The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction ed. by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction ed. by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls
• David Riddle Watson (bio)

the cambridge companion to world crime fiction Edited by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls
Cambridge University Press
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-general-interest/cambridge-companion-crime-fiction?format=PB
320 pages; Print, $36.99

As a fan of the Cambridge Companion series, I was excited at the arrival of The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. As the trend in "worlding" literature continues with the recent publication of volumes such as Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017) and The Routledge Handbook to Crime Fiction (2020), it is refreshing to see the field of crime fiction get its place among other literatures, often considered more worthy of serious study. Because crime fiction is in the process of finding its place in the canon, the editors point out that this installment in Cambridge's series begins from a different place than most volumes: "As scholarly companions go, this volume is atypical. While most companions aim to map an existing field … The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction endeavours to introduce and advance what is still an emerging field." To that end, the volume aims to "take a significant step towards defining the field, identifying its theoretical fault lines and offering an overview of the local traditions and transnational hybridizations that constitute it."

This volume is a valuable addition to crime fiction scholarship, and I believe the editors are successful in their stated mission to expand this emerging field, with many essays genuinely breaking new ground. The collection begins with an attempt to describe the state of the genre. Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King point out in "What Is World Crime Fiction?" that crime fiction [End Page 149] is "emphatically, a global phenomenon," arguing that the "global reach of the crime genre is evident from the fact that crime fiction is written, published, sold and read on a significant scale on all continents … with an established literary culture." This requires a "fundamental rethinking of the crime genre itself," by which they mean to break free from the desire to associate the genre so closely with American and British models at the center that we are prevented from "recognizing non-Western crime fiction unless it closely replicates Western models." This collection recognizes these non-Western works by looking at publishing houses, sales data, and works from regions across the globe. The first six essays of the collection deal with material conditions that allow or hinder the genre to grow spatially or thematically, followed by individual essays organized regionally.

"The International Crime Fiction Collection" and "Crime Fiction and the International Publishing Industry" are particularly useful in mapping the materiality of complicated networks that connect crime fiction on a global scale. In the former, Barbara Pezzotti examines the ways in which publishing houses such as "Serie Noire in France and Septimo Circulo in Argentina have been pivotal in creating a literary environment where the crime genre could survive, thrive, and evolve," and points out the lack of scholarship in this area. Pezzotti explains that "crime fiction scholarship … still underestimates the role that publishers have played in making crime fiction a popular genre on the world scene." By incorporating the material conditions that allow for the possibility of readership in the first place, the essay helps to establish a firm ground upon which further political, economic, or sociological work can build.

In a related manner, in "Crime Fiction and the International Publishing Industry," Karl Berglund writes that because "fine-grained data are lacking, … no one really knows how large the genre is or the extent to which it is distributed worldwide. No one has yet mapped crime fiction globally." He breaks ground through analyzing available data on bestseller lists, concluding that "crime fiction is strongest in the USA and the UK, where titles in the genre hold roughly half of the bestseller spots," while "the genre is at its weakest in Brazil and India, where only around 10 percent of bestsellers are crime novels." In "Iberian and Latin American Crime Fiction," Glen S. Close and Elena Losada...