During its two-hundred-year-long history, the crime genre has proved not only persistent, but also flexible and mobile in many ways, and its contemporary global popularity can be partly attributed to its adaptability to different times, cultures and purposes. While the genre was earlier often dismissed as "a trashy, minor genre" (Rodriguez 3), crime fiction scholarship has during the past few decades increasingly drawn attention to the genre's sociocritical potential. 1 In Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders, and Detection, the popular crime story that incorporates entertainment into critical analyses of societies is approached from the perspective of mobility. We suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. As the chapters in this volume show, often the representations of such mobilities and crossings reflect on sociocultural developments on local and global levels