Whodunits by Women Make Great Travel Books, and It’s No Mystery Why

I can do without a blow dryer or a slip when I travel. But I wouldn’t leave home without a mystery novel.

I know I’m not alone. You need only stop in an airport bookstore to find stacks of mysteries or look down the aisle on a plane, where it seems as though someone in every row is bent over a thriller, a suspense novel, an old-fashioned whodunit or a book about a private eye. Nowadays many of those sleuths are women: Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone of Southern California; Sara Paretsky’s Chicago P.I., V.I. Warshawski; and Edna Buchanan’s Miami-based Britt Montero.

What makes mysteries such a perfect way to kill time while waiting for planes, trains and buses and even in long ticket lines? For one thing, they’re usually mass-market-size, which makes them portable, says Priscilla Ulene, who stocks mysteries along with guidebooks at her L.A. shop, the Traveler’s Bookcase.

Jan Burke’s 1999 mystery “Bones,” which won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, is part of a series that takes place in a fictional version of Long Beach and stars reporter Irene Kelly. Burke says that many women feel adventurous when they travel, so they’re naturally drawn to feisty female detectives with the nerve to walk down dark, deserted streets and duck punches.

Sue Grafton, author of more than a dozen Kinsey Millhone novels (from “ ‘A’ is for Alibi” to “ ‘O’ is for Outlaw”), points to the strong plot lines. “On page 1 you’re off and running,” she said in a recent phone interview. “So you can read them with interruptions.”

I’d have a hard time sticking with Proust on a plane from London to L.A. But I could make it through a Grafton mystery (usually with just enough left to see me through the jet-lagged hours of insomnia during my first night or two back home). When a mystery really cooks, you can’t put it down; time flies, and before you know it, you’re touching down.

But there’s another, perhaps more important reason that mysteries and travel go together. The best mystery novels have a strong sense of place, from Raymond Chandler’s L.A. to Georges Simenon’s Paris to Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, which makes reading them almost as good as--and sometimes more fun than--studying a guidebook. Mysteries not only introduce you to some of the major tourist sites in a city like Paris or London, but they also make you feel the ambience of the place and give you a look behind the scenes at back streets and neighborhoods that only locals know.

Author Burke says she gets lots of letters from readers who try to track down the settings in her novels. In fact, the son of her Dutch translator drove from Bakersfield northeast to Lake Isabella looking for the rock where a scene in her novel “Hocus” takes place. “He went to Bakersfield because of me,” she says. “Can you believe it?”

This doesn’t surprise me. After reading a mystery that takes place somewhere interesting, I often do the same thing. London is an excellent destination for this kind of travel sleuthing because so many wonderful mystery writers have set their tales there. For instance, you can stroll along Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, where the accused murderer Harriet Vane buys arsenic in “Strong Poison,” a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery by Dorothy Sayers. Gabriel Lomas, a character in P.D. James’ “Innocent Blood,” says he learned to love gossip as a child listening to nannies chat by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Irrepressible barrister-sleuth Rumpole, who stars in a mystery series by John Mortimer, used to eat scrambled eggs at Rex’s on Old Bailey Street before it was replaced by an Indian restaurant.

Reading a mystery on the plane home (as I did earlier this year with Peter Hoeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” set in Copenhagen) is a different but equal pleasure. By that time, you know the place you’ve just visited and can better visualize the action. “If you’ve been to a place where a book is set, it really enhances the reading experience,” says mystery writer Burke.

Janet LaPierre, whose novels include “The Unquiet Grave” and “Baby Mine,” set on the Mendocino coast, also likes to read mysteries when she travels, only she travels by car and takes them in on tape. She says she discovered how good Dick Francis is by listening to one of his novels during a five-hour drive. When she returned home, she sat outside in her car for 20 minutes so she could hear the end.

There was a time, LaPierre says, when women thought they had to use male pseudonyms to write mystery novels. Charming, old-fashioned puzzle mysteries like Christie’s (known in the genre as “cozies”) have long been the province of women authors. But it wasn’t until 1977, when Marcia Muller wrote “Edwin of the Iron Shoes,” that a tough female private eye, San Francisco-based Sharon McCone, appeared in a contemporary mystery.

Muller is considered a pioneer by her colleagues, and since McCone debuted, female investigators have proliferated. Besides those of Grafton, Paretsky, Buchanan, Burke and LaPierre, there’s Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner Kay Scarpetta of Richmond, Va.; Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon, a national park ranger; and Elizabeth Peters’ Victorian archeologist Amelia Peabody.

Grafton says that before women private eyes arrived on the scene, “the detective used to be flat and laconic, a smoker, drinker and womanizer. I hope women writers have brought some humanity to mysteries.”

I think they have, which is partly what makes them such indispensable travel companions.