Len Wanner’s book Dead Sharp (Two Ravens Press, 2011) contains nine informative, and entertaining interviews with Scottish crime writers, and a Ten Commandments for successful interviewing. In his Ten Commandments Wanner asks “Am I a good enough interviewer to tell you how to become a better one?” On the evidence of the interviews here, he is. He picks his questions well, is friendly without being gushing, presses his point to get an answer, and manages to bring a lightness and humour even to such glum and serious subjects as gender politics.

It is probably inevitable that the book begins with Ian Rankin, and that his name, and the description “Tartan Noir” should turn up more than once, even in interviews with other writers. Wanner’s interview with Rankin sets the tone for the questioning throughout the book; that is, unexpected, and revealing. The question “If Rebus is an ‘Old Testament sort of guy’, what kind of God are you?” elicits the response from Rankin that “I’m a much more forgiving God than Rebus would accept”, which tells us something about Rankin, and Rebus, but also leads to a discussion about Presbyterianism and guilt in Scottish crime writing that brings in Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride, both subjects of later interviews.

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Gimlet

Four parts gin (Chandler favoured Gordons),

One part Rose’s lime cordial,

Shaken over ice.

Served on the rocks, or ‘up’, depending on personal preference.

Raymond Chandler’s Early Life. Putting right a few longstanding errors in Chandler’s accepted biography.

Raymond Chandler on Writing. Article from The Reader magazine.

Raymond Chandler: A Matter of Disguise. Academic article on Chandler which appeared in Studies in the Novel in 1997.

Raymond Chandler at Dulwich College.

Raymond Chandler’s Advice to Writers.

Philip Marlowe on Freelancing. Pengin book covers and a great quotation.

Raymond Chandler and Google. It looks like Chandler coined the word ‘Google,’and envisaged it as a source of information, in 1953.

Readers near to San Diego might like to know that the ashes of Raymond and Cissy Chandler are to be reunited on February 14th, 2011. If you would like to attend the ceremony and the celebratory drinks and dinner, follow the RSVP instructions on Loren Latker’s website.

Following the Detectives is a smart, modern take on the reference book, informed by the breezy informality of the Web, but playing to all the tactile advantages of a physical book in an age of ePub, and iBooks. Production values are high: heavy paper, with an embossed card cover, lots of photos and illustrations, useful double-page maps, further reading, trivia boxes, and notes on other crime writers connected with a given place. The book feels and looks great.

The content is well done too. Twenty-one locations–15 cities and six regions–are featured in the main chapters, from Los Angeles, and San Francisco, to Iceland, Paris, Sweden, Nottingham, and Shropshire. All are represented by at least one fictional detective. The colours are bright, the style is consistently light and easy, and I can see this going down well as a Christmas or birthday gift.

In his introduction, Jakubowski explains that the idea was to create a book that was neither a travel guide, nor a detailed reference book, but one that had something of both. Size and weight rule out taking this with you on a walking tour of San Francisco, Edinburgh, Oxford, or Ystad–there are walking tours in all those places anyway–but Following the Detectives is a good place to start thinking about it. Better than that, though, it introduces writers, and characters, locating them in their respective cities in ways that help them make more sense to outsiders. For example, Michael Carlson’s chapter on George V. Higgins, Robert. B. Parker, and Boston, brings local knowledge that non-Bostonians may never grasp on their own, such as the significance of long-term sporting failure on the collective psyche of a city’s inhabitants; an explanation, he speculates, for a Bostonian sense of proportion in comparison with New Yorkers.

I’d recommend this book as a gift for a crime fiction fan, but I have some reservations that go beyond the book itself and speak to the environment in which it is published. As I have said, this is a beautiful book: heavy, as well made as a ‘paperback’can be, smartly designed, and written. But I can’t help feeling, with a heavy heart, that what it really needs to be is not a book, but a website, or perhaps an iPad app. Ten years ago, when I was making a modest living writing and editing large-scale reference books, I would come across something on the Web that warranted a link in the references of an entry. Now I think it is the other way around: the Web is the first place I’d go for information at this level. While reading Following the Detectives I wanted links to click and internal threads to follow, I wanted more detail on writers who were name checked. More than that, I wanted it to have the potential to grow over time, to become something truly inclusive, encyclopaedic, something to follow. Although each chapter includes lists of useful websites, typing out web addresses exactly as they are written is a real drag. For example, imagine typing out these, rather than clicking them:

http://www.frommers.com/destinations/florida/0222010007.html

http://visitreykjavik.is/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-13/28_read-1131

I suspect that anyone who does take the time to type those wouldn’t go back to the book for quite a while.

If physical books are going to survive at all in the long run, they need to offer something that isn’t available online, or on rich media devices like the iPad. This book offers a physical, tactile experience that the Web can’t match, and the focus on real locations is well conceived, and beautifully presented. What strikes me though, is that we interrogate, rather than read, books like these, and that we do so for the content, and for the connections between ideas, rather than how they feel. Books have a resistance that works in their favour in some cases: the big, simple maps in this book are particularly good as a tool for envisaging the geography, of, say, Edinburgh in Rankin’s Rebus novels. But for making and following links, for referencing connected but external sources, and for speed, the Web does it better.

Buy Following the Detectives from the publisher New Holland. Use the discount code Routledge to get 20% off.