February 6, 2026
There’s a moment every research traveler knows — the one where you’re standing in a place you’ve only read about, and the gap between archive and reality suddenly collapses. The street is narrower than you imagined. The light falls differently. A detail you never would have invented presents itself like a gift.
Mystery author Fiona Veitch Smith knows this moment well. In a recent piece for Historia Magazine, she describes travelling to Berlin in 2024 armed with a first-edition 1929 Baedeker guidebook — the same resource her fictional character, Miss Clara Vale, would have used in September 1930. The result is a fascinating layered journey: a writer walking through the modern city while simultaneously navigating the one that existed nearly a century ago.
What strikes me most about Fiona’s approach is her choice of primary source. She didn’t just read about Weimar Berlin. She traveled with Weimar Berlin, using Karl Baedeker’s meticulously detailed 1929 guide as her literal map. The guidebook directed her to catch a ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam (in Clara’s day, it was a steamship run by the United Steamship Company). It told her to register at the Alexanderplatz Police Station within 24 hours of arrival — a requirement long since dropped, but one that handed her a perfect plot device.
This is what research travel does that desk research simply cannot: it puts you in conversation with a place across time.
Fiona’s Berlin research led her to Hausvogteiplatz, once the beating heart of Berlin’s Jewish-led fashion industry. In 1930, the square housed over 2,000 thriving businesses. Within a few years, the Nazis had systematically dismantled them in their campaign to “Aryanize” the industry. Today, a memorial outside the U-Bahn station entrance lists the names of people who worked there before the purge — and those who died.
She also found the Eldorado Club, the legendary nightclub featured in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and the musical Cabaret. Shut down and seized by Nazi Stormtroopers in 1933, the building still stands. It’s now an organic food market in Berlin’s queer quarter. As Fiona writes, she’s glad some things can never be destroyed.
These aren’t the kinds of discoveries you make from a search engine. They come from being physically present — from turning a corner and confronting a memorial you weren’t expecting, or finding that a place synonymous with persecution has been quietly reclaimed.
Fiona’s piece is a masterclass in what I think of as traveling with intention. She went to Berlin with a specific research question (what would Clara see and experience in 1930?), a primary source to guide her (the Baedeker), and the willingness to let the city surprise her with what no book could have predicted.
This is the kind of travel Early & Away exists to help you plan. Whether you’re writing a novel set in a particular era, tracing your family’s migration story, or investigating a historical question that matters to you, the methodology is the same: identify your sources before you go, build an itinerary around specific locations and questions, and leave room for the unexpected.
The sensory details — what a place smells like, how sound carries in a particular square, the way afternoon light falls on a building that’s survived a century — these are the things that make writing feel alive. And they’re the things you simply cannot get from a screen.
Fiona’s article was published in Historia Magazine, the publication of the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA). If you’re a writer working in historical fiction or nonfiction, the HWA is a community worth exploring — their membership includes authors, publishers, and agents across the genre. And Historia itself is a treasure trove of features on research methods, writing craft, and the kind of deep-dive historical storytelling that fuels great research travel. Fiona alone has contributed pieces on using vintage fashion and period guidebooks and maps as research tools — both well worth a read.
If Fiona’s journey inspires you, ask yourself: what’s the place you’ve been reading about that you need to stand in? What’s the guidebook, the map, the census record that could serve as your travel companion across time?
That’s where the real story begins.
Fiona Veitch Smith’s The Berlin Murders was published in January 2026. It’s the fifth in her Clara Vale mystery series. Read her full piece on Historia Magazine.
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