Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction

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 Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The 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 including The Last Days of Newgate.

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