The mapping of venice and edinburgh is complete. But crime fiction has been marking out new territories, and for armchair travellers the genre is fast becoming the most popular way to know of foreign lands and cultures. The capacity of the detective framework to capture interest in faraway lands became evident by the runaway success of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books set in Botswana. Donna Leon has, with similar success, been studying the darker side of Venice, with her Guido Brunetti books. And Edinburgh has gained a new popularity with Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie books and, of course, Ian Rankin’s Rebus installments.

But a lot of other writers are enlarging the geographical reach of the novel. Take Qiu Xiaolong, in whose telling the glitzy newness of Shanghai is made real alongside the grimy crimes being investigated by city police. Qiu’s latest, A Case of Two Cities, provides an insider’s view of the corruption and regulation that have come with rapid prosperity.

Barbara Nadel, meanwhile, has been using her detective, Cetin Ikmen, a member of the Istanbul police force, to explore the city’s underbelly.

Italy remains a favourite, with an army of tough talking and cynical detectives providing a pragmatic counterview to the rapturous travelogues about food and villas in Tuscany that keep being published. Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series set in Sicily is the most recommended of the lot. A good book to start with is The Terra-Cotta Dog, which begins with a conversation with, who else, a Mafioso. (For those keen on linguistic authencity: Camilleri, who as opposed to Leon writes in Italian, is immensely popular in Italy. In fact, till a couple of years Leon’s books had not even been translated into Italian, though they have always sold well in Germany.)

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