Courtesy of a retweet by @eurocrime, I happened to see a link to a lovely resource provided by Edinburgh City Libraries via their blog Tales of One City. It’s an interactive map of international crime fiction, entitled, in a stroke of undoubted genius, ‘Around the World in 80 D.I.s’.

Clicking on the map in the post takes you through to a Google-powered world map with 80 book covers sprinkled across it. You can either click on the book of your choice to find out more about it, or browse by country/city and sleuth in the column on the left-hand side. Aside from the usual Scandinavian suspects, novels from less obvious countries are featured such as Laos, Mongolia, Algeria, Greece and Kenya (at least, these are less familiar to me). And it’s great to see that they’ve included some classics as well, like Friedrich Glauser’s Swiss ‘Studer’ novels, written in the 1930s, along with more contemporary writers such as French author Fred Vargas.

Diane Wei Liang's The Eye of Jade: set in Beijing and one of the crime novels featured on the map.

What a wonderful initiative, and a fine example of the kind of contribution our libraries can make in opening up the world of literature to everyone … for free.

14 March 2012  Thanks very much to Maxine for pointing me in the direction of another international crime map, this time from Bitter Lemon Press. Another wonderful resource, and one that readers are invited to add to with further suggestions, providing a whole extra level of interactivity!