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.

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.

Crime fiction, as a constituent member of the field of ‘popular literature’ and an object of literary criticism, has historically been encumbered by a set of restrictive preconceptions: that the genre does not warrant detailed critical analysis, that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality, and that comparative or transnational perspectives are secondary to the study of the core British-American canon. The present volume challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction, which we regard as a relic of a previous, elitist view of literature. Also, and more importantly, it posits that this baggage hinders our engagement with what we regard as the inherent mobility of crime fiction. It is easy enough to point towards individual crime fiction narratives that validate the critical blueprints. Yet, we argue that crime fiction is nonetheless characterized by a transgressive impulse that actively reflects on and challenges its own generic limitations, thereby potentially recuperating the genre from the stasis of established forms. This is what we understand by mobility: crime fiction, far from being static and staid, must be seen as a genre constantly violating its own boundaries. There is an unacknowledged experimental streak to this genre – an easy slippage between affirming the codes and conventions on the one hand, and on the other hand boldly calling into question and venturing beyond its textual, generic and national traditions. Acknowledging these ‘criminal moves’, or these modes of crime fiction mobility, enables a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for our reading of individual crime fiction texts.

The dynamic, text-based conception of crime fiction that we advocate here responds to elements present in the works of, among others, Gill Plain (2001), Lee Horsley (2005) and Merja Makinen (2006), each of whom has advocated the use of close-reading methodologies as a means of highlighting the sophisticated textual strategies employed in the genre. Maurizio Ascari (2007), moreover, has contested the official canon of crime fiction from the point of view of literary history, calling attention instead to a counter-history of the genre based on very different rules and conventions. Further, Stephen Knight (2015) and Pierre Bayard (2000, 2009), coming from opposing theoretical traditions, have argued for a return to the crime text itself, the former seeking to recover its voice and lost meaning, the latter aiming to unleash its semantic potential beyond the detective hero's authoritative solutions.

In a little-noted episode in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse (1928/29), the anonymous detective (the ‘Op’), the ill-starred Gabrielle Leggett and Eric Collinson, her fiancé, are involved in a dramatic, although ultimately harmless, car accident. Having rescued the young woman, a drug addict, from the eerie Temple of the Holy Grail, the Op wants to take her home in Collinson's Chrysler. The fiancé, however, in a state of near panic, has misgiving about returning Ms Leggett to her father and stepmother, preferring to have her examined by a doctor. When the detective insists, trying first to grab the wheel and then proceeding to curse the young man ‘bitterly, fairly thoroughly, and from the heart’ (Hammett 1999: 230), Collinson speeds up the vehicle and eventually loses control when swerving to avoid a sedan at an intersection:

In an insightful study, Inka Mülder-Bach has positioned the traffic accident as ‘a key scene of modernity’, connecting the modernist interest in accidents to contemporary discourses of risk and trauma while also reading it as a means of representing the modern world from the point of view of its discontinuities and contingences (2000: 198–99). The scene in The Dain Curse – one of two car crashes in this novel – exemplifies this logic. A critic looking for meaning and purpose might suggest that the brief account of the accident, apart from adding another piece of action, highlights the contrast between the two aspiring protectors of Miss Leggett, that is, between Collinson's timidness and the Op's uncouth but capable masculinity. In strictly narrative terms, though, the car crash has no discernible function and could have been edited out without materially affecting the overall plot. Unconnected in this manner, it instead takes on emblematic significance.