Watching the Detectives

Abstract

■ Visiting the settings of popular media products has become a growing niche within the tourist market. This article provides a content-based explanation for the popularity of one specific example: the TV detective tour. Three popular television series from different linguistic regions of Europe were analysed, each of which has led to substantial tourist numbers: Inspector Morse (Oxford) , Wallander (Ystad) and Baantjer (Amsterdam). The results show that the tourist attraction of the TV detective programme is due in part to its topophilic character. First, couleur locale is extremely important to the narrative setting of the detective programmes; the narratives elaborate on existing tourist gazes. Second, the narrative development is characterized by a process of investigation and tracking. By taking the tour, viewers can walk in the detective's footsteps and relive the storylines. Finally, the TV detective genre promises the viewer/tourist an acquaintance with the thrilling, `guilty' landscapes of the TV detective. ■

From Blockbuster to Neighbourhood Buster: The Effect of Films on Barcelona

“…Since the 1990s, research on tourism induced by audio-visual fiction has demonstrated the relationship between the presence of certain places in films and television series and the increase in the number of visitors to them after screening [15][16][17]. Hence, the academic literature has focused on such varied aspects as its role in the construction of the destination image [7,[18][19][20][21][22] and the motivations for the visit [18,[23][24][25][26], the impact of film tourism on local economies [27][28][29][30], the experiences of film tourists [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] and their use from the point of view of marketing the destination [7,15,[42][43][44][45], among others.…”

Productive Fandom

“…As the interviewees implicitly note, couleur locale is an important feature in most detective fiction (Reijnders, 2009). The murder changes an ordinary landscape into an active place of imagination, a story that slowly reveals itself.…”

Untitled

“…In and around Ystad there are Wallander town and regional trails, including 'murder walks' whereby tourists can relive story lines and actually walk in the footsteps of their hero, acting out the scripts and plotlines of particular episodes (Reijnders, 2009;www.ystad.se). Partly as a consequence of the success of the Wallander films a regional centre for film production has been established here (Sjöholm and Jönsson, 2009 …”