Travel tips for mystery buffs

A tour of the world of Stieg Larsson's "Millenium" series ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest") begins at the Stockholm City Museum. The first apartment inhabited by heroine Lisbeth Salander and her regular pub, the Mellqvist Coffee Bar and Kvarnen Restaurant can all be found in the Södermalm borough.

Writer Henning Mankell made the Scandinavian crime novel and the Swedish town of Ystad famous the world over. This is the beat of Inspector Kurt Wallander. He lives in a brick house at Mariagatan 10. His book store is on the main square; his favorite café is Fridolf's pastry shop. A special town map points visitors to all Kurt Wallander's haunts and more.

Denmark's capital is the best-selling author Jussi Adler-Olsen's birthplace and setting for his crime novels. Today, he lives in the country north of town. The brutal crimes portrayed in his novels are purely fictional. They follow lead characters Detective Inspector Carl Morck and his assistant Hafez el-Assad of Department Q as they re-open cold cases.

Among the classic detectives is Jules Maigret, the creation of Belgian author Georges Simenon. His quick wit and smarts cracked a good 75 cases - entirely without the aid of now indispensable state-of-the-art forensics. He had the sandwiches and beer for the interrogation breaks delivered from the Brasserie Dauphine - thought to have been modeled on a café on the Place Dauphine in Paris.

Taking center stage along with Commissario Guido Brunetti in the crime novel series by Donna Leon is the backdrop of Venice's alleyways and canals. Brunetti and his fellow officer Sergente Vianello navigate the city in their police boat - stopping occasionally for an espresso in the Bar Do Mori near the Rialto Bridge. But be forewarned: the Vaporetto lines in the books have other names now.

The rugged coasts of Cornwall are riddled with the settings of famous English novels. The Manderley country estate, fictional scene of the thriller "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier, is modeled on her own residence Menabilly near the town of Fowey. Alfred Hitchcock put the novel on the silver screen and won two Oscars in 1940.

City tours on the trail of Sherlock Holmes can be quite a different experience after dark. The father of all detectives, child of Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination, shared lodgings with Dr. Watson at Baker Street 221b. Today, a museum at the address has collected props from their fictional world, including Holmes' iconic armchair by the fireplace and his pipe and slippers.

Authors Ian Ranking, Alexander McCall Smith and Kate Atkinson send their inspectors chasing villains through the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. Fans of Inspector John Rebus can book special tours to the key locations, including readings from the matching scenes in the novels.

Rarely used as a setting for crime stories before, Jerusalem was the home turf of police detective Michael Ohayon in the novels by Israeli author Batya Gur (1947 - 2005), which found readers the world over. Now, a new inspector is solving mysteries in Tel Aviv: Avi Avraham, the creation of Dror Mishani, who's taken up the flag of Israel's still relatively new crime-story tradition.

A patchwork of lonely plateaus riddled with volcanic craters, the Eifel hill country on Germany's western edge is a backdrop for the nefarious doings of at least 30 crime stories. A 55-kilometer-long Eifel hiking path leads to the scenes of the action and follows in the footsteps - on and off duty - of the investigators. Regional settings for whodunits has a tradition all its own in Germany.

Volker Kutscher's detective novels are set in the late 1920s, before the Nazis came to power. An authentic feel for the times creates a singular atmosphere for the cases Inspector Gereon Rath sets out to solve. A map of Berlin on the author's homepage helps to follow the action set in 1932.