Why has crime fiction become a global genre? How do writers use crime fiction to reflect upon the changing nature of crime and policing in our contemporary world? This book argues that the globalization of crime fiction should not be celebrated uncritically. Instead, it looks at the new forms and techniques writers are using to examine the crimes and policing practices that define a rapidly changing world. In doing so, this collection of essays examines how the relationship between global crime, capitalism, and policing produces new configurations of violence in crime fiction and asks whether the genre can find ways of analyzing and even opposing such violence as part of its necessarily limited search for justice both within and beyond the state. 

Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English at Queens University Belfast. He is the author ofThe Contemporary American Crime Novel (2000) and Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016). He has also written five crime novels set in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland includingThe Last Days of Newgate.

David Schmid is Associate Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, USA. He is the author ofNatural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (2005), the co-author ofZombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics(2015), and the editor ofViolence in American Popular Culture(2015). 

Introduction; Andrew Pepper and David Schmid.- Chapter 1. The Bad and the Evil; David Schmid.- Chapter 2. Work and Death in the Global City; Christopher Breu.- Chapter 3. Local Hells and State Crimes; Katy Shaw.- Chapter 4. The State Were In; Véronique Desnain.- Chapter 5. The Scene of the Crime is the Crime; Casey Shoop.- Chapter 6. True-Crime, Crime Fiction, and Journalism in Mexico; Persephone Braham.- Chaopter 7. The Novel of Violence in Latin American Literature; José-Vicente Tavares-dos-Santos, Enio Passiani, and Julio Souto Salom.- Chapter 8. Scandinavian Crime Fiction and the Facts; Andrew Nestingen.- Chapter 9. John le Carré and The New Novel of Global (In)security; Andrew Pepper.- Chapter 10. Geopolitical Reality;Paul Cobley.- Chapter 11. US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism; David Seed.