Crime fiction has consistently been one of the most popular genres—in 2014, around one in three novels published in English was a crime novel.[1] What makes this genre so popular?

For one, the plot is a puzzle, challenging the reader to guess who done it—which was what first attracted me to crime fiction in my early teens. The genre also provides a sense of resolution at the end, which in today’s world can be comforting, while at the same time delving into the darker side of a society and the way it functions (or doesn’t).

For this article, I have picked 20 crime novels and series set in 15 different countries that will take you on a trip around the world—and through time.

Around the world

We start with a little island off the coast of Cornwall: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, a brilliant plot with a dénouement that few film-makers (and there have been many film versions of the book) dare to follow through to its conclusion. Ten strangers, all with dark secrets, are stranded on an island, and are picked off one by one. There is no one else there: so which of them is the murderer?

Yukito Ayatsuji adapted Christie’s plot to write a novel in the tradition of honkaku, a Japanese sub-genre of detective fiction, which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s and was revived in the 1980s. The puzzle is paramount—other details, like fleshing out the characters, are less important. In Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders, a group of seven students are stranded on an island, where they are murdered one by one.

Another Japanese whodunnit in a more “natural” tradition is Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express, with a strong sense of place. A couple is found dead on a beach—was it a suicide pact? Train timings are key to the solution of the mystery. Published a little more than a decade after World War II, this is, in a way, a tribute to Japan’s railways, built after the war and known for their punctuality.

That takes me to two very different whodunnits set in France with a strong sense of place. Georges Simenon’s The Hatter’s Ghosts occurs in the small town of La Rochelle. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a murderer and a neighbour who knows. Simenon’s writing, told from the point of view of the murderer, is very evocative of the town. You feel you are there, in the rain and the cold.

The second whodunnit is Michel Bussi’s Black Water Lilies, set in Giverny, where Claude Monet painted his water lilies. But even amidst this beauty, there is murder. The story revolves around three women, an 11-year-old girl, who is a gifted painter; a young woman married to a jealous man; and an old woman who narrates some of the story. The beautiful setting provides a stark contrast to the darkness of this tale.

This is also true of Nalini Singh’s A Madness of Sunshine, set in the town of Gold Cove on the coast of New Zealand, surrounded by stunning natural beauty. But this beauty has a dark core: women have been going missing in the area. Singh captures the feel of a small town with deep connections between people with shared histories and shared secrets.

A small town with secrets also features in Jane Harper’s The Dry, set in Kiewarra in the Australian Outback during a severe drought. What appears to be a murder-suicide is actually more complicated than it seems. Harper writes vividly about a town caught in the grip of an almost unbearable drought.

In Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods, the murder takes place in a village in Ghana. The murdered woman is a promising young medical student who is in the village to talk about AIDS and is critical of the local priest taking several wives. But the priest is a powerful man, not to be confronted. Quartey brings the Ghanaian village and its social mores to life.

When it comes to power, the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 1950s was not an institution to be questioned. In John Banville’s Snow, the Church tries to interfere in the investigation of the murder of a Catholic priest. This is a vividly written book that takes you to Ireland during a time when the Church was all-powerful.

Jacob Ross’s The Bone Readers takes us to Grenada. The protagonist, the illegitimate son of a police commissioner and his maid, is haunted by his mother’s death. She was shot during a demonstration to protest a rape at the time when his father was Commissioner of Police. Neither her body nor the killer was ever found. The dialogue is written in the local dialect, which gives the book a distinct flavour.

A missing parent is also at the heart of Croatian writer Ivana Bodrožić’s book, We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day. A young journalist tries to find out what happened to her father, who disappeared during the war in the 1990s that broke up Yugoslavia, a war that continues to throw a dark shadow over the country. Bodrožić tells a story of corruption and the far-reaching consequences of conflict.

In Stephen L. Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park, a law professor investigates the death of his father, a judge. The novel takes us into the privileged Black community in the US, people who have successful careers but still have to deal with pervasive racism.

In Nilanjana Roy’s Black River, it is not a parent who dies but a child. Roy uses her experience as a journalist to write about the murders of young girls and women in India, rising religious intolerance, child trafficking, and the lives of the invisible poor who are essential for the functioning of a city like Delhi.

What if the killers aren’t human? In Olga Tokarczuk’s unusual novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, an old woman living in a tiny hamlet in a Polish forest is convinced that the murders around her are the result of animals wreaking vengeance. This is not a simple whodunnit—it is also a meditation on animal rights, astrology and on living alone.

Travelling through time

Crime fiction also takes us back through time, bringing the past to life. Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 is set in Stalinist USSR, a place with echoes of Orwell’s 1984. Children are being killed across the country, but since Stalin has decreed that criminal and serial killers only exist in capitalist societies and not in the USSR, there is nothing to investigate. Smith’s book is a portrait of a system that is based on paranoia and mistrust.

Crime fiction can also use actual events as part of the plot. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Shape of Ruins is a mix of detection, thriller and history. A man is obsessed by two political assassinations, 30 years apart, in Colombia. Vásquez raises questions about what lies behind the historical events we think we know.

Sujata Massey bases her protagonist in The Widows of Malabar Hill on India’s first woman lawyer. Set in Bombay in the early 1900s during the British Raj, the novel centres on Perveen Mistry, the only female solicitor in the city. This is a look at the social mores of the time and the position of women.

Going back even further, there are two crime series set in the UK that I love: C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series, with a hunchback lawyer, set during and just after the time of Henry VIII, and the other is the Matthew Bartholomew series by Susanna Gregory, set in Cambridge in the 1300s, with a physician at a Benedictine college as the main character. Although they’re quite different, both series vividly capture their respective historical periods.

And on a lighter note—and going back even further—are Lindsey Davis’s Falco series set in ancient Rome, during the time of Emperor Vespasian. Falco is a private investigator and the books build up an evocative picture of Rome, a city that feels very much like our present-day ones. Davis has continued the series with Falco’s daughter Albia as the detective.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip I’ve taken you on, and that it will encourage you to look for more whodunnits from around the world! You can find further reviews of crime novels here.

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[1] Franks, R. (2014). “A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction”. M/C Journal, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.770.

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I’m taking a break and will be back on 11 January. Happy holidays!