Scandinavian countries have gone from mostly importing crime fiction to being, in the twenty-first century, the genre’s lead exporters. The chapter considers this transnationalization from three perspectives, showing how Scandinavian crime writing adapts international genres to local concerns, how notable examples of the genre engage with the wider world, and how novels and TV series circulate within transnational networks. It argues that Scandinavian crime fiction is bound up with transnational and transmedial networks of influence, appropriation and innovation. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s procedurals reflect popular geopolitics while their proto-typical Scandinavian cop longs for a Swedish welfare utopia. Cross-border crimes in works by Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and Peter Høeg critique global structures of social and racial inequality and challenge the demarcation between the local and the global. More recent global bestsellers by Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø employ hybrid genres to tell stories of a globalizing world where the relationship between the welfare state and global neoliberalism, and between the bounded nation and an increasingly transnational world are key ingredients.

This chapter explores the history of crime writing in Arabic. It first traces the depiction of police and crime investigation in classical sources and then moves to the nineteenth century, when representations of crime and detection became an important part of the expansion of the press during the literary renaissance in the Arab world known as the Nahda. As a next step, the chapter turns to the early twentieth century, exploring the trope of the noble thief who has been unjustly oppressed by a corrupt justice system and police force. The chapter argues that this highly negative image of the police would continue throughout much of the twentieth century in Arabic literature, as seen in Naguib Mahfouz’s seminal 1961 novel, The Thief and the Dogs. The chapter then discusses two little-known works, the first police procedural written in Arabic from 1960s Morocco and a photo-novel from 1970s Lebanon, highlighting important developments in the depiction of crime and policing in Arabic. The chapter ends by tracing the development of the police procedural in North Africa, linking transformations in human rights in the region to the representation of policing in Arabic fiction.

In this chapter we argue that a predominant concern in many contemporary European crime novels is the consolidation of a democratic culture that protects the rights of citizens and upholds the rule of law. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts from across the continent, we analyse this overall ambition via three of its major manifestations: democratization as seen most clearly in post-dictatorial transitional societies, the treatment of immigrants as an indicator of inclusiveness and social equality and the honest discussion of the national past as the foundation for a healthy democratic culture. What these three themes have in common is that they embody our greatest social aspirations while at the same time being vulnerable to horrific criminal aberrations, which is why crime fiction is a particularly apt medium for analysing and understanding them. This duality forms the basis of one of the master narratives of European crime fiction: the story of how the unsettling and often dangerous process of uncovering crime is the precondition for a more perfect democratic society.

Introduced to China and Japan in the late nineteenth century, detective fiction was understood to be a critical modern genre that embodied rationality and science, which were key concepts within the larger context of modernization and westernization. But prior to their encounter with Western detective fiction, China and Japan had enjoyed a long crime fiction tradition, most notably in the form of court case fiction involving famous judges and magistrates. Sharing some characteristics with Western counterparts but deviating from them in many others, the court case fiction tradition played an important role in the reception of Western detective fiction and helped shape the culturally specific inflections of the genre’s development in these countries. By focusing on key works and major trends from as early as the third century to the turn of the twenty-first, this chapter examines the long history of Asian crime fiction and, in so doing, recontextualizes the Asian reception of a Western genre within this long history to challenge the Eurocentric understanding of crime fiction as a literary genre.

The history of crime fiction in Spanish and Portuguese extends back a century and a half to ratiocinative works inspired by Poe and Gaboriau. Yet until recently, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries have scarcely sustained continuous local crime fiction traditions and produced few internationally recognized crime writers. This chapter examines impediments to the consolidation of modern crime fiction in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world and distinguishes phases in the assimilation of foreign genre formats. The chapter addresses local crime fiction variants including the transatlantic neopoliciaco and the sicaresca (hitman novel) and narco-novel. We argue that while semi-specialized genre authors such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Rubem Fonseca have made significant contributions, the most distinctive and transcendent crime fiction consists of non-serial works by canonical authors including José María de Eça de Queirós, Jorge Luis Borges, José Cardoso Pires, Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Bolaño, who have transformed genre conventions to reflect local realities including rampant criminal impunity, authoritarianism and state criminality.

This chapter explores different modes of systemic critique employed by women writers of crime fiction around the world. It begins by introducing “systems-focused crime fiction,” a mode used by women crime writers to combat the endemic challenges posed by gender discrimination in their cultural settings. After examining the differences between this and other feminist approaches, the chapter surveys the inequalities disproportionately affecting women worldwide that are demonstrated by the systems-focus. By way of illustration, the chapter reads two subgroups of crime fiction. The first highlights women impacted by systemic oppression, as exemplified in novels of by Claudia Piñeiro, Marcela Serrano and Angela Makholwa, and the second positions women as investigators and challengers of oppressive systems, as in the works of Unity Dow, Kishwar Desai and Han Kang. The chapter concludes with a case study of femmes fatales in world crime fiction, based on a comparison of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer and Natsuo Kirino’s Out. Overall, the chapter highlights the compelling ways that women crime writers utilize genre conventions to contest systemic inequalities.

Detective or crime fiction has had a long and varied history in South Asia, at times inflected by local concerns, at other times transporting readers into a world of international intrigue. This chapter traces its development from its colonial origins under the aegis of a local boom in print media, ‘intrusive’ colonial law and policing and the influx of European narratives combined with precolonial tropes. The chapter focuses on iconic ‘homegrown’ detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi in the 1930s, the quintessential Bengali gentleman detective engaged in the high pursuit of truth, the debonair detectives Faridi and Imraan created by Indo-Pakistani writer Ibne Safi in the 1950s–1970s, and the heroes of ‘hard-boiled’ Hindi crime fiction in the 1970s–1990s. Crime fiction has also allowed women writers to imagine bold female detectives who challenge and debate gender norms, from Kamala Satthianadhan’s trailblazing Detective Janaki (1934) to Sujatha Massey’s Perveen Mistry. Crime fiction in South Asia has been intensely translational, not just from English but also across South Asian languages. It has pioneered its own distribution channels and spawned adaptations across media platforms.

This chapter explores whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of an African brand of crime fiction. It seeks broad trends in localized examples but, in so doing, it privileges those texts that have resonated beyond national and indeed continental borders. Following a survey of the role played by the Parisian publishing industry in the global dissemination of African crime fiction, the focus turns inwards, examining how authors including Benin’s Florent Couao-Zotti and South Africa’s Margie Orford and Deon Meyer stage the continent’s social realities, typically in the wake of independence. Crucial here is the appropriation of the city. On the other hand, authors including Mali’s Aïda Mady Diallo and Moussa Konaté and Ghana’s Kwei Quartey and Nii Ayikwei Parkes use their work to subvert the literary myths of rural Africa. The chapter argues that Sub-Saharan African crime fiction has an important anthropological function, adapting the genre’s urban DNA in order to map the tensions between the traditions of rural Africa and life in its modern cities.

This chapter analyses the position of crime fiction in the global publishing industry. Drawing on bestseller data from nine countries across all continents, it confirms that crime fiction is prominent in the commercial top segment everywhere, but to varying degrees. The genre is most dominant in countries with strong domestic crime fiction traditions, such as the UK and the USA, and least visible in non-Western markets (e.g. Brazil and India). Data from the UK and the USA show very few bestselling crime novels in translation, unlike other book markets where bestselling translations are more common – primarily translations from English, but to a notable extent also from the Scandinavian languages. Discussion focusses on the power dynamics of global publishing, the increasingly important sector of rights sales and adaptations, author branding and serialization, and the rapid structural changes that are currently taking place in the book trade, including the increased interest in digital formats like streamed audiobooks.

Scholarship underestimates the role publishers have played in making crime fiction a popular genre worldwide. This chapter analyses the origins and development of crime fiction collections like the Italian I libri gialli (The Yellow Books), the French Série Noire (Black Series), the Argentinian Séptimo círculo (Seventh Circle), the German Goldmanns Taschen-Krimis (Goldman’s Pocket Crime Novels) and the British Green Penguins, among others. It argues that crime collections have enabled popular culture to gain a foothold in often hostile and elitist literary environments. It highlights how, by translating foreign crime novels, they have adapted crime tropes into a local context and facilitated the establishment of local traditions, thus facilitating crime fiction’s global reach. It also suggests that crime collections have sometimes performed an act of resistance towards cultural hegemony. Finally, it argues that, by fostering both imitation and innovation, they have helped create a network of mutual influences that has resulted in new forms of crime fiction, turning the genre into transnational and transcultural literature, that is, world literature.

This chapter sketches out some ways translation aids the circulation of crime fiction across cultures and literary systems, with examples from the early twentieth century and from more recent times. The importance of setting and ‘local colour’ is examined as a key factor in the popularity of certain writers and traditions across international borders, as are editorial and publishing decisions relating to such paratextual elements as titles, cover images and blurbs. One historical example comes from Mondadori’s series of gialli, which was enormously successful in Italy from the 1930s on and which included many translated texts. These works went on to influence local writers, resulting in the importation and adaptation of certain subgenres and tropes. A case study of translations into English of the enormously successful Montalbano novels of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri provides the opportunity to investigate the kinds of choices translators and publishers make in preparing a text for a new audience and market. The analysis looks at the translation of dialect and non-standard language, culture-specific political and historical content and the value of translators’ notes.

This chapter engages with the tensions between periphery and centre that are displayed by all forms of world crime fiction but that are especially telling in crime fiction in French. The notion of ‘French crime fiction’ is analysed, including the tensions inherent in Frenchness itself (the Francophone debate) and those between literature and genre fiction. Case studies include the nouveau roman, especially Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which stages the rules of crime fiction while simultaneously mapping them overseas; the nexus formed by Albert Camus’ The Outsider and Kamal Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation; the territorial and literary double spaces of Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam; and questions of decapitation in Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Headless Corpse and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise. Additionally, the relationship between France, the Caribbean and Québec is traced in the genre-bending works of Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Fred Vargas and Anne Hébert. Through these texts, their points of intersection and their generic and geographical movements, crime fiction in French will be shown to exemplify the mobilities of world crime fiction.

Recent studies in environmental psychology have shown how acts of perspective-taking can increase empathy in participants, leading to a ‘green nudge’ effect in relation to climate change. Similar proposals recur in ecocritical approaches to climate change fiction, influenced by long-standing arguments on fiction’s capacity to improve ‘theory of mind’. To further understand, but also to problematise and thus develop, these discussions of perspective-taking, I identify the parallels between these claims and those concerning virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy machine’, as well as those counter-claims regarding VR as an ‘appropriation machine’ that commodifies the experience of others. Jorie Graham’s poetry collection Fast (2017) explores the possibilities and difficulties of generating environmental empathy via material and simulated means, the latter inclusive of both textual and digital forms. In my analysis, I show how Graham generates a deliberately unstable and unreliable perspective-taking process with regard to human and non-human others. Consequently, I argue that her poems contribute a crucial interpretation of perspective-taking as a provisional act that at once reveals our strong human desire to connect with others, as well as our (potentially inevitable) inability to do so.