Reading Crime Novels

I had a chat today with a chap who was buying one of Tony Hillerman's novels about the Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he told me that there had been films made of some of the stories. IMDb website confirms this, listing four made for TV movies. The first was The Dark Wind in 1991, followed by Skinwalkers in 2002, Coyote Waits in 2003 and A Thief of Time in 2004. They look quite interesting - but not interesting enough to send off to the States for, so I think I'll continue to rely on my imagination for the settings, fed by old copies of National Geographic.
It was the setting that attracted me to the series. I'm never particularly bothered by who did the murder - what I'm interested in is life on the Navajo reservation and around the Four Quarters. And I now know that the film Cheyenne Autumn doesn't actually have any Cheyenne in it at all, thanks to a hilarious scene in one of the books where the film is screened at a local drive in movie.
It was the same with the Mma Ramotswe stories by Alexander McCall Smith, too - I wanted to know what it was like to live in Botswana. What particularly impressed me in the first book, the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, was a comment by one of the characters that nobody wrote books about people like him - and the next chapter was entirely about him and his life.
That's why I read the Faye Kellerman novels about Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, too - it's the details about Orthodox Jewish life in modern Los Angeles - and of course, that's the attraction of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small series (titled with the days of the week). My memories of the murders are hazy, but the synagogue politics of the 1960s small American town remain vivid, as does Rabbi Small's impressions of Israel when he takes a sabbatical there.
Perhaps the most exotic location for a crime novel that I've read is Tibet. I came across Water Touching Stone, by Eliot Pattison, the second in a series featuring a Chinese detective in Tibet. This was more than just an interesting setting - it was an entirely different world. Occasionally there are trucks and Communist officials and cheap plastic shoes, but surrounded by villagers who believe in demons, remote lamaseries, a reincarnated lama, smugglers and an exiled White Russian with his favourite camel (surely a role for John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli and Indiana Jones' sidekick Sallah, if anyone ever attempted to film it). I've recently found a copy of the first book in the series, The Skull Mantra, so I'll be revisiting that strange and wonderful world soon.