In the midst of the emulsifying homogeneity of modern retail culture there are still little bastions of shopping independence, like plucky Gallic villages holding out against the Roman Empire. And chief among them, of course, are the dwindling but brave band of second-hand bookshops.

Not only do they delight in themselves, they also keep alive the buried culture of the towns they grace. In Cornwall the ghosts of Daphne Du Maurier and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dwell amid the stacks, in Lancashire I found Elizabeth Gaskells aplenty, biographies of free-trade heroes such as John Bright and a wonderful life of David Lloyd George.

The ability of second-hand bookshops to open a window on to a place's soul isn't restricted to England. In Stockholm last week I stumbled into a couple (my wife is convinced that I could find second-hand bookshops in Amazonia or Antarctica) and was surprised by what they revealed. The largest amount of space devoted to a single author - and it was huge in both shops - wasn't there for Strindberg or some other Scandinavian national hero.

No, the author who seemed to have the greatest purchase on the Swedish soul was Agatha Christie. There were yards of Olde English whodunnitry stretching far further into the recesses of the shop than any collection of bleak Nordic dramaturgy.

Indeed, the deeper I delved, the more Swedish and English literary tastes seemed to intertwine. For both countries the detective novel is the defining national genre. The Swedish authors who succeed abroad, and are devoured most energetically at home, are the crimewriter Henning Mankell and the husband-and-wife detective novelists Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Mankell's Kurt Wallander and Sjowall/Walloo's Martin Beck, like P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, or Miss Marple, Campion, Wimsey or Rebus, are the fictional creations who define a nation.

Other countries have different defining genres. For Spain, it is swashbuckling action romps (from Don Quixote to Arturo Pérez Reverte's Captain Alatriste). For Italy, it is intellectual games-playing disguised as fiction (Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), for France it is essays in deep cultural pessimism laced with a huge amount of bonking (The Sexual Life of Catherine M, anything by Michel Houellebecq).

The more one goes on, the more marked the tendency appears. Egyptians like busy, criss-crossed, urban narratives (Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany), Hungarians like aristocratic nostalgia (Sandor Marai, Miklos Banffy) and Latin Americans, of course, enjoy novels about dictators in which fantasy provides an escape from oppression (all of them up to and including Junot Díaz).

Almost all of these preferences can be explained by history - but one mystery still remains - what is it about we people of Viking blood that inclines us to enjoy reading about murder?

One side of the page

One country that defies my attempts to give it a defining national genre is, inevitably, America. Its literary output is so rich, so plural, so prodigious that there is no way that even a determined pigeon-holer like me can shrinkwrap it into one package.

Over the next two months a number of American writers, from Paul Auster to Toni Morrison, will be appearing at the Southbank Centre, before the presidential election, to give us a range of perspectives on the world's most important nation. But there is one problem. Not a single one of the names booked has a good word to say about either the present American President, or the present favourite to succeed him. All have been chosen to reflect, and amplify, the standard British view of America - a view that casually conflates supporting the present Administration's War on Terror with criminally dangerous moral imbecility.

Why, when writers such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan can see the fight against totalitarianism in a properly sophisticated way, does the Arts Council and lottery-funded South Bank present only one side of the argument?

Polls apart

If the polls are correct, John McCain is on course to win the popular vote in the US. But in the states that matter Barack Obama still has the edge. Which means that the Democrats could gain fewer votes overall, but win the Electoral College. Just like George W. Bush in 2000. If that does happen, then Barack Obama will be the legitimate President.

But I bet you a hanging chad to a private jet that if that does happen Michael Moore and Al Gore won't be complaining about a stolen election...

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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