Chasing sleuths and unravelling the metropolis

Annals of Tourism Research 57 (2016) 113–125

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Chasing sleuths and unravelling the metropolis Analyzing the tourist experience of Sherlock Holmes’ London, Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles and Lisbeth Salander’s Stockholm Nicky van Es ⇑, Stijn Reijnders Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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Article history: Received 3 March 2015 Revised 13 November 2015 Accepted 23 November 2015 Coordinating Editor: Lee Jolliffe Keywords: Crime-detective fiction Literary tourism Place experience Urban spaces

a b s t r a c t Visiting places associated with popular literature is increasingly prominent as a tourist practice; however little is known on how to explain the growing popularity of this phenomenon in large cities over the world. How do tourists experience contemporary cities through their participation in crime-detective fiction tours, and what meaning(s) do they attribute to their experiences? Towards this end, an ethnographic approach has been adopted which encompassed participation in three literary crime-detective fiction tours as well as in-depth interviews with twenty participants. The results of this study show that popular crime-detective fiction tourism is best understood as a quest to find the presumed true nature of the city. Participants experience a gradual descent into the city’s underbelly, discovering multiple intertwined place-narratives and ultimately might acquire a sense of belonging, illustrating that this manifestation of literary tourism can be understood as a form of cultural criticism against a supposed ‘‘urban placelessness”. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction It was about ten minutes to noon, early August, when the sky turned from bright blue to dark grey, transforming Stockholm from the once so colorful and beautiful city into a shaded, gritty and gloomy ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 618979104. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. van Es), [email protected] (S. Reijnders). URL: http://www.locatingimagination.com (N. van Es). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2015.11.017 0160-7383/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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place. With the rain pouring down on us, we gathered underneath an overpass at the bottom of a steeply declining street called Bellmansgatan. Across the street from where we stood was a fourstory apartment building, colored with a bright earthly orange-red and a pointy black roof. Its bright color make it stand out from the rest of the faint yellowish apartment buildings in the street, this was Bellmansgatan 1, the home of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (2005). It seemed that the sudden dramatic change in weather was providing a morbidly fitting atmosphere for an experience of the city in line with its depiction in this internationally popular crime-detective fiction series. Out of the grey wall of rain appeared a slender silhouette, halfway hidden underneath a decent sized umbrella, approaching our group. He was wearing a dark long overcoat, equally dark trousers and a bright red scarf that jumped out from the rest of his outfit. Our guide, Håkan, had arrived. Not long into the introduction of the tour, Håkan raises a relevant question, when he states: So the Swedish people feel a little bit of national pride. What we do not think of is that Stieg Larsson’s books have given a very special image of Sweden (sic) [. . .] the Swedish government is totally corrupt, Swedish men beat up their women. That’s the image from Sweden that has been spread around the world. And that may, I don’t know if that would, attract you to come here. It is indeed fascinating to unravel the underlying meanings these people attribute to their experience of a big city in line with its particular dark and gloomy associations derived from popular fiction. Although being celebrated for increasing tourism to Stockholm in the wake of the international success of the Millennium Series (InvestStockholm, 2011), this case is by no means an isolated one (e.g. Gibbs, 2008; Lawson, 2012). Related to the increasing international popularity of the genre of crime-detective fiction as a whole, there has been a simultaneous rise in the demand for and facilitation of routes and tours to experience the ‘‘places of imagination” (Reijnders, 2011) associated with the adventures of the world’s most famous private detectives. Aiming to provide an explanation for the popularity of this practice of visiting urban places related to popular crime-detective fiction novels and their subsequent ‘‘multimedia afterlife” (Clayton, 2003; Vanacker & Wynne, 2013; Watson, 2009), this research addresses the following research question: How do tourists experience contemporary cities through their participation in literary crime-detective fiction tours, and what meaning(s) do they attribute to their experiences? Particularly set against the backdrop of notions surrounding ‘‘urban placelessness” supposedly characterizing our postmodern times (cf. Soja, 2000), where cities are conceived to be inherently transnational (eg. Krätke, Wildner, & Lanz, 2012), increasingly becoming reduced to homogenous and flattened out nodes in a global network of cities and is as such held to be illustrative of the ‘‘death of the city” (Madden, 2012: 11). In this context, where cities have arguably nothing more to offer than conspicuous consumption and superficial entertainment, it becomes even more relevant to assess how and why popular crimedetective fiction is able to facilitate a (more) meaningful experience of the present-day metropolis. In order to provide an answer to this question, this study employs an ethnographical approach towards the practices and underlying meanings attached by present-day tourists related to their visit to three capital crime cities: Sherlock Holmes’ Late-Victorian London, Philip Marlowe’s Hard-boiled Los Angeles and Lisbeth Salander’s Post-welfare-state Stockholm. Twenty participants of guided literary city tours have been interviewed in order to investigate their experiences of the cities at hand through their association with popular crime-detective fiction. Before discussing the results of these interviews and their implications for the fields of research to which they tap into, it is first important to elaborate more on the relevance of this research in terms of already existing studies about the practice of literary tourism. Experiencing literary places The practice of visiting the locations associated with popular crime-detective fiction can be conceived as an example of literary tourism—visiting and experiencing places through their association with a popular novel and/or author. Having its modern-day inception in late nineteenth century, Romantic-era Great Britain, the popularization of visiting literary sites by members of progressively different layers of society is seen as connected to the simultaneous rise in popularity of the realist,

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romantic novel (Watson, 2006). As the phenomenon of literary tourism increased in international popularity over the past couple of centuries, this development has been met with ample research from a broad range of disciplines such as cultural geography, history, literary studies, cultural sciences and tourism marketing studies. Surprisingly however, only a minor amount of studies have focused on the underlying motivations and experiences of those directly involved in visiting places associated with literature today: the literary tourists. Related to the fact that a large share of the research devoted to the subject of literary tourism is generally approaching it as an historical literary phenomenon, the study towards the relationship between literature and an experience of place proceeds mainly through textual analyses. This encompasses either the original, source-text’s employment of place and autobiographical accounts of the authors themselves or secondary accounts of travel writers and poets who eloquently described their breathtaking experiences of the sublime and picturesque encountered at literary places (DeLyser, 2003; Watson, 2006; Westover, 2012) and writers houses (Hendrix, 2008). Although these accounts have advanced our understanding of the practice of literary tourism, they represent a particular experience of literary places which is captured through a distinctively ‘‘romantic gaze” (Urry, 1990). Informed by extensive close readings of the novels as well as experiencing the place in prolonged solitude and in actively reflecting on the deep feelings and emotions evoked by this through recording them in travelogues, these accounts provide for quite over-romanticized and profoundly elitist accounts of the experiences of literary places. It is here where the first blind spot is raised which this paper aims to address, namely that of literary place as experienced by the more conventional and contemporary literary tourist. Literary tourism as a collective and social practice is increasingly engaged in, for example through the guided tours, which build more upon a ‘‘collective gaze” (Urry, 1990) to create a sense of place and, which as a communal activity speaks to a wider range of audiences. As literary tourism can only exist by the grace of holding significance for the people who engage in this practice, it is relevant to assess the meanings that are attributed to this by the tourists themselves. This does not mean, however, that the practice of literary tourism has not been studied from the perspective of the tourist. The few studies that do exist nonetheless share their exclusive focus on the genre of the romantic realist novel and corresponding romantic literary places located in the countryside, stemming from an equally romantic desire on behalf of the literary tourist to escape everyday life lived in the ‘‘great sprawling cities” (Tuan, 1974) and experience the extraordinary, sublime and picturesque located in the countryside. This notion is reflected in research done in the United Kingdom (Busby & Shetliffe, 2013; Herbert, 2001; Pocock, 1992; Squire, 1993, 1994), France (Herbert, 1996) and the United States (DeLyser, 2003), resulting in the conflation of the practice of literary with that of heritage tourism. Mainly focusing on the experiences of domestic tourists, these studies illustrate the literary tourists’ desire to experience a romanticized version of their own national or local history conveyed through classic novels, reflecting ‘‘the corollary of the present-day obsession with heritage and cultural memory” (Plate, 2006). The dominant focus on the romantic novel and novelists results in the second blind spot this paper wishes to address, namely a lack of attention towards the diversity of the existing relationships between literature, place and experience. Resulting from a general negligence for the tourists’ meaningful experience of literary place and an over-romantization of the phenomenon of literary tourism in both object—romantic novels and literary places—as well as in subject—the romantic literary tourist— the current treatment of the practice of literary tourism is rather one-dimensional. As a reaction, this has recently been met with academic attention towards more conventional literary tourists in the wake of popular crime-detective fiction set in the cities of Ystad, Sweden (Sjöholm, 2010) and Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Reijnders, 2011). Following this shift in focus to urban literary tourism based on the popular genre of crime-detective fiction, this study aims to expose these blind spots and provide further insights into the multifaceted relationship between both literature and place as well as between the tourist and his/her motivated experiences of these literary places. The central place of crime-detective fiction has always been the city, providing a distinctively unromantic account of everyday life through focusing in general on a hidden world of crime, corruption and mystery located underneath the urban façade of progress, success and safety in numbers. Emphasizing the mundane, grotesque and urban, the genre clearly opposes itself to the more conventional, romantic

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focus on the sublime, picturesque and rural. Underlying the popularity of the genre of crime-detective fiction is thus not so much a longing for a romanticized version of cultural memory, but more an ascribed cultural fascination for the ‘‘unknown” and ‘‘uncanny” in the city, so it seems, similarly traceable to Romantic-era cultural values and desires (Booth, 2009; Clayton, 2003). Following this, the popularity of the genre is thus frequently explained through feeding back into this cultural desire of seeing the ails and mysteries of urban life exposed, thoroughly analyzed and ultimately controlled through the supreme observational and reasoning skills of the main protagonist(s), supported by the most advanced technologies and sciences available (Gever, 2005; Harrington, 2007; Schmid, 1995). Thus, both romantic and crime-detective fiction can be conceived of as a reaction to the everexpanding metropolis, of the rise of the urban proletariat and accompanying urban pathologies such as poverty, crime and corruption. The difference lies in the way in which both genres react to this development. On the one hand, romantic literature opts for a flight away from the city, to escape alienating life in the city and to retreat in the picturesque, authentic countryside. On the other hand, crime-detective fiction approaches the issue through diving in headfirst, getting into the deep, dark heart of the city in an attempt to expose, analyze and control the urban problems brought about by its progressive expansion. Following this, it becomes relevant to discern how and to what extent the fundamentally different employment of narrative and place in crime-detective fiction results in diverging motivations and experiences of tourists on location. Aiming not only to diversify these tourist motivations and experiences of capital crime cities through focusing on literary tourism in the wake of a distinctively unromantic genre, this research also expects important differences to occur within the genre and between participants as well. Due to the existence of popular sub-genres within crime-detective fiction as a whole, characterized mainly by their different employment of place, time and protagonists, it is to be expected that these places are imagined differently and hence experienced as such. Additionally, as the practice of reading is generally conceived to be an highly imaginative and individual way to make sense of a (fictional) narrative and place as opposed to the relatively more collective practice of viewing it is also to be expected that individuals themselves have different imaginations of these places and characters which they bring with them as they eventually visit the actual places themselves (Laing & Frost, 2012; Robinson & Anderson, 2002).

Cases and method This study focuses on the relationship between three particularly popular crime-detective fiction series set in three distinctive large cities. These cases have been selected on the basis of their centrality in currently popular crime-detective fiction, capturing in essence the blueprints of the genre as it developed from the nineteenth century until today. Following the Romantic-era origins of the genre, it seems sensible to start with the archetypical detective Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887–1927) and the equally iconic city of Late-Victorian London. The detailed, realistic and powerful imagination of Holmes’ Late-Victorian London lives vividly amongst a wide array of international tourists visiting London (Iwashita, 2006; Laing, 2012), increasing in intensity after the release of an acclaimed adaptation, such as the new BBC-series Sherlock (2010-). Right at the point where the last of Sherlock’s adventures was published, the world witnessed the advent of the hardboiled detective, such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1934–1959) set in the mean streets of booming Los Angeles. Painting a realistic depiction of Los Angeles’ heyday during the nineteen thirties through fifties, the subgenre of L.A. Noir represents the city as increasingly expanding and dangerous, filled with seedy and dark locations underneath a veneer of sunshine, palm trees and Hollywood celebrities (Farish, 2005). As we arrive back in our present day-and-age, we locate the contemporary hot-spot of crime-detective fiction in Scandinavia, particularly in the Stockholm of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series (2005). Centered on a strong female protagonist—unique to the genre as a whole—the trilogy follows the troubled master hacker Lisbeth Salander and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Building upon a subversion of the popular conception of the city as the symbol of the Swedish elaborate welfare state, being clean, orderly and above all democratic, Millennium is celebrated for its realistic depictions of organized hatred against women, xenophobia and state authoritarianism (Brodén, 2011; Forshaw, 2012).

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Through adopting an ethnographic approach, this study aims to yield a rich and diversified account of the underlying meanings attached to contemporary instances of literary tourism. This implies that participation in tourist practices is required in order to get a detailed image of the tours and the practices which are engaged in. In turn, this facilitated the subsequent conversation with the tourists (Crang, 2011) in being able to ask directed questions about specific locations or behavior. Last, participation in the tours also allowed for an initial face-to-face contact with potential respondents which resulted in a relatively high response rate. Participation in the tours took place during July and August of 2013 (London and Stockholm) and January 2014 (Los Angeles). All the tours are held multiple times a year—ranging from weekly to once every three months—and are consistently fully booked with 30–40 participants, coming from a diverse range of backgrounds. In London, the In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes-tour, provided by the longstanding organization London Walks (LondonWalks, n.d.), was taken. The two-hour tour took us primarily through the Covent Garden’s area in London, starting out in the Victorian Embankment Gardens, right next to the Thames, zigzagged northwards into the city before returning back to the Sherlock Holmes Pub, located close-by the Embankment. Highlight of the tour was the small, dark, cobble-stoned alley of The Strand. In Stockholm the Stieg Larsson Millennium Tour: In the footsteps of Lisbeth was participated in, provided by the City Museum of Stockholm (VisitStockholm, n.d.). Starting out in front of Mikael Blomkvist’s house on Bellmansgatan 1, the one-and-a-half-hour tour spanned the north part of the island of Södermalm and ended up at Fiskargatan 9, the new address of Lisbeth Salander. Along the way, the tour addresses existing discrepancies between locations used in both the novelized and the audiovisual versions. Last, Los Angeles was experienced through the Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place-tour, provided by the relatively young company EsoTouric (Esotouric, n.d.). This four-hour bus tour started out a little east of downtown Los Angeles and first drove downtown to The Oviatt building on Olive and 7th Street—or ‘‘The Treolar” building in The Lady in the Lake (Chandler, 1943)—drove further towards the north-west and finally into the heart of Hollywood (see van Es and Reijnders (submitted for publication) for a more thorough analysis of the design of these tours). One of the main advantages of recruiting participants through these guided city tours is that they catered to a broad array of participants, both in terms of their cultural background as well as in their degree of fandom. In order to get underneath their motivations and experiences, twenty participants were interviewed via semi-structured, in-depth interviews (Bryman, 2004), conducted either on location right after the tour or at a later moment in time through Skype. Though the Skype-interviews had a strong overlap with the ones conducted face-to-face, there was a noticeable difference in time-span between moment of participation in the tour and the moment of the interview. This affected the data in the sense that the participants interviewed on location had a more recent and vivid recollection of their experiences. However, the participants interviewed through Skype had more time to reflect on their overall experiences of their visit to the city and even incorporate them into subsequent reading and/or viewing-practices, making these small differences work rather complementarily. The participants in this study ranged in age from 21 to 62, and all had at least read one of the novels under study and had seen its audiovisual adaptations. Representing over eight different nationalities spread out over four continents, the interviewees had similarly diverse occupations, ranging from student, teacher, public administrator, ICT-specialist, manager to retired. Participants were being offered anonymity, and apart from two exceptions (Ms. Canada and Mr. K.H.), everybody agreed to have their real names used when being referred to in this study. The interviews themselves took between 40 and 90 min, and were loosely structured around three main topics aiming to capture the before, during and after visit experiences of both the series under study as well as the capital crime city in which they are set. The first topic, the pre-visit experience, is directed at capturing the affinity of the participant to the series under study in both its original, novelized form as well as its subsequent afterlife and how this relates to their imagination of the city. In addition, this was connected to their motivations for travelling to the city in general, as well as their motivations for participating in the tour in particular. The second topic, the experiences during visit, involved the discussion of their actual experiences on the tour, focusing in particular on their general impression of the tour, locations and stories which made an impression, their behavior on the tour and their overall experience of the city through its connection to popular fiction.

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Finally, the post-visit experience, encapsulated a reflection on their visit and how this experience has affected both the way in which they perceive the place as well as their continued (re-)reading practices. After transcription, the analysis of the interviews proceeded through several readings and marking the paragraphs in which the participant elaborated on each of the three main topics. After this, sections from these paragraphs were marked and labelled as particularly illustrative of the participants’ motivations, experiences and reflections on their participation in the tour and the city in general. This stage of ‘‘open coding” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) focused mainly on how the participants themselves articulated their experiences, paying particular attention to certain ‘‘sensitizing concepts” (Bowen, 2006) they use in doing so. Following this, the results of this initial analysis were compared with each other, firstly through comparing participants’ descriptions pertaining to the same city and secondly through comparison between each of the three cases. Based on the encountered commonalities and differences here, a nuanced description can be given of the experiences and underlying motivations of the practice of literary tourism in the wake of popular crime-detective fiction in three major cities. ‘‘The game is afoot!’’ To start with, it should be noted that the experience of the crime-detective tour is not univocal. Respondents emphasize different elements of the tour in narrating their own experiences. Most of these differences can be related to the participants’ cultural background, as well as their variable degree of affinity with the series under study. Besides the strong influence of being a domestic or local tourist on expressing relatively more nostalgic and ‘‘topophilic” (Tuan, 1974) sentiments, the cultural background and everyday life situation of the international participants similarly influences both imagining place as well as subsequently experiencing it on location. Illustrative of the importance of the participants’ everyday life situation and cultural background in the imagination and experience of place, is the case of Maria (Stockholm; 34, female, Argentina), when she explains that her imagination of Stockholm did not match her experience of Stockholm—which she describes as ‘‘kind of perfect and shiny”—due to her residence in a much larger, darker city: I found here that the books are so dark and so mysterious and all that and the city is nothing like that. Everything is so kind of perfect and shiny and. . .it’s really different, the atmosphere that’s in the book and the real atmosphere in the city. That might be because of the city I live in, I live in Buenos Aires which is a huge city and there are parts of the city which are, quite dark, and so everything seems so much better over there [Stockholm] than out here. Additionally, it turned out for some of the North-American respondents to be problematic to imagine events happening in European cities, illustrated by Mary-Ann (Stockholm; 21, female, United States): ‘‘It’s hard for me to form European cities in my head as opposed to American cities, because it’s much older architecture, so my default, I visualize things in my head as not in that style of architecture at all”. In addition to the importance of one’s cultural background and everyday lived environment, the tourists’ experience of place is to varying extents informed by their degree of affinity to the series. Those participants who conceive of themselves as fans of the series desire to get an experience of the city in line with how the central protagonist(s) of the fictional narratives experiences the diegetic space and ‘‘try to put yourself in the shoes of Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson, see it from that sort of view” (London; Caitlyn, 23, female, United States). Although this ‘‘added layer of significance” can provide for a ‘‘very powerful experience of a city” (London; Aline, 34, female, France), it can also result in disappointment in those cases where high expectations of the place are crudely destroyed due to the location not existing anymore: . . .as much as you want to see the places that you read about, sometimes they don’t live up to them in your mind, so for instance if there is a lot of stuff like ‘this used to be here. . .’, well, that, for somebody who has read about it in the novels, you know, it’s a bit heartbreaking right?  Andrea (London; 40+, female, Canada). On the other end of the fan-spectrum, we find for example Sandi (LA; 33, female, United States), who mentions that she is not a fan of Raymond Chandler and thus ‘‘wasn’t as excited from that

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Model design: the authors. Graphic design: Y.A. Dung.

Fig. 1. Visual representation of experiencing capital crime cities through gradually approaching its presumed core-identity.

perspective as more from my interest in learning about LA” in her experience of Los Angeles. Here we also encounter people like Abhijit (Stockholm; 49, male, Singapore) who are brought along on the tour by an aficionado of the novels—Abhijit’s wife in this case—and was more into the experience for ‘‘doing something different” compared to the typical tourist attractions in Stockholm they had done on their previous visit several years earlier. That said, we also found strong similarities between the different participants. The encountered similarities between the participants in terms of their experiences of both the series and city has resulted in a three-stage model (see Fig. 1) which describes the process of experiencing the capital crime city by means of gradually getting closer to its perceived true identity. It is here where crimedetective fiction forms the starting point in taking the first step into what participants describe as the ‘‘underbelly” of the city (ie. see statements from Malia and Ms. Canada in the next section) by means of visiting relatively hidden and obscure locations related to the series at hand. Into the underbelly That street, that little side-street, which wasn’t anything special, but it had these old lanterns and everything. I found it was such an embodiment of what these stories are, really, it’s not in the main streets, it’s in the side streets. And that’s also what I like to see in a city; not just what everybody else sees, but the little things.  Aline (London; 34, female, France) The aforementioned quote from Aline captures her experience at the small side-street of The Strand, frequented during the Sherlock Holmes tour. This particular location made a large impression on her— as well as on most of the other participants of this tour—because it is a location which has the ascribed right atmosphere to provide a place-experience in line with her imagination through reading Sherlock Holmes. The desire to experience the city through its particular dark and gloomy associations derived from popular fiction is frequently related to having a perceived more real and authentic experience of the city than is otherwise noticeable on the surface. For example, when Danielle (Los Angeles; 29, female, United States) explains in relation to her experience of Los Angeles as a capital crime city: ‘‘I guess seeing like LA’s underbelly and knowing that you’re experiencing everything there is to experience”. This is further underscored by Malia (Los Angeles, 36, female, United States), in saying that her experience contributed to: . . .understanding that there is many sides to LA, not just the one that people always think of right, just the glamour and glitz, but that there is just the underbelly, the different, the darker side, the grittier side, the raw side, which is pretty cool.

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At this point it needs to be remarked that the particular locations and neighborhood(s) visited during the tour are complementary to the participants’ experiences of other parts of the city. Having experienced the surface of the city, getting to experience the city’s ‘‘underbelly” contributes according to these participants to acquiring a more complete sense of place. However, not everybody is able to get underneath the façade as they might have hoped for, illustrated by the following quote: I didn’t get to see the underbelly-side of the city, the side that is being described in the books [. . .] I didn’t so much physically see it as I had kind of anticipated that I would see it, so it was really more clean and laid back and lots of runners everywhere, the super healthy side they want to show.  Ms. Canada (Stockholm; 30, female, Canada) This inability to experience a place in line with its representation in popular crime-detective fiction is mostly related to two ‘‘temporal discrepancies” which affect the atmosphere of the place as encountered by the tourists on location (Roesch, 2009). The first one is related to an existing discrepancy between the weather-conditions and season in which the city is represented in popular fiction and how these are experienced during the time of visit. As both Sherlock Holmes as well as The Millennium Series are typically set and imagined in autumn/winter, including the rain, fog and snow, the experience on location did quite not manage to capture their imagination of these for some tourists. Additionally, in the two cases where the cities are imagined in their respective historical timeperiods, there was a second temporal discrepancy which involved the fact that the fast-paced, modern-day city life was a disturbing element in experiencing the city in the desired atmosphere in which they have imagined it. This is illustrated by Andrea (London; 40+, female, Canada), in referring to The Strand’s alleyway: I think that the alleyway was sort of the most where you felt that we could see Sherlock coming in and solving a crime and knocking a bad guy down and sniffing around, whereas the rest, it tended to be a little bit more busy, modern-looking places. Providing some nuance to this process of seeking out of an imagined underbelly of the city, is the active reflection on this by some of the participants, discussing that their explorations into the urban underworld is consciously done from a relatively safe position, knowing in the end that it is all fiction. Related for example to the actual grotesque Jack the Ripper murders in similar Late-Victorian London, Sherlock Holmes provides for a relatively mild representation of this London than it was in actuality. As Maria-Anna (London; 30, female, Germany) says: ‘‘I think in reality it was definitely more brutal and violent than in the stories, I would say”. This is further underscored by Christine (Los Angeles; 47, female, United States) when she states that ‘‘the strange things that happen in reality, usually are more outlandish than the things that people make up in fiction”. It is here where we locate the desire to experience a certain place in line with how it is imagined through popular crime-detective fiction. Not only does this allow the participants to closely scrutinize their imagination with reality and vice versa, it simultaneously works towards giving them an experience of the city which is conceived to be more full and rich in the eyes of the participants. By visiting places during the tour which they otherwise would not have found and visited by themselves, the participants motivate their practices as being aimed towards getting into the ‘‘underbelly” in order to get a more authentic experience of the city. The authenticity of this experience is thus both perceived as ‘‘constructed authenticity”, through performatively experiencing the city just as the protagonists of their beloved crime-detective fiction, as well as ‘‘existentially authentic” in allowing the participants to identify themselves as being different from the average urban tourist (Wang, 1999). At this point it is relevant to critically analyze the usage of metaphors to describe the city in the accounts of the aforementioned participants. The frequent coining of the ‘‘underbelly” of the city implies a modernistic conception of the city as an organism, which in order to identify it means addressing its obscure and often overlooked parts. Thus, by focusing on how the city as an organism digests, or copes with the pathologies created by this ever-expanding body—ie. crime, corruption, poverty—the participants aim to get closer to a presumed core identity of the city itself. This corresponds to how the city is imagined through reading popular crime-detective fiction, as all of the protagonists of the series under study are generally heralded for their extensive knowledge of the cities in which they operate, particularly because they have access to the generally hidden and obscured parts of the city.

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Peeling back the layers The city has this really rich and fascinating history [. . .with. . .] layers upon layers that Los Angeles builds upon itself and kind of buries the past in order to sort of try to create a new image for itself and that’s why it’s so much fun to kind of peel back the layers a little bit and see what its actually been like.  Zac (Los Angeles; 33, male, United States). The described experiences by the participants are illustrative of a discovery, to varying extents, of the multi-layered nature of the city. Drawing on the aforementioned quote by Zac, it becomes evident that the city is experienced in metaphorical terms like an onion, in which an imagined core lies encapsulated in multiple layers, stacked on top of one another and at certain points intertwining with each other. These ‘‘multiple layers of significance” (Torchin, 2002) are particularly unique to the experience of the literary city as a ‘‘multi-generic text” (Watson, 2009: 144) in itself, a ‘‘palimpsest” (Crang, 1996), providing for a plethora of experiences of urban space through its connection to a multitude of intertwining fictional and factual narratives inscribed in place. In following the onion-metaphor and moving from the outside-in, the first layer is formed by the employment of the locations in the original, diegetic space of the series under study. As discussed in the previous paragraph, the employment of place in the fictional narratives forms an entry point for participants to get underneath the urban façade, and from here onward the layers are gradually exposed in an attempt to approach the presumed essential identity of the city. However, there is another fictional layer stacked on top of this during the tours in the experience of several of the participants. This layer is simultaneously based on the employment of the city in fictional narratives, only this time it is related to the audio-visual adaptation(s) of the original, literary narrative. In drawing upon differences in locations based on their employment in either the original novels or their subsequent afterlife, a ‘‘spatial discrepancy” (Roesch, 2009) is exposed which affect the experience of place. Being based on different employments of place in a similar fictional narrative mediated across different platforms, this is better understood as a diegetic discrepancy. This is illustrated clearly in the case of Mellqvist Kaffebar, which featured in the Millennium Trilogy novels as the coffee bar where Mikael Blomkvist always grabs a coffee, however for the movie they chose another location as the coffee bar where the protagonists go to, which is also the one addressed on the tour whereas Mellqvist is not. This resulted in a somewhat disappointing experience for some of the participants, as is shown from the following remarks made by Anna (Stockholm; 29, female, Poland) ‘‘that’s a bit disappointing when they choose that other place when there is the real one available” and MaryAnn (Stockholm; 21, female, United States): There was one coffee bar, but he [guide] said it wasn’t the actual coffee bar, he said that was the one that was used in the movie [. . .] yeah it would have been nice to go see the other one, because I feel like the one they used in the movie, the movie really doesn’t matter that much to me, but to me the one used in the book is, I guess the real, ‘‘real” one so to speak. In the case of these fictional spatial discrepancies, the locations associated with the novel were experienced as more ‘‘real” than the ones related to its afterlife for these participants. Providing for an additional layer of experience through drawing on these discrepancies on location, it becomes evident that the third layer—original, literary narrative’s employment of place—is conceived to be closer to the imagined core of the city than the layer associated with the adapted take on the literary narrative. Moving further towards the center and providing a bridge in between the fictional and more actual place narratives, lies the second layer based upon the autobiographical narratives of the author. Here is a connection being made between the actual life world of the author and their respective diegetic spaces created on paper, which itself forms the first layer. Discovering this particular second layer is described as an ‘‘eye-opening” experience: I guess I knew very little about Chandler’s actual life and how much he drew on his own experiences and the people he knew for his books, and so I really enjoyed that part of the tour, because it was completely new to me, but when it was tied into the books, that was a very eye-opening experience.  Zac (Los Angeles; 33, male, United States).

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It is here where participants aim to get an experience of place which allows them to see and feel the locations of inspiration to the writer. These locations provide ample opportunity to combine the autobiographical narratives of the authors with the characters, events and locations employed in their fiction, providing for an experience described as ‘‘enlightening” by Mary-Ann (Stockholm; 21, female, United States). By becoming aware that the author, Stieg Larsson, ‘‘was very politically inclined and quite a feminist”, she was able to place the themes of the Millennium Series better, as well as how this narrative fits in the context of Stockholm. Arriving closer to the presumed core lies the layer associated with actual, historical place narratives. For some participants, the historical narratives which are conveyed through much of the popular crime-detective fiction narratives and associated places brings them closer to a perceived real center of the city. In utilizing the fictional narrative as a window to expose the historical place narratives hidden underneath, Aline (London; 34, female, France) says the following: ‘‘I think through fiction and thinks like that you can, it opens a lot of doors really and you can learn a lot of things about settings, about real things”. In a similar fashion, Derrick (Los Angeles; 40, male, United States) makes the following statement in describing his experience of both reading Philip Marlowe stories as well as the actual Los Angeles behind it: They [Philip Marlowe novels] are about Los Angeles and as you read these things, you realize how much of it, how much crime there is and how much corruption there is and you just don’t think so much about that [. . .] that’s kind of what I learned about LA through these novels, was sort of like a slice of life, going through Philip Marlowe and all his cases [. . .] it opened my eyes to what a history this city has. Referring to his experience as ‘‘eye-opening”, Derrick’s account is illustrative of the notion that through crime-detective fiction the possibility of approaching an identity of the city that is perceived as more real opens up. For others, however, they had not necessarily wanted to get this far into the actual historical place narratives underlying the locations frequented on the tours. Instead, it tended to be an additional bonus to their experience in the sense that historical narratives managed to be relatively more successfully conveyed through fiction during the tour. Learning more about the actual places through their connection with fiction made it more personal, meaningful and entertaining for participants to retain these factual place narratives. Stating that ‘‘frankly I don’t care that much about history”, Mary-Ann (Stockholm; 21, female, United States) also notes that ‘‘I feel like a lot more stuck with me from the Millennium Tour than did most city tours” (sic), illustrating that the emotional attachment to the fictional narratives resulted in a more informative and personal experience of the city. Connecting to the city . . .it kind of helps us experience a nostalgia for a time-period we never lived through. . . [by visiting these locations] you kind of are putting yourself on a timeline when you get to visit this place and you know the history [. . .] part of the appeal is getting a better understanding of what your surroundings are in relation to you and I guess how you fit into the world.  Danielle (Los Angeles; 29, female, United States) Once access to the underworld of the city has been achieved and the multiple layers of significance have been discovered, analyzed and related to each other, participants can ultimately feel that they have grasped the core identity of the city—or at least approached it close enough—in order for them to identify themselves with it and experience a ‘‘sense of belonging” (Morley, 2001) to the city itself. In referring to the experience as related to an ‘‘imagined nostalgia”, Danielle illustrates that by visiting locations associated with the genre of L.A. Noir, she is able to feel connected to her immediate urban surroundings and her place in it. Here, the experience of the city through its association with popular crime-detective fiction is very much in line with the conception of urban literary tourism as ‘‘flânerie”, or a ‘‘walking for cultural meaning, [which] allows for the anchoring of one’s self in the social past and its urban spaces and so to acquire a sense of identity, continuity and belonging” (Plate, 2006: 109). This final step of feeling connected to the city itself was relatively more brought to the foreground in the conversations with participants of the Raymond Chandler tour in Los Angeles, as this was

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predominantly frequented by domestic, local tourists coming from in, but mostly from around LA. Describing LA as ‘‘a hidden city, it’s hard to find, it’s hard to understand in a way and it’s hard to know what to look for” (Los Angeles; Sandi, 33, female, United States), these participants are building upon the representations of Los Angeles in popular fiction in order for them to either see the city in a different light as well as finding previously unknown locations in the city. Extending this, some participants are expressing ‘‘topophilic sentiments” (Tuan, 1974) which are evoked by their exposure to Philip Marlowe’s adventures, as Derrick (Los Angeles; 40, male, United States) says in this regard: ‘‘it made me fall in love with Los Angeles too, because I would recognize the places that he was describing”. These sentiments were mainly encountered amongst the participants in Los Angeles, who, related to their own cultural backgrounds of either being a born-and-raised Angelino/a or a ‘‘transplant” originating from somewhere else in the US, were able to get to know their city, the history behind it and ultimately came to love and appreciate it. As Zac (Los Angeles; 33, male, United States) says in this regard: ‘‘I guess I’ve sort of developed a little bit of an obsession with Los Angeles and its history and Chandler’s novels really fed that quite a bit”. For others, it makes them appreciative on how far the city has come since that historical episode, but are simultaneously left reflecting on the current situation in LA, particularly referring to poverty-stricken areas such as Skid Row, in concluding: ‘‘and there’s still people hustling, trying to get jobs, trying to make it work, to not live on the streets barely having enough money, that still exists” (Los Angeles; Malia, 36, female, United States). The accounts outlined above are illustrative of the ways in which these participants manifest a desire to locate points of convergence between their own personal narratives set in the city as well as the fictional and factual place narratives which underlie it. For these participants it is more important to make an connection to the place, revolving more around the possibility to get the feeling that they (could) fit into this environment through identifying with the narratives—both fictional and historical—which make up the city. Describing their experiences with considerable topophilic sentiment, the domestic tourists encountered within this study are illustrative of the way in which literature can contribute to the creation of a ‘‘space of belonging” (Morley, 2001) in which people can feel connected to a collectively imagined past grounded in the present-day experience of the metropolis.

Conclusion Based on the conducted interviews with twenty participants in popular crime-detective fiction tours in London, Los Angeles and Stockholm, the results of this research point towards conceiving the practice of crime-detective fiction tourism as a modernistic backlash against the supposed problematic nature of urban experience in a postmodern context. Reflected in the respondents’ accounts of their experiences of capital crime cities on guided tours, the frequent usage of metaphors to describe the city suggest distinctively modernistic—holistic and organic—conceptions of the city and an underlying desire to peel back the complex and sometimes confusing whole of multiple layers of significance (Torchin, 2002) in order to gradually approach its presumed core-identity. The first step in this process of approaching this mythical essence of the city proceeds through the window provided by the popular crime-detective fiction narratives to get underneath the urban façade and gain access to the city’s underbelly. In traversing unknown routes through the city and visiting relatively unknown locations, the participants feel that they get a more accurate representation of the city as a whole, particularly in relation to the more conventional tourist experiences and attractions offered in the cities. The second step involves the discovery of the existence of multiple layers of significance. It is here where participants, to varying degrees, described their experience in terms of getting to know the various narratives and corresponding layers of significance—actual, historical, autobiographical, fictional literary and fictional multimedia afterlife—which encapsulate the perceived ‘‘true” identity of the city. The final step, which was only manifested in the accounts of the predominantly domestic tourists who participated in the Raymond Chandler tour in Los Angeles, is illustrative of a desire to feel connected to the city itself. Expressing their ‘‘topophilia” (Tuan, 1974), these respondents’ accounts suggest that they have (sufficiently) approached what they perceive to be the true nature of the city and are able to identify with that and ultimately acquire a ‘‘sense of belonging” (Morley, 2001).

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Considering the notion that certain essentialist conceptions of the city are no longer deemed a possibility in our present, postmodern times (cf. Madden, 2012; Soja, 2000), it is evident that particularly popular crime-detective fiction can provide a way to go beyond the ascribed placelessness of the city and to imagine and (temporarily) experience the city as having a coherent, underlying identity. In that sense, these tours can be understood as a form of cultural criticism. Additionally, it is also worthwhile to view the results of this study as a response to the ascribed superficiality of conventional (mass) tourism, said to be an increasing characteristic of the tourism industry in a postmodern day-andage (Urry, 1990). The accounts of the respondents in this research have illustrated quite differently that they perceive to get a more fuller and complimentary experience of the city itself by traversing its hidden routes, getting off the beaten track and visiting relatively obscured urban sites and locations as opposed to more conventional, mass-tourism. In doing so, the results of this study raise questions in relation to the extent to which postmodernism is suitable in providing an accurate conceptualization and explanation of present-day instances of urban literary tourism. These results can be conceived to be distinctively related to the genre of crime-detective fiction and its particular employment of urban space as consisting of multiple layers, taking the reader from the surface to the depths of the urban underworld in a never-ending quest to expose the hidden truth. In contrast to the frequently addressed romantic conception of equally romantic literary places located in the countryside (e.g. DeLyser, 2003; Herbert, 2001; Watson, 2006), it would appear that the results of this study point towards a potentially exclusive connection between different genres of literature, places and place-experiences. The extent to which the encountered underlying modernistic conception of (urban) space is unique to the experiences of crime-detective fiction tourists is open for further empirical research which can assess the applicability of the outlined model in other contexts. At the same time, parallels seem to exist with the modernistic authenticity claims to the experience of place in accounts of the ‘‘site guardians” of the L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish Home on Prince Edward Island in Canada (Fawcett & Cormack, 2001) as well as in the accounts of literary tourists ‘‘walking in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps” in London (Plate, 2006). Retaining the focus on tourist experiences, further systematical inquiry is necessary to discern the relevance of this modernistic myth of urban coreidentity in contemporary manifestations of literary tourism. In doing so, it may expose the wider relevance of literary tourism as a cultural practice in providing a modernistic alternative for the experience of place in a predominantly postmodern context. Acknowledgements This research has been financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) without any influence on, or interference with, the overall study design and content of the study itself (grant number: PR-11-77). The authors would like to express their gratitude towards the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions for improvements on the previous version of this paper. Additionally, the authors thank Nicola Watson, Anne Marit Waade, Abby Waysdorf and Leonieke Bolderman for their helpful comments in the earlier stages of this research. References Booth, A. (2009). Time-travel in Dickens’ World. In N. Watson (Ed.), Literary tourism and nineteenth-century culture (pp. 150–163). Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Mcmillan. Bowen, G. A. (2006). Grounded theory and sensitizing concepts. International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, 5(3), 12–23. Brodén, D. (2011). The dark ambivalences of the welfare state: Investigating the transformations of the Swedish crime film. Northern Lights, 9, 95–109. Bryman, A. (2004). Social research methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Busby, G., & Shetliffe, E. (2013). Literary tourism in context: Byron and Newstead Abbey. European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation, 4(3), 5–45. Clayton, J. (2003). Dickens in cyberspace: The afterlife of the nineteenth century in postmodern culture. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Crang, M. (1996). Envisioning urban histories: Bristol as palimpsest, postcards, and snapshots. Environment & Planning A, 28, 429–452. Crang, M. (2011). Tourist: Moving places, becoming tourist, becoming ethnographer. In Geographies of mobilities: Practices, spaces, subjects (pp. 205–224). Andover, Hants: Ashgate.

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