Sam Wiebe is a winner of a Crime Writers of Canada Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He’s also been nominated for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and City of Vancouver Book Awards. His several novels include four in a series set in Vancouver, featuring P.I. Dave Wakeland, who is also the protagonist of his first story for EQMM. Entitled “The Barguzin Sable,” the story is featured in our March/April issue, which goes on sale in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, Sam has provided some reading suggestions for those who like to see their favorite series detectives in a setting other than their usual turf.   —Janet Hutchings

Rebus and Edinburgh. Warshawski and Chicago. The detective is so linked to the city in which they operate that a cliché persists: “the city is itself a character.”

Yet often over the course of a series, a detective is called out of town, summoned to a locale foreign to them. Florida salvage expert Travis McGee ends up in New York City; Swedish detectives Martin Beck and Kurt Wallander make trips to Hungary and Latvia, respectively; Cajun Dave Robicheaux leaves Iberia Parish for Montana, while Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire sojourns a while in Philadelphia.

So why send the detective out of town? What are the benefits of an unfamiliar setting?

W.H. Auden believed the traditional detective story required “a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect.” When a murder is committed, this idyllic community is thrown into chaos by guilt. The detective is, according to Auden, “a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt.” Once their job is done, they serve no further purpose in that community, and must move on. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot functions in such a way. Perhaps no detective spent as much time abroad as Poirot. A Belgian expat, Poirot is equally not-at-home in Egypt, Siberia, or the English countryside. He arrives, detects, and leaves.

The hardboiled detective novel doesn’t recognize an innocent society: finding the killer in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles no more restores order than temperance laws restored sobriety. Yet Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest functions in a similar way to Auden’s prescription: the Continental Op is sent to Personville to rid the town of violence and corruption. The PI is a working-class character; they go where the work takes them.

A foreign location highlights different aspects of the detective’s character. When Kinsey Milhone leaves Santa Theresa, she leaves behind her support system, including cops and attorneys who know her and make allowances for her methods. Establishing that same level of trust in a different town is impossible, so Milhone operates with no safety net, sans benefit of the doubt.

“New York is where it is going to begin,” Travis McGee ponders in Nightmare in Pink, describing how societal collapse will start in Manhattan, until “by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke.” Of course this says less about New York than about McGee himself. His reaction to the crowds and turbulence of the urban landscape adds a paranoid edge to the usually confident detective.

New cities bring new perils. Bringing Edinburgh’s John Rebus to London in Tooth and Nail pits the detective not only against a serial killer, but against an English culture that looks down on the Scots. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Man Who Went Up in Smoke and Henning Mankell’s Dogs of Riga send their detectives behind the Iron Curtain, where the justice system operates in a vastly different manner. When Spenser leaves Boston to stop a terrorist plot in Montreal in The Judas Goat, or when VI Warshawski heads to Lawrence, Kansas in Fallout, they move into a world that functions differently than the world they’re used to.

Of course some detectives don’t need to leave their city to be in a hostile place: Easy Rawlins and Mas Arai only need to leave their Los Angeles neighborhoods to find social circles where their skin color marks them as other. Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen frequently interacts with a US Marshal named Catherine Rohn, both in Chen’s hometown of Shanghai and in Los Angeles; this friendship shows the similarities and differences between Chinese and American cultures.

Authorial considerations also apply. When Reed Farrel Coleman took over Robert B Parker’s Jesse Stone series, he brought the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts to New York for the reunion of Jesse’s minor league baseball team. An unfamiliar setting was a way to clear the slate, focusing on aspects of Stone’s character that Parker hadn’t previously mined.

But perhaps the best reason for an out of town entry in a detective series is what it brings back. If a city is indeed a character, then defining that character is easier by comparison and contrast. While most of Henry Chang’s Jack Yu novels take place in New York’s Chinatown, Red Jade travels as far afield as Victoria, B.C.: the Chinatowns in these far-flung cities are similar, different, and linked to New York’s, painting a larger picture. When Philip Marlowe or Kinsey Milhone leave L.A. for Mexico (in The Long Goodbye and J is for Judgement), it’s to find answers to cases originating in their backyard.

The risk of an out of town book is also its reward. Who is this person outside of their natural habitat? New relationships are formed, and old ones change. In Gasa-Gasa Girl, Beverly Hills gardener Mas Arai travels to New York to aid his daughter, strengthening their relationship and coming to terms with his hakujin son-in-law. In Dogs of Riga, Kurt Wallander falls in love with a Latvian officer’s widow, who becomes a character in further novels. The professional relationship between Absarohka County Sheriff Walt Longmire and Deputy Victoria Moretti becomes briefly romantic when the pair visit Moretti’s hometown of Philadelphia. When Dave Robicheaux is framed for murder, he takes his adopted daughter Alafair on the run with him to Montana. In Robicheaux’s case, solving the murder doesn’t just mean finding the guilty person and clearing his name: it also means being allowed to go home.

Done right, a brief trip out of town re-invigorates a series, bringing out hidden aspects of the character and the place where they function best.

A Brief List of Out of Town Detective Series Novels

Burke, James Lee. Black Cherry Blues

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye

Chang, Henry. Red Jade

Christie, Agatha. Death on the Nile

                        Murder of Roger Ackroyd

        Murder on the Links

                        Murder on the Orient Express

Coleman, Reed Farrel. Robert B Parker’s Blind Spot

Grafton, Sue. J is for Judgment

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest

Hirahara, Naomi. Gasa-Gasa Girl

Johnson, Craig. Kindness Goes Unpunished

MacDonald, John D. Nightmare in Pink

Mankell, Henning. The Dogs of Riga

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress

Paretsky, Sara. Fallout

Parker, Robert B The Judas Goat

Qiu Xiaolong, A Case of Two Cities

Rankin, Ian. Tooth and Nail

Sjowall, Maj, and Per Wahloo. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke