of Scotland
Yard lends itself to the registration of crime fiction set in
London (Figure 7), photographic images of a flamingo are
suitable for the retracing of a crime scene set in the Munich
Zoo of Hellabrunn.
For its method of representation, the atlas deliberately
chooses hyperrealistic maps, imaginary, fictitious and
absurd maps, to create a lack of accuracy. The atlas
integrates several thousand entries of fictitious paratextual
maps from crime fiction novels and from geo-cultural and
geographical narrative crime fiction units at various levels
The Cartographic Journal
(Figure 8, e.g. Entry Shikumen House), in order to allow
for updated (or historicising) views of geographical land-
scapes.
While the empirical work of mapping crime fiction
locations onto the diagrammatic scheme of the world map
retains the realistic references of the genre, the atlas shows
the extent to which crime fiction locations, based on
recognisable crime scenes, open out into virtual and multi-
territorial rhizome networks. Crime fiction topography
generates geographical displacements, overlayering and
duplication, in the direction of the past, as in the example
of the Mediterranean space, with the aim of cutting
through stereotypes and refuting the insularity of territorial
regions. A World Atlas of Crime Fiction, on the base of a
schematic world map, can achieve two things. It can point
out the intention of the genre to mediate culture, which in
an epoch of global cultural variety is jointly responsible for
the international success of crime fiction. A World Atlas of
Crime Fiction also presumes that the topographical fiction
presented in crime fiction novels reproduces the changes in
political territories, the break-up and rebuilding of nations,
the founding of transnational communities and the new
significance of regional contexts, and reflects these dynamic
developments.
This essay has been translated by Rosemary Little.
Topographical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction 283

Figure 8. World Atlas of Crime Fiction, article ‘shikumen-house’

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Erfurt (Germany) and supplement professor at the

Department of Romance Literatures at the University of
Eva Erdmann is teaching
Konstanz (Germany). Her main subjects of research are:
and doing research in Com-
multilingualism in literature and translation; internationality
parative and Romance Li-
of crime fiction; correspondences and literature; comic in
terature at the University of
theater and film; and perspectives and narratives of child-
Freiburg im Breisgau. She
hood.
studied Romance Studies,
Philosophy and Education
Science at the Universities
NOTES
of Paris (France), Heidel-
1
berg (Germany) and Ge- The fact that this reworking of both national history and
neva (Switzerland). She of the dying tradition of national literatures finds its place in
was assistant professor in crime fiction cannot be enlarged on here. The connection
the Department of Litera- would certainly lead to a discussion of the discourses of
ture at the University of crime, tradition and the nation.
284
2 Bollhöfer, B. (2007). Geographien des Fernsehens. Der Kölner
One of the latest episodes in the German TV series
Tatort, broadcast on 23 January 2011, is called Heimatfront
(Home Front). This series is set each week in a different
German state and may be considered a staple of German
family television. Heimatfront has a German Army setting
and is about soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan.
3
It is astonishing that literary introductions to crime
fiction do not mention the map as a genre element. More
specific secondary literature does not pick up on the map
either (Wigbers, 2006).
4 Political and Cultural Mappings of Criminality in New and
Ascari (2007) shows the link between the crime fiction
novel and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
5 77.
A popular variant is provided by Donna Leon’s English-
language crime novels set in Venice. Similarly to the map,
these crime novels are produced for external (‘foreign’) use.
6 Genette, G. (1987). Seuils, Edition du Seuils, Paris.
In accordance with new terminology, literary scholars
have become accustomed to using the term ‘paratexts’,
which as ‘attachments’ are separate from the text.
7
Various online portals are dedicated to the locating of
literary settings on an atlas, see, for example, http://
www.literaturport.de or the Roman Atlas of the German
newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
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