The best mysteries that make characters of cities

As the father of the hard-boiled PI novel, Dashiell Hammett takes the reader through San Francisco, using full advantage of the fog, the streets and intersections, the drug stores and eateries, and the horn on Alcatraz Island to create an indelible sense of the city circa 1930. Many sites still stand, including John’s Grill on Ellis Street, a steakhouse where detective Sam Spade eats a meal near the end of the novel. Several years ago I visited John’s Grill. After I showed my Mystery Writers of America membership card and said how thrilled I was to be there, the server gave a Home of the Maltese Falcon glass to each member of our party.

Street names, the Charles River, bridges, the Back Bay, the Public Gardens, actual hotels and restaurants—Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels make Boston so much a character that Parker wrote Spenser’s Boston. The sixth novel in the series, published in 1980, has Spenser searching for a missing lesbian activist who’s been kidnapped by an anti-gay group. Like Buffalo, Boston sometimes gets a lot of snow. Unlike Buffalo, which is not the snowiest city in New York but is depicted as such, Boston is not known as a snow capital. That Spenser must search during a blizzard is a welcome dose of realism.

With V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky gives the world a hard-boiled woman detective as tough and driven as any male PI. In the series’ second novel (1984), Warshawki’s Chicago is as detailed and engaging as Spenser’s Boston. A feminist of note, Paretsky is unafraid to depict the Windy City’s love of hockey, its politics, its neighborhoods, its quirks, and the particulars of Great Lakes shipping. Like Buffalo, Chicago is a Rust Belt city with character to add to its characters. Paretsky showcases them all deftly and lovingly.

In 2009, after years of writing Easy Rawlins novels set in a past Los Angeles, Walter Mosley began a new series set in contemporary New York. African-American Leonid McGill is a hard PI, with a complex seamy past who aspires to become a better person, despite the pressures of being a husband and family man caught in a near-loveless marriage. The New York in which McGill lives and struggles is the upscale but still gritty descendant of earlier versions of the city in the Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Matthew Scudder novels of Buffalo-born Lawrence Block. It is a land of wealth and culture but danger and deceit.

Unlike the Los Angeles of, say, Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch novels, the city in Kellye Garrett’s 2017 Detective by Day debut is a superficial, brighter place full of influencers, social media excesses, fashion, a home burglary crew, and Hollywood aspirations that, for many, refuse to die. At the center of this delightfully humorous mystery about death from a hit-and-run is an accidental detective, Dayna Anderson, a once successful African-American star of TV commercials. Dayna has fallen on hard times and is scraping by in a city that doesn’t tolerate scraping, at least not without a smirk. But she has the instincts of a natural sleuth and won’t let go until she finds the killer.