There are crime dramas I remember because of the murder, others because of the detective, and then there are the ones where, years later, the first thing I remember is where I was. Not literally, of course, but that is what a great crime drama can do.
It can make Reykjavík feel bitterly cold from a sofa in London. It can make the narrow streets of Genoa feel familiar even if you have never walked through them. It can leave you with the grey skies of Szczecin, the cliffs of Broadchurch or a Scandinavian forest long after you have forgotten exactly who killed whom. For me, that is when location stops being background and becomes part of the story.
And it is probably the main reason Mapped in Drama exists.
A Crime Story Has to Happen Somewhere
Every crime drama has a location. That sounds obvious, but there is a huge difference between a story that happens in a place and a story that actually belongs there.
You can place two detectives in front of a beautiful building, give us a drone shot of the city and tell us where we are. That is location. But place is something more complicated.
Place is the way people speak, how far they have to travel to reach the next town, whether everyone knows everyone else’s family, whether darkness arrives at three in the afternoon, whether the sea is an escape route or a barrier, whether wealth sits on one side of town and poverty on the other, and whether a community still remembers what happened thirty years ago.
The best crime dramas understand this difference. They do not simply use a location. They allow it to affect what happens.
Could This Story Happen Somewhere Else?
This has become one of my favourite questions when watching television: could this exact story happen somewhere else?
If the answer is yes, then perhaps the location is simply doing decorative work. If the answer is no, things become much more interesting.
Take Trapped. Move that story away from Iceland, take away the snowstorm, the isolation and the impossibility of easily leaving town, and you fundamentally change the drama. The weather and geography are not sitting politely behind the actors. They are interfering.
They restrict movement, create pressure and trap people together. The title suddenly means more than one thing.
That is what place can do.
Geography Creates Possibilities — and Removes Them
Crime stories are full of movement. Someone disappears. Someone runs. Someone needs to reach another person before it is too late. Someone has to hide something. Someone has to dispose of something.
Geography determines what is possible.
In a city, someone can disappear into thousands of people. In a village, everybody notices the unfamiliar car parked outside the house. On an island, there may be only one ferry. In the mountains, weather may close the road. In dense forest, metres can separate visibility from complete isolation.
A border can offer escape. A river can divide communities. A coastline can connect one country to another.
Suddenly the map itself begins influencing the investigation, and that fascinates me.
Cities Create Their Own Kind of Crime Drama
I love small towns in crime drama, but cities have their own extraordinary possibilities.
Think about Genoa. The narrow caruggi immediately create a particular relationship between character and city. There are corners, stairways, shadows, buildings packed tightly together and streets that seem capable of swallowing someone whole.
Then there is Paris. A crime drama can move between postcard Paris and parts of the city tourists rarely think about, sometimes within minutes. London gives writers something else again: anonymity, class, neighbourhood identity, wealth sitting remarkably close to deprivation, and millions of people constantly crossing paths without ever knowing one another.
A city gives crime drama layers. The interesting productions do not simply show us the landmark that proves where we are. They take us around the back.
That is usually where I want to go.
Small Towns Have Nowhere to Hide
Then there are small towns, and perhaps this is why they work so brilliantly for crime fiction.
Everyone knows everyone, or at least everyone thinks they do. The detective knows the victim’s mother. The person being questioned went to school with the police officer. Families have histories. Arguments began years before the first episode.
People remember things. More dangerously, communities decide which things should not be remembered.
In a big city, a secret can disappear into the crowd. In a small town, it sits at the next table in the café.
That creates an entirely different kind of tension. The geography may be open — mountains, fields, forests, coastlines — yet socially the place can feel incredibly claustrophobic.
That contradiction is irresistible.
Beautiful Places Can Hold Terrible Stories
One of the things I love most about European crime drama is its willingness to place terrible events somewhere breathtakingly beautiful.
It creates an uncomfortable tension. We see a coastline and want to visit, then someone finds a body. We see a perfect village where stone houses sit beneath mountains, then discover that everybody has been lying for twenty years.
The landscape does not care. The sea remains beautiful. The forest keeps growing. The snow falls over everything.
Perhaps that indifference makes the crime feel even darker. Beauty does not protect anyone. Sometimes it simply makes the darkness more visible.
Weather Belongs to Place Too
Weather deserves its own discussion because in the best crime drama it becomes almost physical.
Snow slows everything down, rain obscures things, heat makes people restless, and wind can make an exposed coastline feel hostile. Long Scandinavian winters create a completely different visual and emotional world from the bright Mediterranean sun.
And I love when a series refuses to make sunshine automatically mean happiness. Spain and Italy can produce darkness perfectly well without a single snowflake. A murder committed under brilliant blue skies does not become less disturbing. Sometimes the contrast makes it worse.
This is one of the reasons moving between European crime dramas is so satisfying. The genre stays familiar while the climate changes everything around it.
Architecture Tells Stories Before Characters Speak
Buildings matter too. A police station tells us something about bureaucracy and resources. An enormous country house tells us something about money. A cramped apartment tells us something else.
Post-war concrete, medieval streets, modern glass towers and abandoned industrial buildings all carry history. European cities are particularly good at allowing different centuries to occupy the same frame.
A detective can walk from a medieval street into a modern office in a matter of minutes. The past is physically present, and crime drama loves the past: old crimes, old families, old political wounds and old buildings containing people desperately trying to live modern lives.
Strike is a perfect example of how strongly a building can register without anyone needing to explain it. Every time Strike closes the door to his office, I feel as though I know exactly how that room smells. Old English wooden floors that refuse to stop creaking, damp coats, tired furniture, and the faint suggestion that whisky or beer has been spilled into every corner at some point over the years. You can almost hear the building settling around him. It is not polished, it is not fashionable, and it absolutely should not be replaced by some sleek glass office. The room feels worn in exactly the same way Strike does, and that makes it part of his character rather than simply the place where he works.
Place Gives Us Social Context
This may be even more important than scenery.
Crime drama is often really about society. The murder is the door we walk through. Behind it we find class, politics, immigration, corruption, family structures, religion, gender, poverty, wealth and power.
Those things cannot be separated completely from location.
The same crime means something different in different communities. The relationship between police and citizens changes. Attitudes towards authority change. Family expectations change. What counts as scandal changes. What people are prepared to say publicly changes.
That is why international crime drama becomes so much more interesting when it is allowed to remain culturally specific.
I do not want every police department in Europe to behave as though it is in the same country. Difference is the point.
Sometimes Scenery Should Stay in the Background
There is one important exception. Not every story needs its landscape fighting for attention.
I felt this particularly strongly with The Missing. Its locations are beautiful, but the stories are so emotionally powerful that the scenery simply does not need to become another character.
And that is perfectly fine.
Sometimes place does its job quietly. It holds the characters, gives the story credibility, then moves out of the way. That is still good location work.
The problem is not when scenery stays in the background. The problem is when a production expects scenery to compensate for a story that is not strong enough. A beautiful forest cannot fix weak writing, and a drone shot cannot create emotional depth.
The location should serve the story, not rescue it.
Then There Is Criminal
And occasionally a programme proves the importance of place by almost completely removing it.
Criminal is the perfect example. The same interrogation environment is used across different countries, deliberately stripping away the usual visual signals.
There is no city wandering, no landscape and no architecture competing for attention. What remains is people, language, behaviour and cultural difference.
The setting becomes controlled, almost neutral, which makes everything else more noticeable. It is a wonderful reminder that place matters even when filmmakers deliberately choose not to show it.
Sometimes absence tells us as much as presence.
A Location Can Make Me Want to Know More
This is where television often sends me somewhere completely unexpected.
I watch a series, then I search for the town. Then I look at the map. Then I want to know why the buildings look that way. Then I discover something about the region’s history. Then I start reading about the food.
And suddenly the crime drama has become a doorway into a place I knew almost nothing about two hours earlier.
That, for me, is one of television’s greatest pleasures. You do not necessarily have to visit every location. Curiosity is enough.
A series can expand your mental map of Europe from your own living room.
Location Tourism Is Not the Same as Place
There is a danger, though.
When audiences become interested in filming locations, productions can start presenting places almost like tourism adverts: beautiful harbour, perfect square, famous monument, sunset, another postcard.
But that is not what interests me most.
I want the laundrette. The ordinary café. The apartment block. The bus stop. The neglected street behind the landmark. The building where people actually work. The neighbourhood that does not appear on the tourist brochure.
Those are the places where characters begin to feel as though they genuinely live somewhere rather than simply passing through a film set.
Perfect places are attractive. Lived-in places are interesting.
Place and Character Are Connected
Characters are shaped by where they come from, and sometimes you can feel that connection immediately.
The Sommerdahl Murders is a perfect example. Dan Sommerdahl never feels like a detective who has simply been assigned to Helsingør. He feels as though he has always lived there. He knows the streets, the rhythms of the town and, more importantly, he seems to know everyone in it. There is always a sense that the person he is questioning may also be someone he has known for years, someone he has passed in a café, gone to school with, worked alongside or simply seen around town a hundred times before.
That familiarity changes the investigation. He is not looking at the community from the outside; he is part of it. The town feels like home rather than territory, and that makes every crime slightly more personal.
This is what small-town and local crime drama can do so well. A detective who has spent their entire life in one place knows things an outsider cannot, while an outsider may notice things the locals have stopped seeing.
Who belongs? Who came back? Who never left? Who desperately wants to leave? Who arrived yesterday?
Those questions are geographical, but they are also emotional. Sometimes a character’s entire identity can be understood through their relationship with the place they call home.
The Best Locations Leave a Memory
Eventually the case ends. The murderer is identified. The missing person is found — or isn’t. The detective moves on. Another programme begins.
But some places remain.
I still remember the snow, the harbour, the forest, the narrow Italian streets, the empty roads, the grey apartment blocks and the café where everyone seemed to know everyone else.
That is when I know a location has done something more than look good.
It has entered the memory of the story.
This Is Why Place Matters
Crime drama does not exist in a vacuum. Someone has to live somewhere. Someone has to disappear somewhere. Someone has to hide. Someone has to search.
And where all of that happens changes everything.
Geography creates obstacles. Architecture carries history. Weather creates mood. Cities offer anonymity. Villages create intimacy. Borders divide. Roads connect. Landscapes isolate.
And sometimes the most innocent-looking place imaginable contains the darkest story.
That is why, when I begin a new crime drama, I am never interested only in who did it.
I want to know where we are.
Because sometimes the map already knows part of the answer.