Research on the Pentateuch began in the eighteenth century with the book of Genesis. This has had noticeable consequences for the current literary-historical analysis of both the Pentateuch as a whole and Genesis in particular. It is clear that the question of the sources and redactions in Genesis cannot be answered without the whole Pentateuch in view. However, the exact impact of the earliest questions of Pentateuchal research upon the research approaches of later generations, even in areas in which the directions of inquiry have clearly shifted, is rarely considered.

Genesis reflects a robust example of inter-cultural conversation. This chapter will summarize the major categories of commonality between Genesis and the ancient Near Eastern world in three major categories: (1) creation and humanity; (2) perceptions about the gods; (3) ancestor narratives. A truism of comparative studies is that similarities as well as differences require attention, and examples of both will be discussed.

This chapter examines the problem of the region in world crime fiction – the extent to which a regional approach to crime fiction offers a way of moving between the national and global. It focusses on the Mediterranean and what is called Mediterranean or Southern European noir and examines works by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Andrea Camilleri and, more pointedly, the Mexican writers Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It seeks to tease out the complications produced, first, by attempts to locate what is distinctively Mediterranean in Mediterranean noir, and second, by attendant moves to distinguish between different taxonomies of geographical and political space. Attention is paid to the fusion of cultures central to and produced by an understanding of the Mediterranean as matrix and to the ways this cultural mixing has also been exploited by organized crime networks for profit. However, to fully interrogate the place and problem of the region in world crime fiction, and to tease out its political possibilities, this chapter looks at the complex entanglements between texts, readers, publishers and contexts, and hence new ways of doing critique.

This chapter provides a framework for the companion by defining world crime fiction and outlining the key theoretical issues involved in studying crime fiction as a global genre. The first section explores the global and transnational prehistories of crime fiction; it covers various forms of premodern crime writing and discusses the global dissemination of Western crime fiction from the late nineteenth century, highlighting the role of translation, pseudotranslation and adaptation in the emergence of local crime literatures. The second section focusses on the transnationalism of contemporary world crime fiction, arguing that the global adaptations of the genre are not just a matter of adding local colour, but involve formal hybridization that results in new, local versions of the genre. The final section discusses how crime fiction studies, as a field traditionally tied to Western crime writing, has recently moved towards a global and transnational conception of the genre. The overarching argument of the chapter is that founding world crime fiction as a research area requires a rethinking of the crime genre itself beyond the Anglocentrism of the scholarly tradition.

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.