Crime Fiction from the Global Peripheries

Crime fiction has always been an international genre, yet, until the late 1990s, the dominant locations of widely translated and canonized crime novels have coincided with the major and shifting centres of the publishing and media industry. Although their detectives are often displaced, travelling or negotiating the tensions between urban or geopolitical centres and geographical peripheries, Poe and Simenon's Paris, Conan Doyle and Christie's London, and Chandler's Los Angeles, to mention a few, replicate the dominance in translated fiction of a few major languages and locations. However, as Andrew Pepper and David Schmid (2016, 1) assert:

From an Anglo-American central perspective, it undoubtedly appears that ‘indigenous crime fiction’ (like Kirino's Japanese, Camilleri's Sicilian or Arion's Romanian crime novels, Mendoza's Mexican narconovellas and Deon Meyer's South African thrillers) is only just now emerging from hitherto ‘dark’ countries and continents on the map of world literature, and that these must ‘naturally’ arise from ‘foundational texts’ familiar to critics and non-professional readers in the global centres of the West. This habitual framing of contemporary ‘crime fiction as world literature’ as peripheral, national fungi feeding on the cosmopolitan crime fiction capitals of the Western world, resembles a view of globalization described by Cairns Craig (2007, 29) as a world system wherein ‘the cultural distinctions on which peripheries could draw to resist the processes of “globalization” are […] erased: difference at an economical level turns into sameness at a cultural level’. In other words, the internationalization of crime fiction is a pertinent example of ‘global literature’, propelled by global market forces that capitalize on the exposure, management and exploitation of the exotically different local expressions of a global marketplace (Stougaard-Nielsen, 2016).