So long in situ] Writers must stick to their garrets

There was a lot of excitement during the Edinburgh Festival this year about the centenary of Robert Louis Stevenson's death, and maybe there was a lot of excitement, too, in Samoa and all the other places he lived. However, there doesn't seem to have been much celebration in Bournemouth, despite the fact that Stevenson lived in the town for three years (1884-87) and wrote some of his most famous books there. If the bunting was out for Robert Louis Stevenson, and spontaneous Scottish reel parties broke out in the streets of Bournemouth, I failed to notice. If so, I apologise.

The fact is that we English are pretty good at celebrating our own writers and their locale, and turning them into tourist attractions (Come to Hardy's Wessex] Visit James Herriott country] Join a coach tour of Jilly Cooper's Adulterous Home Counties]). But we tend to ignore foreign writers who come and set up house here. French writers, for instance, have come and gone from our shores repeatedly, but you wouldn't know it from the local guides.

Rimbaud, Verlaine, Alain-Fournier and many others spent time in England, but I have never spotted the blue plaques outside their rented accommodation.

Bournemouth was the residence not just of Stevenson, but also of Paul Verlaine, who even wrote a poem called 'Bournemouth'. Anyone in the class ever read it? Hands up. No, I thought not. It was effort wasted as far as the English are concerned.

I have gleaned all this information from a book called Writers on the South-West Coast, a handsome and highly enjoyable literary ramble round the West Country, newly published by Ex Libris Press in Bradford-on-Avon. The authors of the book, Eric Bird and Lilian Modlock, have gone round the coast of Britain from Dorset to Bristol, fiercely searching out any writers who have been that way and standing them up against the wall for questioning.

Hardy, Betjeman, Powys, Kingsley, du Maurier - all these, of course, are high on the list of south-western suspects; but occasionally foreign bodies will swim into Bird and Modlock's net, such as Verlaine and Stevenson. Alas, they do not always get the answers they want.

'It is said that the pine woods reminded Stevenson of Scotland, and the sunny summertime Channel recalled the Mediterranean, but the truth seems to be that local landscapes made little impression on him. While living in Bournemouth he wrote Kidnapped, with his mind on Mull and the Scottish Highlands, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but he was already a sick man and any local travelling went unrecorded, though some scenes from The Wrong Box were set in the New Forest. In 1887, he abandoned Bournemouth for the United States and Samoa. The house called Skerryvore was destroyed in an air raid in 1940 and the site is now a memorial garden . . .'

You can see why Bird and Modlock are a bit miffed. Here was Stevenson, a great writer, actually coming to the South-west and living there for four years and not deigning to write any material for their book. It's just not fair. Nor was Sir Walter Scott much more help. Scott had a friend, a now forgotten MP and writer called William Stuart Rose, who lived in the tiny village of Mudeford, near Christchurch Harbour. Bird and Modlock comment, tight-lipped: 'In 1807 Sir Walter Scott stayed with him while he was writing Marmion, but this poetic work, set in Scotland, makes no reference to Dorset.'

Yet surely this is the way human nature works. People don't write travel books while they are travelling. They write them when they get back home.

They spend months, years, in the outback, and then when they get back they shut themselves up in their little studies and write about Samarkand or Rajasthan, because in their minds they are back in Samarkand or Rajasthan, not closeted in their little studies. Same with exotic novels, like Kidnapped. They are generally written at some remove from the locale, and generally better written. Evelyn Waugh did not write Scoop sitting in Africa, and I would hazard a guess that Graham Greene was not in Havana when he wrote about our man there. (The only book I can instantly think of that was written in situ is Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, which may explain why it is so wretchedly bad a book.) And I rather think that this is the way you should read books as well.

Kidnapped should not be read while on holiday in Scotland. It should be read in Bournemouth or in Samoa.

Tomorrow: What to read where, a completely new approach to an old problem.