Route 66 was 20 years old and World War II had just ended when Bobby Troup, an aspiring songwriter from Pennsylvania, decided to go west. As it turned out, that drive in early 1946 did more than anyone could have imagined to establish the road as a symbol of footloose American freedom.

Stories, photos and travel recommendations from America’s Mother Road

Troup, 25 at the time, had already earned an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, written a hit song (1941’s “Daddy,” sung by Sammy Kaye), worked for bandleader Tommy Dorsey and served as a Marine through the war years. But to restart his career as a songwriter and actor, he believed that he needed to be in Los Angeles. So he and his wife, Cynthia, pointed their 1941 Buick toward California.

They started on U.S. 40, then picked up Route 66 in Illinois. Along the way, as Troup told author Michael Wallis in the book “Route 66: The Mother Road,” Cynthia came up with a phrase she thought was songworthy.

Bobby Troup, composer of the hit song “Route 66” and grand marshal of Duarte, Calif.’s Salute to Route 66 parade, rides in a 1948 Buick convertible and waves to fans in 1996.

(Louisa Gauerke / Associated Press)

“Get your kicks on Route 66,” she said.

Troup took it from there, creating “a kind of musical map of the highway.”

As Troup later recalled in an introduction to a Route 66 book by Tom Snyder, they heard Louis Armstrong play a club in St. Louis, stopped at Meramec Caverns in Missouri and found that “a good part of the highway was absolutely miserable — narrow, just two lanes, and very twisting through the Ozarks and Kansas.” Then came a snowstorm in Texas.

By the end of the drive, the up-tempo tune was half-done. Then, not quite a week after arrival, Troup landed a chance to pitch a few songs to Nat “King” Cole, who had already won fame with hits including “Sweet Lorraine” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”

They were sitting by a piano on stage — after Cole’s last set of the night at the Trocadero on Sunset Strip — when the nervous young songwriter decided to share his unfinished road song.

“I got up on the riser, pulled the piano bench back a little bit — and it went over the side and I fell over backwards,” Troup confessed in a later interview.

Still, Cole “loved it,” Troup recalled. “As a matter of fact, he got on the piano with me and played it.”

This was February. By mid-March, the song was done and Cole was recording it in a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, part of Route 66.

The finished version name-checked a dozen cities along the route, including these words:

Now you go through Saint Looey

Joplin, Missouri,

And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.

You see Amarillo,

Gallup, New Mexico,

Flagstaff, Arizona.

Don’t forget Winona,

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66.

In April, Capitol Records released “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and the tune quickly rose to #11 on the Billboard chart of top-selling singles. Before 1946 was out, it had been recorded again, this time by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. That version went to #14.

Musicians Nat “King” Cole, left, and Bing Crosby, circa 1945.

(NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

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Coming just as postwar America was rediscovering leisure travel, the song was a big hit — and for many, a painful irony. Even with guidance from the Green Book used by many African American travelers in those days, it would have been deeply risky — and illegal in some places — for any Black man, Nat King Cole included, to eat and sleep on Route 66. This was a year before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball’s major leagues, two years before the U.S. Army was integrated.

As Candacy Taylor puts it in her 2020 book “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America,” “the open road wasn’t open to all.” Into the 1950s, Taylor writes, “about 35% of the counties on Route 66 didn’t allow Black motorists after 6 p.m.” and six of the eight states on the route still had segregation laws. Cole may have helped sell Route 66, Taylor writes, but “the carefree adventure he was promoting was not meant for him.”

Documentary photographer Candacy Taylor at the New Aster Motel in Los Angeles in 2016. In her book “Overground Railroad,” she writes about the discrimination Black travelers faced while driving on Route 66.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Two years after recording the song, when the increasingly wealthy Cole and his family bought a Hancock Park mansion and became the neighborhood’s first Black homeowners, many neighbors tried to keep him out, poisoned the family dog and burned racist insults into his lawn.

The Coles stayed put. The family was still in that home on South Muirfield Road in 1956, when Cole became the first African American to host a network television show, and in 1965, when Cole died of cancer at 45.

Troup, who later was divorced from Cynthia and married singer/actor Julie London, went on to record more than a dozen albums and had other songs recorded by Little Richard and Miles Davis. As an actor, Troup filled many guest-star roles on television, played Dr. Joe Early on the 1970s TV show “Emergency!” and had a small part in Robert Altman’s 1970 film “MASH.”

Meanwhile, the song kept rolling. As years passed, Perry Como, Sammy Davis Jr., Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, the Manhattan Transfer, Michael Martin Murphey, Asleep at the Wheel, Buckwheat Zydeco, Depeche Mode, Glenn Frey, the Brian Setzer Orchestra and John Mayer recorded versions. At different points in the 2006 movie “Cars,” you hear Berry’s and Mayer’s versions. Troup, who died in 1999, never forgot the difference the song made, both in his life and the way people think about the road.

“On the basis of that song, I was able to go out and buy a house and stay in California,” Troup told Wallis. “I never realized when I was putting it together that I was writing about the most famous highway in the world. I just thought I was writing about a road — not a legend.”

The Rolling Stones are among the countless musicians who have recorded versions of “Route 66.”

(David Redfern / Redferns via Getty Images)

I’ve always loved mystery novels that take me inside different cultures. While lots of English language crime writers are good at evoking other lands — think of Philip Kerr’s Nazi Berlin or Cara Black’s Paris — the richest portraits come to us in translations of books by homegrown writers. These have the revelatory tang you get when novelists know their culture from the inside.

As it happens, two terrific novels of this kind have just come out from Bitter Lemon Press, a small London publisher that specializes in translated mysteries. These new books could hardly be less alike, except for one thing: Each is, in its unconventional way, quite brilliant.

The End of the Sahara is a kaleidoscopic murder mystery by the Algerian writer Saïd Khatibi, a rising star who just won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Superbly translated by Alexander E. Elinson, the book’s set in a provincial city on the edge of the Sahara in 1988 Algeria, a troubled time when the ruling socialist government has clearly failed. But you don’t need to know Algerian history to get sucked in by the plot, which centers on the murder of Zakia Zaghouani, a nightclub singer at a local hotel called The Sahara.

Burning with urgency, the story is told by a big cast of characters who all speak to us in first person. There’s Ibrahim, a college grad who’s been reduced to dealing in illegal videos. There’s the hotel owner, Maimoun, a shifty wheeler-dealer who fancied Zakia. There’s Zakia’s fiancee, Bachir, a decent guy found with blood on his shirt. He’s the top suspect of Inspector Hamid, a corrupt, womanizing cop who also fancied Zakia. Bachir’s represented by his cousin Noura, a good-hearted lawyer who’s constantly derided for reaching the age of 30 without a husband.

As we move from suspect to suspect, Khatibi not only makes us feel the textures of these characters’ everyday lives — the looks and smells, the food shortages and emerging Islamist militancy — but he deftly unveils how they are all are trapped together in a spiderweb of lies and betrayal that began in the past.

Using 1988 Algeria as a mirror for present-day Algeria, Khatibi gives us an X-ray of an entire social structure. Even as we learn who killed Zakia, we realize that no one escapes the bone-deep misogyny that underlies her murder and the repressive, post-colonial politics that leave Algerians spinning in circles. As one character thinks bitterly, “It was as if this country’s history just repeats itself rather than moving forward…”

Not surprisingly, life is far cushier along the prosperous Tuscan coast. That’s the setting for An Enigma by the Sea, a new edition of the 1991 novel by the legendary Italian team of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. Witty, erudite and socially astute, they play with the mystery genre as they explore the many sides of Italianness.

The place is the Gualdana, a pine-protected seaside enclave where the well-off have holiday villas. “A certain air of secrecy hangs over it,” the opening tells us enticingly.

The time is winter, when only a few residents are around. They’re an assortment of Italian types that includes a rich, disaffected Roman couple; a philandering count who’s arrived with his latest conquest, a fame-hungry model; an old woman addicted to reading Tarot cards; and a smug politician stewing in paranoia. You get a whiff of Upstairs, Downstairs in the relation between these moneyed folks and the locals who service their many needs — the security guards, the wry police commander and the village handyman, who is also, everyone knows, the village cuckold.

Deliciously translated by Gregory Dowling, An Enigma by the Sea starts off like a gently acerbic comedy of manners, as these self-absorbed characters go about killing time — chatting, flirting, bickering, having tea. Then suddenly the story shifts. Three residents inexplicably disappear. Could they have been murdered? Here? The question unleashes the sleuthing instincts of their neighbor, Signor Monforti, a pessimistic depressive who’s a born detective: He spends his life scrutinizing every single thing for clues to impending disaster.

Masters of the light fantastic, Fruttero and Lucentini roll out their mystery with the slyest of touches, weaving discussions of the Greek cynics and the nature of depression into their droll evocation of a gray, chilly off-season resort with its wind storms and dire pizzerias. If Khatibi shows us characters caught in the tragic flames of history, Fruttero and Lucentini look at human folly with a cool, almost ancient amusement at what strange, funny creatures we all are.