Growing up, my father always made a game of travel. He called it “exploring.” Whenever we arrived in a new place he’d always go off—usually on his own—and then suddenly reappear with a big “surprise” smile on his face. I came to appreciate his methods when I began my own solo travels. In my twenties, I did my first transcontinental road trip on a motorcycle—inspired, like so many others back then, by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Reading a map on a bike isn’t an easy thing to do. I had a compass mounted on the gas tank, vowed to stay off interstates, took only secondary roads and rode around lost much of the time.

You notice things when you’re lost, things that might otherwise go unnoticed—big and little details, features of land and cityscape. There is no better way to discover and become situated in an unfamiliar place than to be lost in it for a time. To draw one’s own map, even a crude one, or trace one’s progress on a printed chart is the ultimate way of connecting to and locating oneself in a landscape.

If my motorcycle trip would have been utterly different with GPS or Google Earth, writing A Geography of Secrets would have been impossible without them. The geo-coordinates that start each chapter form a map of the cartographer/narrator’s quest, a subjective triangulation of the world to bring order and coherence to his life. Geotagging, which has evolved with Google Earth into a kind of hobby and game, is an intriguing new form of self expression—photographic projections, by people, of their presence on the globe. It shows how deeply the urge to locate and be located goes. Satellite photography shows us where we are. (I can see my house from here!)

It’s a proposition requiring a certain amount of ill-advised nerve—launching a mystery series using a spectacularly famous person as your protagonist sleuth. Double that if your celebrity is a world-renowned writer. There’s no limit to the amount of scat that could fly your way: fans irked, scholars betrayed, traditions subverted, biographers crossed. That fact hasn’t, of course, prevented it from being something of a trend, what with mystery series under way centering on Oscar Wilde, Edna Ferber, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mark Twain. (One shots include Sigmund Freud, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Lester Dent, Humphrey Bogart and… Elvis Presley!)

The genre seems to have been pioneered by one George Baxt, a gay pulp novelist and screenwriter from the midcentury, whose paperback series of Hollywood whodunits starred, for one novel each, Noel Coward, George Raft, Dorothy Parker, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Alfred Hitchcock. It didn’t catch on then, but who knows, Baxt might be due for rediscovery.

The ground is, as they say, well-trammeled enough. It’s not difficult to fathom the allure of the celebrity-writer-sleuth genre-twist—the heady combustible brew formed by mixing genre violence and structure with the biography and personality of a beloved public artist. Who wouldn’t want in? My choice, which wasn’t a choice at all given the biographical real estate it bought me, was Ernest Hemingway. Search fruitlessly for another writer who has traveled as much, knew as many famous contemporaries, plunged headfirst into as many risk zones and war theaters, pissed as many people off, earned as many devoted friends, took as many women to bed, and still had psychosexual conflicts enough for a cast of Dostoyevsky characters and enough for it to kill him in the end. There’s so much seething stuff there it seemed hard to believe, once I researched it a bit, that no one had employed him as a fictional hero before.