A fire severely damaged the historic Brooks House hotel and much of the town's Main Street

Mention Vermont & the mind fills with images of bucolic farms & snow-covered mountains. Crime novelist Archer Mayor, who also works as a death investigator for Vermont's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner & as a detective for the Windham County (Vermont) Sheriff's Office, sees those things & others. His police detective protagonist Joe Gunther is over likely to gaze out at the Connecticut River near Brattleboro & discover a body floating on the surface, as was the case in Mayor's 2007 novel "Chat."
Brattleboro, Joe Gunther's home turf, embraces its position as Vermont's fictional crime middle & the whole state of Vermont embraces Archer Mayor. At 12 Vermont Welcome Centers, including Guilford on I-91 near Brattleboro & Williston North & South on I-89 between Montpelier & Burlington, a brand spanking new lending library program lets visitors pick up a print or audio edition of an Archer Mayor novel to enjoy while they travel & to return when they are done. Lodging packages with an Archer Mayor/mystery fiction theme are available in Brattleboro, Burlington, North Bennington & Waterbury. The Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place in October.
The past year has not been kind to Brattleboro. A fire severely damaged the historic Brooks House hotel & far of the town's Main Street, & rains from Hurricane Irene flooded the downtown area. But Vermont's natural beauty remains unblemished.


We can thank Sweden for the current popularity of crime fiction tours; the country is rife with them. Even the attractive, small fishing village of Fjällbacka in the Bohuslän region of West Sweden, which usually sees its population drop to one,000 individuals in the off-season, now receives a steady of flow of visitors who need to see the locations mentioned in Camilla Läckberg's best-selling Erica Falck novels, beginning with "The Ice Princess."
Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander is resentful about working in Ystad, a little city in the Skåne region of southern Sweden that he considers a backwater. Yet visitors now flock to Ystad from all over the world for the "In the Footsteps of Wallander" self-guided tour. (You can follow the route by map or by app.) The tours feature locations from the books and from both the Swedish and British TV series based on them.