In recent decades crime fiction has enjoyed a creative boom. Although, as Alison Young argues in her book Imagining Crime (1996), crime stories remain strongly identified with specific locations, the genre has acquired a global reach, illuminating different corners of the world for the delectation of international audiences. The recent fashion for Nordic noir has highlighted the process by which the crime story may be franchised, as it is transposed from one culture to another. Crime fiction has thus become a vehicle for cultural exchange in the broadest of senses; not only does it move with apparent ease from one country to the next, and in and out of different languages, but it is also reproduced through various cultural media. What is involved in these processes of transference? Do stories lose or gain value? Or are they transformed into something else altogether? How does the crime story that originates in a specific society or culture come to articulate aspects of very different societies and cultures? And what are the repercussions of this cultural permeability?

Christiana Gregoriou is an Associate Professor in English Language at Leeds University’s School of English. Her published work includes three monographs: Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2007), Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives (2011) and Crime Fiction Migration: Crossing Languages, Cultures, Media (2017).

David Platten is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction (2011). He is currently leading a project on the influence of true crime writing over public attitudes and policy development, and is writing two monographs entitled: The Power of Belief: True Crime in a Post-Truth World; and The Secrets of Existence or The Indispensable Albert Camus.

Gigliola Sulis is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds. Recent publications include Sergio Atzeni e le voci della Sardegna, co-edited with Giuseppe Ledda ( 2017) and Local, Regional, and Transnational Identities in Translation: the Italian Case, co-edited with Elisa Segnini as a special issue of The Translator 24, 1 (2018).