Crime Fiction

as World Literature
Stewart King

Abstract. This article explores crime fiction within a world-literature framework. It argues that
the study of national traditions can blind us to the dialogue across borders and languages between
texts and authors. It proposes a reading practice that aims to develop a more nuanced under-
standing of this truly global genre.

From its origins in the nineteenth century until the present day, the crime story has
crossed borders and languages, and everywhere it has settled local writers have appropriated
and rewritten it to address their own specific concerns. However, despite the international
spread of crime fiction and the success of crime writers from all over the world such as
Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, and (more recently) Henning Man-
kell, Natsuo Kirino, Qiu Xiaoling, Fred Vargas, and James Lee Burke, there has been little
attempt to understand the genre in its global context. This article seeks to explore the inter-
national dimensions of crime fiction by framing the genre within a world-literature frame-
work. In doing so, it seeks answers to the following questions: why study crime fiction as
world literature? What is the relationship between nationally focused studies of crime fiction
and a world-literature approach? And what form or forms might a practice of world crime
fiction take?
The examples discussed here come mostly from the practice of Anglophone crime
fiction criticism.1 Writing in 1999, John G. Cawelti observed that mystery criticism lags
behind in “the regionalization and the internationalization of the detective story” (“Detect-
ing” 54) and, in a later publication, he lamented that “English and American critics are
largely unaware of the work done by the French and Germans” (Mystery 311). Cawelti’s crit-
icism is borne out in the numerous introductory studies to crime fiction that prioritize the
Anglo-American canon and either ignore or treat non–Anglophone texts superficially. One
such example is the Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction in which Martin Priestman,

Stewart King teaches Spanish and Latin American studies and coordinates the International Literatures
program at Monash University, Australia. He has published extensively on contemporary Catalan and
Spanish narrative, particularly crime fiction, and he is currently completing a monograph on cultural
identity and crime fiction from Spain.

CLUES • A Journal of Detection / Volume 32, Number 2 / Fall 2014 / pp. 8–19 /
ISSN 0742-4248 (paper) / ISSN 1940-3046 (online) / DOI: 10.3172/CLU.32.2.8 / © 2014 McFarland & Company, Inc.

8 CLUES • Volume 32, Number 2

the editor of this otherwise excellent introductory text, recognizes that crime fiction is
“multilayered rather than unidirectional” (6), but the collection itself does not reflect this;
it consists of studies of Anglo-American crime narratives with one exception: a single chap-
ter on French crime fiction by Sita Schütt.2
In the years since Cawelti called on scholars of crime fiction to engage more broadly
with nonmainstream and non–Anglophone detective, mystery, and crime narratives, a
growing number of scholars have done just that, producing book-length studies of crime
narratives from France (Gorrara; Hutton), Italy (Past; Pezzotti; Pieri), the Iberian Peninsula
(Godsland; Vosburg), Japan (Kawana; Seaman), Cuba and Mexico (Braham; Uxó), and
Scandinavia (Forshaw; Nestingen and Arvas).3 Despite undoubtedly expanding the param-
eters of mystery literature and developing greater awareness of the diverse practice of crime
fiction globally, these studies have not been able to break the monopoly of the Anglo-
American canon; this continues to sit front and center, whereas the studies of national lit-
eratures are relegated to the margins with little critical engagement between the two.4
Furthermore, although these works help to raise awareness of the variety of crime nar-
ratives practiced throughout the world, studies of crime fiction works that fall outside the
Anglo-American focus, like analyses of the Anglo-American canon, rarely reflect the global
dimensions of mystery writing. In some ways, these very studies contribute to their own
marginalization in crime fiction criticism by tending to limit their object of analysis to a
specific national or regional literary tradition. These studies of national crime fiction reveal
a pattern, or what Franco Moretti calls a “law of literary evolution” (58, emphasis in original),
by which the global genre becomes nationally bounded. This occurs through the focus on
the progress toward the production of truly autochthonous crime narratives by writers in
the specific national tradition on which the scholar works. In this pattern, analyses tend to
begin with the translation of foreign — mainly Anglo-American and French — models such
as the novels and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie,
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Georges Simenon into the national language.
In the second phase, scholars identify and
evaluate crime narratives by local writers in
terms of the degree to which they are imita-
tive of foreign models or contribute to the
creation of national crime fiction. In my own
field of crime fiction from Spain, for exam-
ple, critics recognize that the genre came late
to Spanish letters, with the first acknowl-
edged detective novel being La gota de san-
gre (The Drop of Blood, 1911) by Naturalist
writer Emilia Pardo Bazán (see figure 1). Yet,
despite receiving praise for introducing the
genre into Spanish literature, Pardo Bazán is
also taken to task by critics because La gota
de sangre was seen as “being based more on
imitation of foreign models than on the very
real possibility of creating an autochthonous
criminal literature” (Valles Calatrava 91).5
Critics also decry the fact that, in the period
Figure 1. Author Emilia Pardo Bazán. Frontispiece spanning Pardo Bazán’s tentative first steps
from Pardo Bazán, A Christian Woman (1891). in the genre to the 1970s, the majority of

Crime Fiction as World Literature 9

crime writers from Spain tended to reproduce foreign patterns, as authors reportedly
responded to readers’ expectations and set their stories abroad in exotic locales and popu-
lated their narratives with foreign characters. In many cases, this act of national literary
transvestism was completed by the use of foreign (usually English or faux English) pseu-
donyms, with accompanying fictitious English titles from which the novels were supposedly
translated into Spanish.6 Such was the case of Fernanda Cano who, writing as Mary Francis
Colt, wrote 13 novels between 1953 and 1963 in the English cozy tradition.
For scholars of Spanish crime fiction, writers like Cano or Colt are not seen as authen-
tically Spanish, and therefore they rarely attract critical attention beyond the anecdotal.
Instead, scholars are more interested in so-called authentic works of Spanish crime fiction,
the national legitimacy of which is assured by “characters who openly flaunt typical Spanish
traits in the characterization of their personality and in their language [and] . . . situations
presented in the Spanish detective novels [that], while somewhat universal, continue to
correspond directly to social conflicts particular to Spanish reality” (Colmeiro 265).
The development of Spanish crime fiction from translation, through imitation to orig-
inal creation sketched here, is representative of the way in which critics tend to chart the
expansion of crime stories beyond the Anglo-American canon (see, for example, Pieri;
Seaman). Such an approach centers very much on the development of a national literary
tradition at the expense of international connections between works. This approach is
understandable, given that literary scholars tend to be based within nationally focused uni-
versity departments of English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Span-
ish, or Scandinavian languages and tend to have to bow to institutional pressures to produce
scholarship in their field. The aim here is not to undermine the legitimacy of national
approaches; it is important to understand how the genre develops in a particular society
and how local writers adopt and adapt the genre to suit their specific circumstances. Nev-
ertheless, although the national approach is understandable and a necessary academic prac-
tice, this article argues for the denationalization of crime-fiction studies. That is, in place
of the national framework that dominates current critical practice, it is proposed here that
we read crime fiction as an example of world literature to gain greater insights into the
global reach of the genre.
From its beginning as a concept, world literature has sought to avoid the straitjacket
of national traditions. In one of the earliest uses of the term, Goethe proposed that
“[n]ational literature is now a rather unmeaning term,” because “poetry is the universal
possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hun-
dreds of men” (Goethe and Eckermann 22–23). To understand literature more fully, Goethe
believed that we should follow his practice and “look . . . in foreign nations,” because “the
epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach”
(Goethe and Eckermann 23). Since Goethe first sketched his vision of world literature,
scholars have struggled to define this elusive term. Is it all literature that has been produced
everywhere and throughout history? Is it limited to a selection of the literary masterpieces
from around the globe? What is its relationship with national literatures? And, focusing on
the subject of crime fiction, what are the implications for the study of crime narratives
from around the globe?
The practice of world literature can be reduced to two broad approaches: inclusive
and exclusive. In developing what he calls “transcultural” literary analysis, Swedish scholar
Anders Pettersson maintains there should be “no predetermined national or temporal lim-
itations” placed on the study of literature (463). Pettersson does acknowledge that “[t]here
is a tendency to think of the united literatures of the world as something that is simply too

10 CLUES • Volume 32, Number 2

vast to contemplate” (466), but he argues that continental European scholars do exactly
that and he cites several examples, including the German New Handbook of Literary Studies,
published in 25 volumes, as evidence that world histories of literature can be produced
(466).
While acknowledging that world literature, as described in Pettersson’s transcultural
literature, “may in some sense exist as an ideal order, a hypothetical mental construct”
(Damrosch, What 111), David Damrosch and Claudio Guillén argue for more restrictive
interpretations of world literature. Guillén calls the inclusive approach a “wild idea, unat-
tainable in practice, worthy not of an actual reader but of a deluded keeper of archives”
(39), whereas for Damrosch, a “category from which nothing can be excluded is essentially
useless” (What 110). Instead, Damrosch proposes that world literature encompasses “all lit-
erary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their
original language” (What 4). Perhaps recognizing that such a definition still leaves scholars
facing an enormous literary field, Damrosch provides a further restriction; he limits world
literature to the relevance of any text at any particular moment: “a work only has an effective
life as world literature whenever and wherever it is actually present within a literary system
beyond that of its original culture” (What 4, emphasis in original).
There are many crime novels that conform to Damrosch’s and Guillén’s criterion for
a text being treated as a work of world literature, particularly the novels of Christie and
Simenon. With works translated into more than 100 languages, sales of 1 billion in English,
and a further billion in other languages, Christie is allegedly the bestselling author of all
time. Likewise, in the mid–1980s it was estimated that the Belgian-born Simenon was the
most read living novelist on the planet (Platten 15). These two writers are perhaps just the
most well-known examples of the many crime writers whose works are read far beyond the
public for which they were originally produced. More recently, the global popularity of so-
called Nordic noir with Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Camilla Lackberg is ongoing
proof of the genre’s international relevance and hence its place within the sphere of world
literature.
The world “literariness” of crime fiction is not only evident in the number of languages
into which a novel is translated or in the number of sales worldwide. Although these are
important markers, works and authors can be identified who enter into the pantheon of
world crime fiction through the numerous intertextual references to earlier works and writ-
ers that appear in the crime narratives of writers around the globe. Two such examples are
pioneering Japanese and Catalan crime writers Taro Hirai and Jaume Fuster. Taro Hirai,
for instance, expresses his debt to the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in his
nom de plume, Edogawa Rampo, whereas Jaume Fuster acknowledges the influence of Ross
Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett in his short-story collection Les claus de vidre (The Glass
Keys), featuring his detective Lluís Arquer, a Catalanized version of Macdonald’s private
investigator Lew Archer.7
Although the global reach of crime fiction in translation and in the original should
make it an ideal example of world literature, the practitioners of world literature have
largely ignored the crime genre, except perhaps as teaching practice (see Buckler). The
absence of crime fiction in world-literature approaches may perhaps be due to the focus
on so-called works of high culture; those literary texts considered worthy of study and
translation beyond the country in which they were produced. This is evidenced in the titles
of popular anthologies of world literature such as The Best of the World’s Classics (1909),
The Harvard Classics (1910), Masterpieces of World Literature in Digest Form (1949), and the
Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1956). More recent anthologies such as the six-

Crime Fiction as World Literature 11

volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the Norton Anthology of Western
Literature (2004, 8th ed.), although more open to noncanonical texts through inclusion of
folklore and popular songs, also exclude examples of modern works of popular fiction such
as science fiction, erotic, fantasy, romance, and, of course, crime fiction.
The exclusion of popular fiction in the study of world literatures replicates a division
that already exists in literary studies. As Ken Gelder argues, “it can often seem as if Literature
and popular fiction exist in a constant state of mutual repulsion and repudiation” (11). In
this scheme, world literature represents quality and “its key values are called originality,
complexity, closure, autonomy, personality, multilayeredness, timelessness, and so on,”
whereas popular fiction is characterized by quantity, “and its credo is a cluster of value
gathering notions such as surprise or novelty . . ., format and genre (and, on a more micro-
stylistic level, formulaic writing), sensationalism and voyeurism . . ., and finally heteron-
omy” (Baetens 336 –37). The underlying motivation for the study of world literature seems
to be that if you want to analyze texts across national traditions, then you should choose
quality works that justify the time and effort invested in stepping outside a national tradi-
tion.
Whereas world-literature scholars have ignored the detective genre, crime-fiction
experts have attempted to comprehend better the global reach of the genre. This can be
seen in the few studies of so-called “international” crime fiction published to date. These
studies—Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime
Fiction (2009) edited by Marieke Kranjenbrink and Kate M. Quinn; The Foreign in Inter-
national Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (2012) edited by Jean Anderson, Car-
olina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti; as well as Peter Baker and Deborah Shaller’s edited
collection Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot (2012)— mirror
Pettersson’s inclusive approach and do not place limits upon the study of crime fiction. As
a result, these excellent collections contain examples of crime fiction from around the globe,
including China, France, the Pacific Islands, Australia, Austria, Russia, Cuba, India, and
Italy. The global dimension of crime fiction is also analyzed in studies of postcolonial crime
fiction such as The Post-Colonial Detective (2001) edited by Ed Christian, Postcolonial Post-
mortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006) edited by Christine Matzke
and Suzanne Mühleisen, and Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World
(2009) edited by Nels Pearson and Marc Singer. Nevertheless, although there are exceptions
(see Chiaroni; Erdmann, “Nationality”; Mathur), in these international and postcolonial
collections the majority of the chapters are limited to the national tradition to which the
author or text belongs, be it Catalan or Canadian, Algerian or Argentine. The responsibility
for making the international connections between texts and authors is largely left to the
editors of the respective collections and, of course, to those readers who read more than
one chapter.8
An exception to national-bounded approaches to crime fiction can be found in the
work of German scholar Eva Erdmann, who is one of the few critics to theorize the notion
of world crime fiction.9 Like Pettersson, Erdmann advocates inclusiveness. In “Topograph-
ical Fiction: A World Map of International Crime Fiction,” she proposes mapping the set-
tings in which crime novels take place to “demonstrate the international range of crime
fiction and, not least, . . . show up the gaps in a universal crime-scene world” (279). This
map, Erdmann argues, allows us to discover the existence or absence of Kenyan or Korean
crime fiction; to identify locations where crime novels concentrate such as New York, Lon-
don, Barcelona, Paris, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires; and to see how different authors
characterize these places. Erdmann’s atlas of world crime fiction is an exciting proposal,

12 CLUES • Volume 32, Number 2

but it also has its limitations. Where would Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, set in the
fictitious city of Isola, appear on such a map? Where exactly would we locate Christie’s St.
Mary Mead, home to Miss Jane Marple? Furthermore, although she opens up the study of
crime fiction to texts from around the world, Erdmann — to a certain degree — binds the
texts into another national framework by attributing nationality to the locus criminalis
(“Nationality” 12). She does this by attributing nationality to the location in which the
crime novel is set irrespective of whether the author is from that country or not. Thus, in
her example, Erdmann suggests that Robert Wilson’s Javier Falcón series set in Seville “may
be assigned geographically to the multiple category: ‘Spanish literature of British origin’”
(277). Wilson, however, also produces Portuguese literature in A Small Death in Lisbon
(1999) and, following Erdmann’s classification, has produced what is probably the most
well-known works of Beninese literature in his Bruce Medway novels set in the West African
republic.
This return to the national within the framework of international crime fiction high-
lights the difficulties of an inclusive approach in practice. A history or a map of world crime
fiction would be a massive undertaking, given that thousands of crime novels are produced
each year in the United States alone, and if all crime novels produced elsewhere were
included as well, it is clear how quickly a history or even a map of world crime fiction
becomes an impossible undertaking. Faced with such an overwhelming task, it is easy to
understand why scholars choose to remain safely within the borders of a national literary
tradition.
Despite these difficulties, a world-literature approach to crime fiction can be achieved,
but not by reading more novels. Even Pettersson’s inclusive approach does not imply that
scholars have to attempt to read every work of crime fiction that has ever been published
in order to consider themselves experts. Rather, Pettersson compares the study of world
literature to that of world history, arguing that just as you “would expect a historian, regard-
less of his or her precise specialty, to have some modest grasp of world history,” so, too,
should literary scholars have “a modicum of transcultural literary-historical knowledge”
(466). Scholars can and should work on smaller segments (467). However, these “smaller
segments” should not be limited to what Pettersson calls the “cultural claustrophobia” of
national literatures (464), such as the majority of chapters that make up the international
and postcolonial crime-fiction collections previously mentioned. Instead, he urges literary
scholars to overcome “the risk of parochialism in a scholar’s or critic’s outlook and writings”
by bringing novels from different traditions together and getting them to speak to each
other and, at times, against each other (466). In applying Pettersson’s transcultural approach
to the study of crime fiction, rather than studying the development of the crime genre in
a particular national tradition, scholars could profitably analyze the evolution of particular
subgenres such as the murder mystery, the hard-boiled novel, the spy thriller, and so forth
across different countries and languages or study the appearance of new tropes—for exam-
ple, the characterization of women detectives across the globe.
Moretti observes that “world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem
that asks for a new critical method” (55, emphasis in original). Likewise, Damrosch proposes
that world literature is not so much an object of study, a canon of great works that must
be read, but a reading practice, a way of analyzing literary texts outside of the cultural and
intellectual tradition from which they come (What 297). The practice of reading world
crime fiction requires a shift from studying the production of crime fiction to its consump-
tion. That is, a shift from writers to readers.
In studying crime fiction as world literature, we should not completely abandon the

Crime Fiction as World Literature 13

study of crime writers in their national context, as an understanding of authors who self-
consciously write within a specific national tradition is important in itself. Instead, it is
proposed here that we approach crime fiction in the way that many crime fiction readers
do. Rarely do readers only read novels by writers from a single country or set exclusively
in a particular country; rather, they often enjoy a range of texts written by authors from
different countries and/or writers who set their novels in numerous foreign locales (see
Schreier). Many readers of crime fiction read the genre in a worldly way, and to develop
crime fiction as world literature, scholars need to create an analytical practice that reflects
this.
Such a practice is based on the need to make connections between works and writers.
Italo Calvino argues that the study of literature “is always a dialog amongst many voices
which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it” (412). In this vein,
the objective of a world-literature approach to crime fiction is to establish this dialogue
between writers and texts across national, cultural, linguistic, and temporal borders. To
create this dialogue, a process of triangulation between the world, the text and the reader
is required. As David Damrosch puts it:
As we triangulate between our own present situation and the enormous variety of other
cultures around and before us, we won’t see works of world literature so fully enshrined
within their cultural context as we do when reading those works within their own tra-
ditions, but a degree of distance from the home tradition can help us to appreciate the
ways in which a literary work reaches out and away from its point of origin. If we then
observe ourselves seeing the work’s abstractions from its origins, we gain a new vantage
point on our own moment. (What 300)
Damrosch’s triangulation process can be profitably applied to the study of crime fiction
as world literature. In practice, the focus of world-literature studies is generally defined in
three ways: (1) as a study of the classics from around the globe, (2) as masterpieces of liter-
ature from different national traditions, and (3) as windows onto specific cultures. Although
a case can be made for the creation of a canon of masterpieces of world crime fiction that
every scholar should know, the study of crime fiction as world literature falls most com-
fortably within the third category — windows onto specific cultures and societies. As Ander-
son, Miranda, and Pezzotti argue, the proliferation of crime novels around the globe means
that crime fiction could be considered “a new form of travel writing” (1), albeit to places
and situations the reader may never wish to experience firsthand.
As a form of travel writing, crime novels frame how readers experience the town, city,
or country depicted in the story itself. They do so by focusing attention on how specific
societies and cultures represent transgression and its policing. Heather Worthington main-
tains:
[a] crime implies the violation of a community code of conduct and demands a response
in terms of the code. It always depends on a legal definition, and the law. As a result, in
representing crime and its punishment, whether evoked or merely anticipated, detective
novels invariably project the image of a given social order and the implied value system
that helps sustain it. By naming a place and by evoking the socio-economic order that
prevails within it, they confirm, in fact, that there can be no transgression without a
code, no individual criminal act without a community that condemns it. (120 –21)
Crime novels thus provide a means of understanding the relationship between crime
and community in the popular imagination. Who is killed, where, why, by whom, and how
the investigation resolves or does not resolve the case; what punishment, if any, is meted
out to the criminal — these are all factors that can shape a particular community’s under-

14 CLUES • Volume 32, Number 2

standing of transgression. According to Cawelti, the “criminal act disrupts the social fabric,
and the detective must use his unique investigative skills to sew it back together again. In
the process, the skillful writer can reveal certain aspects of a culture that otherwise remain
hidden” (“Detecting” 55). In the sense that transgression is culturally specific, the national
context of a crime novel becomes important and is not entirely redundant as a category
when adopting a world-literature approach. However, whereas a nation-bounded approach
examines the transgression within the national context, a world-literature approach seeks
to take the crime beyond the national borders to compare and contrast it with the repre-
sentation of criminal acts and their policing in a number of different contexts.
Critics have highlighted that studying specific genres can facilitate the analysis of texts
across different literary traditions, as the conventions that define any particular genre “play
a major role in the shaping of works and in forming audiences’ expectations for them”
(Damrosch, How 47). As Damrosch suggests, “we can learn a good deal about a culture by
seeing which elements a given tradition highlights, and how its writers use them” (How
47). Moretti makes a similar point; he argues that “comparative morphology is such a fas-
cinating field” because by “studying how forms vary, you discover how symbolic power
varies from place to place” (66). Although in his example Damrosch focuses on high cultural
forms like drama and the epic, this genre-centered approach can be used to study popular
fictions as well. The crime genre, with its typologies and topoi formulae, is one such exam-
ple. Gelder notes there is probably not a more formulaic type of popular fiction than the
crime narrative, and he argues that great effort must be made to distinguish works through
characters and places (63). In analyzing crime fiction within a world-literature approach,
the very repetitive and formulaic aspects of the genre that are so often derided by literary
scholars instead become positive features.
What direction might a practice of world crime fiction take? In some ways, both the
inclusive and the exclusive approaches to the study of world literature can be deployed use-
fully in the study of crime fiction from around the globe. Although no crime novel is nec-
essarily excluded, scholars need to focus on more manageable elements in the interests of
practicality. As mentioned earlier, an evolutionary approach could focus on the adoption
and adaptation of the murder mystery, the hard-boiled novel, or the spy thriller across the
world. Such an approach could also analyze the use of a particular literary device across
time and place such as the so-called “locked-room mystery” first used by Edgar Allan Poe
in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and later developed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) and The Valley of Fear (1914 –15); Gaston
Leroux’s Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (publ. as The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908);
and more recently in Stieg Larsson’s Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (2005; publ. as The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo, 2008), in which the island of Hedeby becomes a “locked room” when
its only exit to the mainland — a bridge — is cut off because of a traffic accident.
Another approach is to examine specific historical events or phenomena through the
prism of the crime genre’s conventions, particularly its focus on legality and justice. One
such example is the study of crime novels that engage with “the National Socialist past and
its legacy in the postwar era” conducted by British scholar Katharina Hall (288). In this
study, Hall has identified more than 150 transnational crime novels, including English, Ger-
man, Czech, Polish, and Canadian, which treat this topic. For Hall, the study of an historical
event or period such as National Socialist rule in Germany and Europe through crime
fiction from writers of different backgrounds and nationalities can provide “illuminating
depictions of policing” and “encourage readers, via the figure of the Nazi detective, to think
critically about issues of justice, moral agency, and guilt” (311).

Crime Fiction as World Literature 15

 Closely related to Hall’s research is the notion of transitional justice in postdictatorial
societies. In recent years, there has been a slew of crime novels from countries that had suf-
fered repression under dictatorships, including Eduardo Sacheri’s The Secret in Their Eyes
(Argentina), Andrés Trapiello’s Los amigos del crimen perfecto (The Friends of the Perfect
Crime, Spain), Purge (Estonia) by Estonian-language Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, and Ber-
nard Schlink and Walter Popp’s Gerhard Self series (Germany). A world-literature analysis
of these novels would offer insights into the multiple ways in which writers use the genre
to position past actions within the legal framework, which is the basis of the crime genre.
In this way, such novels do not just seek to overcome institutionalized disremembering by
recovering repressed memories; they are also an attempt to focus attention on historical
justice from a legal point of view.
From tentative beginnings in the early part of the twentieth century, but particularly
from the 1970s onward, women writers have penned crime novels featuring women detec-
tives— whether amateur, professional, or police — as a means of exploring issues related to
women’s oppression such as physical and psychological abuse, rape, prostitution, institu-
tional and social discrimination, and female agency. By adopting a world-literature approach
that focuses on the representation of female characters as victims, criminals, detectives,
and other roles in different cultures and societies, crime fiction can tell us much about how
the issues facing women and how their role in society are viewed. Similar world-literature
approaches can be applied to the construction of race, homosexuality, class, and ethnicity
across cultures and countries.
Finally, a world-literature approach could profitably study the reception of particular
novels in different parts of the world. Why are some novels international successes and
others are not? What is it in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy that resonates across languages
and cultures? How have critics, writers, and readers responded to works by Conan Doyle,
Christie, Hammett, and Spillane? The study of the reception of particular texts, such as
that undertaken by Margrit Schreier, can profitably draw on readers’ reviews at booksellers’
sites, fan sites, and blogs to gain insights into how novels travel beyond their home cul-
ture.
Translator Edith Grossman describes national literature as “a narrowing, confining
concept based on the distinction between native and foreign” (17). To overcome this strait-
jacketing, she argues for literary translation because “[t]ranslation asserts the possibility
of a coherent, unified experience of literature in the world’s multiplicity of languages”
while, at the same time, celebrating “the differences among languages and the many varieties
of human experience and perception they can express” (17). Grossman does not advocate
abandoning entirely the study of national traditions; she recognizes that national literature
“is certainly a valid and useful differentiation in some areas and under certain circum-
stances” (17). As Worthington argues, crime fiction is tied to how any one culture or society
constructs and represents crime. Although this feature fundamentally links crime fiction
to a specific place, applying Grossman’s idea to the study of world crime fiction leads to the
conclusion that the study of crime novels in the original or in translation across national
traditions, rather than within them, can reap new insights into the relationship between
particular communities and transgression. A world-literature approach thus has the poten-
tial to develop new interpretations and a more nuanced understanding of this truly global
genre.

Keywords: crime fiction, international literature, world literature

16 CLUES • Volume 32, Number 2

 NOTES
1. Further research is required to determine whether crime-fiction criticism produced in languages
other than English follows the nationally bounded tradition discussed later or whether there is a greater
attempt to understand crime fiction in its global context.
2. Two further studies that confirm this trend are Gill Plain’s Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction:
Gender, Sexuality and the Body and John Scaggs’s Crime Fiction. Despite their general titles, Plain only
examines English-language works, whereas Scaggs’s work contains a smattering of references to French
works and a discussion of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rossa (publ. as The Name of the Rose, 1980).
3. Studies of nonmainstream Anglo-American fiction works include monographs on Jewish (Roth),
African American (Pepper; Soitos; Gifford) and Native American (Browne; Rodriguez) crime fiction.
This list is limited to works written in English. It therefore does not take into account the vast body of
research on the detective novel conducted by scholars who publish in languages other than English.
4. An exception to this is Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker’s French and American Noir: Dark
Crossings (2009).
5. Translations from the Spanish are by the author.
6. The use of English pseudonyms was also common in Italian crime fiction until the 1990s, accord-
ing to Gabriella Turnaturi (55).
7. Although the examples cited demonstrate the influence of Anglo-American models on non–
Anglophone crime writers, such influence does not always come from the United States and Britain.
For example, Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri shows his esteem for Spanish author Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán by naming the protagonist of his series Salvo Montalbano.
8. This is also the case with so-called European crime-fiction studies such as Crime Scenes: Detective
Narratives in European Culture Since 1945 (2000), edited by Anne Mullen and Emer O’Beirne, which
contains only one article that examines fiction in more than one country.
9. Pioneers in this field include geographer George Demko, who has taught and written extensively
about the evolution of crime fiction around the world, and Nina King and Robin W. Winks, whose
Crimes of the Scene (1997) is an armchair travel guide to crime fiction across the globe.

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