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From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales—crime and crime solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies—some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados—with style, wit, and passion. Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir—cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards—and offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

This introduction briefly deals with the major orientations of this European Review Focus on ‘European crime fiction’. It first specifies what is meant by ‘Europe’ and which type of questions can be asked of crime fiction in view of a better understanding of Europe’s multiple and changing identities. It then presents the various contributions by linking them with the three fundamental questions of (1) circulation of crime fiction, (2) expansion of crime fiction in the broader cultural, social and economic field, and (3) the relevance of crime fiction for a thorough reflection on some properly European aspects of culture and society.

Noir is a genre label with a long and complex history. The success of certain European home-grown forms of the genre (the French polar, the Scandinavian noir, etc.) invite us to reflect on the range but also the limits of the label in today’s European culture. The seemingly paradoxical example of Donald Westlake’s Ordo, an American noir novel that is perhaps neither ‘truly American’ nor ‘noir’ (and perhaps not even a ‘novel’) will serve here as a test case for some reflections on the actual use and function of the noir label in European literary culture.

The article starts from the observation that Irish fiction has recently shown a diversification, which can be summarised as follows: on the one hand there are works addressing the history of Ireland, on the other hand we see novels focusing on post-national topics (cf. Haekel). John Banville, who under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black also wrote crime novels, is a renowned representative of narrative fiction informed by contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, exploring questions such as memory, cognition, and personal identity. My article reveals how in his latest (and allegedly last) literary novel The Singularities (2022) his highly sophisticated character narration reaches a terminal point, as self-reflexivity, textual referentiality, and abstraction become unsettling. However, the complexity of placing his work in literary history has intensified by the appearance of three more novels published between 2020 and 2023 under Banville’s own name despite the supposed finality of The Singularities. Surprisingly, Snow (2020), April in Spain (2021) and The Lock-Up (2023) revisit dismal topics from Irish national history. These thematically (trans)national fictions also enhance the propositions of realism in Banville’s work. They present another hybrid form of narrative genres, blending crime fiction and historical novel, infused with philosophical reflection. The writer evades a categorisation. With The Singularities, Banville wishes to take his departure from the philosophical novel, as it seems with the intention to continue writing his new kind of murder mystery. The Lock-Up will be followed by another crime novel in October 2024. The Singularities, I wish to show in my analysis, points at the exhaustion due to a self-reflexive probing of the subject, the unreliability of knowledge, and the impossibility of truthful representation. Reality appears gloomy, yet in the end art surfaces as a source of freedom and imaginativeness for the individual and prospering kinds of fellowship.

Following the global success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy(2005), Scandinavian crime fiction has attracted considerable attention from researchers in literary studies and other domains. However, a gap still remains with regard to the translations of this sub-genre in Portugal and Brazil. To address this gap, this article attempts to demonstrate how crime fiction produced in Sweden, Denmark and Norway has been disseminated in Portugal and Brazil by means of a bibliographic survey that traces the various transit routes that exist between these (semi-) peripheral languages. The results indicate that indirect translation continues to play an important role in this process, contrary to some predictions.

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

During the last two decades a dramatic shift in the production and distribution strategies of TV series has taken place on a global level. This article discusses how these broad changes also led to a transformation in the form and the themes of European crime series, which emerge as ideal objects to study the representation of European societies in contemporary popular culture. The article looks at recent serial crime dramas such as La casa de papel, Suburra, and Peaky Blinders, which have abandoned the classic formula of European crime TV series, usually focused on the figure of the detective and primarily addressed to a national audience. Designed for an international market, these series provocatively concentrate on the figure of the criminal and adopt an explicitly sensationalist approach. The article argues that this style and the bleak depiction of European society in these series are both an expression and a critical representation of the rise of populism across the Old Continent.

Aside from being part of a vibrant corpus of Indigenous futurism, Claire G. Coleman’s novel Terra Nullius (2017) can also be analysed as an eco-crime novel. Indigenous Australian authors of this genre (e.g., Philip McLaren, Steven McCarthy, Nicole Watson) often anchor the source of criminal acts in the theft, loss and devastation of traditional lands, which provides their crime novels with a heightened awareness of environmental issues. The same applies to Terra Nullius. This is, however, a novel that successfully conceals its futuristic framework until halfway through. Equally, this successfully disrupts the usual postulates of crime fiction by shifting the reader’s attention from the usual “whodunnit” to the more elusive “whoizzit” mode of crime fiction. This, as the discussion reveals, means that the criminal acts in Terra Nullius are rendered unpunishable. This paradox, as it is argued, is strengthened by introducing the so-called “noir detective” (Timothy Morton) in the character of Father Grark, who cannot investigate that which constitutes the crime and the alibi shaping the world of Coleman’s futuristic novel.

Close study reveals the systemically interwoven nature of the criminal and licit sectors of capitalist economies, yet capitalist society seeks to legitimize the latter sector by attempting to hegemonically externalize or Other the former. It often does so by associating the criminal sector with stigmatized minority and/or immigrant groups, who are blamed for all of society's ills. Placing blame in this way allows the capitalist ownership class to falsely pass itself off as virtuous and free of the taint of criminality or of having engaged in criminal acts. There is a systematic sociocultural denial of the fact that capitalism produces all forms of conceivable capitalist accumulation, regardless of whether they accord with received notions of morality or legality. This essay argues that Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Salman Rushdie's novels The Moor's Last Sigh and The Golden House challenge this hegemonic Manichean conceptualization of crime and capitalism by thematizing the close relationships between capitalism and organized criminality in India. In the face of a socioeconomic system whose spiraling material inequalities are eroding democracy and fueling the rise of fundamentalist nationalisms, these novels counter the hegemonic legitimizing narratives that present success within the world of neoliberal capitalism as a function of meritocratic entrepreneurialness. They also present a perspective on organized crimes that resists the doxa that criminal acts and capitalist successes are wholly discrete, disparate phenomena.