DELIGHTS, NEAR AND FAR

If you enjoy travel to foreign lands and if you enjoy mystery suspense series with a strong, memorable protagonist, then we share the love of a special niche in escapist fiction.

I’m sure there are more such series, but there are four authors’ series that I know of.

James Church‘s novels, featuring an Inspector O of Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely, inhospitable setting for a story and likable protagonist, but Church makes it work, fabulously. I guarantee you’ll be hooked once you start reading these:

• A corpse in the Koryo (2006)
• Hidden moon : an Inspector O novel (2007)
• Bamboo and blood (2008)

Perhaps my favorite among the authors I know in this niche is John Burdett with his Bangkok series, featuring a continuing cast of quite varied characters, including the central one, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. What is so intriguing about this series is how completely the characters’ world view is Thai–not at all Western. I really do love this series.

• Bangkok 8: A Novel (2003)
• Bangkok Tattoo (2006)
• Bangkok Haunts (2007)
• The Godfather of Kathmandu (2010)

An earlier novel of his, not part of the series, is The Last Six Million Seconds (1997), that takes place during the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the People’s Republic of China. Good book!

Of course, the widely known Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson, belongs in this niche as well. These may be the most famous novels of this type.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
• The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007)

To my knowledge, there’s no one who wrote mystery series set in foreign lands earlier, than the granddaddy of them all, Martin Cruz Smith and his Inspector Arkady Renko mysteries set in Russia:

• Gorky Park (1981)
• Polar Star (1989)
• Red Square (1992)
• Havana Bay (1999)
• Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
• Stalin’s Ghost (2007)
• Three Stations (2010)

I would love to see Church and Burdett become as widely known as Larsson and Smith; they deserve to be.

I would also love to know of other mystery series set abroad so I can indulge myself in more hours of armchair travel and sleuthing.

There are, of course, many mystery series with European locales…England, France. And, I vaguely remember reading a series of mysteries set in Italy featuring a rather dour, Italian police detective, but I can’t recall the author’s name or any of the titles in the series. But, I was thinking, in this post, of more exotic locations.

If you know of any other (exotic locale) foreign mystery series, please comment, below. (No, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau does not count!)

I’m surprised there’s not a series set in India…or China…or…

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