For a memorable vacation, follow a detective novel instead of your guidebook

“In late spring, when it was very late we’d walk back across the old town, which was completely deserted by now and dense with strong smells, dirty, disturbing and beautiful." Guerrieri reminisces in 2003’s “A Walk in the Dark."

Though some of the quarter has now been sanitized for Airbnbs, I caught glimpses of Guerrieri’s Bari: the sound and smell of sausages sizzling in a pan, the interplay of streetlights and shadows down narrow alleys.

Guidebooks send you to museums, hotels and restaurants with menus in English, but detective novels get at the heart of a city, allowing you to feel its pulse, to understand where its people come from and how they spend their time. Much of a place can be revealed by its underbelly. 

When I travel, fictional detectives are my dining companions, tour guides and interpreters of the “criminal geography," as Carofiglio calls it, all over the world.

In Bari, the unseasonable spring weather—torrential rain punctuated by lashing winds—suited the emotional climate of Marshall Pietro Fenoglio, the detective protagonist in Carofiglio’s 2016 novel “The Cold Summer": foreboding with a good chance of the unexpected. Inspired by Fenoglio’s knack for finding what lies beyond the surface, I went in search of a glass of wine.

Before becoming an author, Carofiglio worked for years as a public prosecutor taking aim at the mafia in Puglia. I knew, from his instruction, that I needed to enlist informants.

I headed to La Staffa Enoteca, a wine bar, and perused its bottles. I mentioned a few autochthonous grapes from the region to the proprietor and, just like that, I had landed my own cooperator. “The best natural winemaker in Puglia will be here in an hour," he said. 

When Vittorio Pugliese, of Loco winery, arrived, he had a hatchback full of his wine. He opened a bottle and as rain fell, we spoke in hushed tones of its complexity and then of the city. Fenoglio had taught me well.

Read Rio de Janeiro

The detective Inspector Espinosa can lead you to street snacks and untouristed beaches

In Rio’s Copacabana, you must stroll along Avenida Atlântica, marvel at the view of Sugarloaf Mountain and see Christ the Redeemer overlooking the city. Then venture off the tourist trail.

Enter Inspector Espinosa, star of a series of novels by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. Espinosa lives in the Peixoto district: “a survivor of the old Copacabana, before the area had been transformed into a compact mass of buildings squeezed between the ocean and the mountains," Espinosa tells us in “December Heat."

Espinosa’s most crucial allies in the area aren’t the corrupt cops he works with or the rich Rio citizens who try to impede his investigations, but the street preachers and homeless children who call Copacabana their home. In books like “Pursuit," Espinosa walks the streets not only when he is tailing a suspect, but also in an attempt to solve the most fundamental mystery: What is Rio?

In detective novels, cities are evolving, multifaceted entities as compelling as any human character. Espinosa’s stroll through the marbled corridors of the Galeria Menescal shopping arcade, for example, can serve as a guide to the glory of a more human-scale Rio, now dwarfed by towering condos and high rise hotels. 

A kibe he enjoys at the Baalbeck food stall shows how this Middle Eastern snack of lamb enveloped in bulgur has, like waves of Lebanese immigrants, become thoroughly Brazilian.

When the beach beckons, try doing it as Espinosa does at Leme Beach, with a stop along the way at Cervantes, his favorite sandwich shop, open until 5 a.m. Follow Espinosa to the shore early and you might spot, as I did, white-clad Afro-Brazilian worshipers approaching the waves as the sun rises.

Find the Lost Dublin

Dublin wasn’t always a shiny tech haven—the right book can be a guide to that past

Forensic pathologist Quirke, a recovering heavy drinker, might not seem like the ideal companion to venture into the barrooms of Dublin. But in the 1950s city of Benjamin Black’s novels, pubs are where his sober eyes see all. (Black is the pen name of literary superstar John Banville.)

Today, the city has been gussied up by tech money, but you’ll find whispers of Quirke’s Dublin in the lobby bar of Wynn’s Hotel, a favored haunt of rural parish priests and farmers visiting the city in Black’s books.

Though the weather, the politics and the morals of Dublin seem much sunnier than in Quirke’s day, his penetrating gaze can help you locate other remnants of that time.

Walk Grafton Street, steering past the chain stores, and follow Quirke to the “rich, fat smell of coffee beans roasting at Bewley’s," once called Bewley’s Oriental Cafe. In Black’s books, Quirke comes here with his daughter, with friends and with a grieving spouse. The cafe, though refurbished, is decorated with colorful stained glass windows from 1927 and offers the very same “coffee, and fried sausages, and sugary pastry" Quirke enjoyed.

Despite Quirke’s (mostly) sober nature, his Dublin is conspicuously defined by its pubs, like Ryan’s of Parkgate Street and Doheny & Nesbitt. While other spots have closed, you can still be inspired by his longing for discovery in the confines of a dimly lit pub. 

Contemplating entering a bar in “The Lock Up," for instance, Quirke “was like a prospector panning for gold, searching for the never-to-be-found nugget the size of his fist that would release him for good from his labors and send him home a rich man."

See L.A. Confidentially

Steph Cha’s novels explore a city as familiar to Raymond Chandler as a modern denizen

Juniper Song fancies herself a modern-day Philip Marlowe, navigating Los Angeles guided more by Raymond Chandler’s masterworks than by Google Maps. Song, the creation of author Steph Cha, is a 20-something Korean-American who uses her private-eye skills to help friends in need.

As much as she romanticizes Marlowe’s metropolis, Song’s L.A. is modern, multicultural and not exclusively masculine. In her city, the neon lights of Koreatown shine more brightly than Hollywood. In Cha’s debut, “Follow Her Home," Song observes this transformation while passing by the Wiltern, a landmark theater “with an ancient marquee, a place that had seen Koreatown sprout up and around it, leaving no lot unturned."

To find the disparate worlds of L.A., Song might send you to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Ave. “I couldn’t say what slice of Los Angeles made up the clientele," Song says on one visit. “But it was generously cut, with patrons ranging in age, respectability, wealth, and sobriety."

Having a fictional detective as a travel companion means seeking out their haunts. But by inhabiting the preoccupations and obsessions of these characters, you’ll also make your own discoveries.

You’ll find Song’s polyglot present and idealized noirish past intersecting at the Prince, a Koreatown bar bathed in red light and decorated with plush cushioning, used as a shooting location for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown." The decor evokes Marlowe’s L.A., but the menu, ranging from boilermaker combos to spicy sea snails, is thoroughly Californian-Korean. It’s as if Song built the bar of her dreams, where Tinseltown and Koreatown converge.

The Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.