As argued by Martin Priestman in the opening statement of the Cambridge Companion on Crime Fiction, there are two dangers that threaten the study of the genre: first the reduction of its diversity to the debate between the British whodunit and the American hardboiled – and beyond this the larger quest for a kind of absolute model; second, the over-representation of US and UK examples in the quest for the ‘pure’ detective – while any openness to other traditions generally remains limited to French works and authors (Priestman Reference Priestman and Priestman2003, 2–3). Both questions are clearly linked: the powerful presence of both whodunit and hardboiled in the UK as well as the US explains why most case studies draw upon instances from these cultural areas, and the British-cum-American corpus inevitably leads to a strong emphasis on the types of crime fiction that are best represented in their respective traditions. Things may have changed a lot since the publication of Priestman’s landmark collection, but it cannot be denied that much work on crime fiction still has a strong Anglo-Saxon twist and continues to be haunted by the attempt to pinpoint what crime fiction actually ‘is’, as a kind of transhistorical kind of story and storytelling.

The ambition of the essays presented in this Focus is not to challenge or question our current knowledge of crime fiction, which is no longer a marginal or undervalued genre that needs rescuing from neglect by ‘high culture’, but which now is rather the truly hegemonic literary form. As Anita Singh (Reference Singh2018), discussing the UK market (but figures for other European countries are comparable) puts it: ‘Crime novels and psychological thrillers are outselling other types of fiction for the first time, after a glut of television dramas boosted interest in the genre’. What these essays instead try to do is to widen the approach to crime fiction in order to produce a certain shift of focus. Discussions of the history of the genre, the ways in which the genre changes when it moves from fiction in print to other forms of representation and storytelling, the boundaries within the genre as well as between crime fiction and other types of crime-related narratives, fictional or not, will not be shunned in the essays that follow. But the primary focus is elsewhere. What matters here is the question of Europe as seen through the lens of crime fiction.

Yet what do we mean by Europe here, and how can one take stock of crime narratives to say something about Europe?Footnote ¹ As far as the first question is concerned, it is important to stress that Europe does not coincide with the EU. Europe is also, and more importantly, a cultural horizon, which is both open to non-EU Europe (several essays highlight the leading role of contemporary English TV fiction for instance, while from a more historical point of view it would be totally absurd to pitch new continental types of crime fiction against non-EU major references in the field) and deeply divided – at the same time as energized – by internal differences (various contributors will tackle the dialectical relationship between the emergence of local or minor crime authors and productions and the general perspective imposed by the very existence of a supranational construction and the increasing exchanges, physical, linguistic, cultural, between EU and non-EU countries or regions). Glocalization may be a key word in this regard: Europe, be it EU or non-EU, more precisely the organization of Europe according to national boundaries, is no less strongly defined by regional tendencies than by globalization, and the crime fiction scene is a good echo chamber of these tensions. The articles by Pagello, Baschiera, and Hansen, Készeg and Kálai all disclose fascinating aspects of the new production policies of crime series, which nowadays are often made for a transnational audience (while benefiting from all kinds of local financial and creative assets), but which cannot do without a strong set of local references, traditions and idiosyncrasies (which paradoxically may prove a crucial stimulus for wider success).

However, the second question, namely: how may one study these changes with the help of the crime fiction genre, is the crucial one. It cannot be denied that crime narratives ‘represent’, that is mirror and reflect, what is going on in Europe. Yet while always taking into account the documentary, historical, sociological, and ideological value of the works they study, most articles go beyond a type of reading that examines the clash between the idea of Europe one can infer from crime fiction (and this idea is, to put it mildly, often very raw and devoid of any illusion) and the more positive and idealist vision of the Old Continent as presented in official political documents. It is imperative to be aware of the gap between both types of representation, but European crime fiction is not just a set of stories, currently told in many different media and across a wide range of platforms (several of them will explicitly be addressed in the following collection). Next to these stories, their style and their content, there is their actual use. It is at this level that studying crime narratives in relation to Europe and vice versa is most pertinent.

To start with, because of the extreme linguistic diversity of the continent, European crime fiction circulates in very special ways. Not all works have the chance to be translated and translation itself is never a neutral or simple phenomenon: not all target languages have the same presence and impact, not all linguistic communities have the same curiosity about imported works, not all local cultural industries have the power to successfully export (parts of) their production, not all publishing companies prove capable of fruitfully marketing translations, not all regions or countries manage to bring together producers and consumers, be it physically or virtually, and, above all, not all these mechanisms, structures, events, decisions, strategies, policies, objects and people interact on an equal basis and within the same temporal framework. The opportunities and threats of actual exchanges and communication are at the heart of the article by Migozzi, Levet and Amir, which studies the place of translated crime fiction in France (the country with the most active translation policy of all EU countries), with a sharp eye to the broader context of series, prizes, and festivals – and all the human, institutional, and economic interactions this market involves.

Next to the issue of circulation, there is also the question of crime fiction’s expanded space, to reuse in a very literal sense the famous expression coined by Rosalind Krauss in her study of the blurring of boundaries between works, media and context (Krauss Reference Krauss1979). Crime fiction today is not only migrating, although less freely (and certainly not free of cost for the consumer) than is often thought, from one host medium or channel to another, and permanently adapted and transmedialized in increasingly creative ways; it is also a cultural practice that generates new uses, new products, new practices. One of the most salient of these is crime-fiction-based or induced tourism, ranging from the musealization of iconic places (Sherlock Holmes’s 221B Baker Street) to the packaging of tourist circuits actively integrated in city marketing policies (the maps that one used to find in certain detective novels being transformed into real tourist guides, one of the many forms taken by the encounter between John Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry Reference Urry1990) and Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore Reference Pine and Gilmore1999). Yet here too the close examination of a Danish example (the Aarhus ‘crime city walk’ app, here studied by Bengesser and Waade) lays bare the heterogeneity of users’ desires, expectations, experiences, behaviour and thus… economic as well as cultural decisions.

Finally, all articles also prominently feature ideas and reflections on the very meaning of Europe, covering a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches. In certain cases, the reading is inspired by a critical return on some basic literary categories, such as the ‘noir’ (here analysed by Baetens, Truyen and Schultze in the distorted mirror of an American noir). In others the horizon is both ethical and political, as in the article by Caius Dobrescu, who dramatically reframes television detective fiction in light of the moral dilemmas and governance issues of Baroque drama. Still other contributions foreground questions of deepening mutual knowledge and bridging power inequalities via creative appropriations of crime fiction subject matter, styles, motives, and business models.