This book reflects on crime narratives as a site of trauma and explores crime trauma fiction as a space for addressing urgent social issues and offering social critique. Informed by both crime fiction scholarship and trauma studies, Trauma and Contemporary Crime Fiction demonstrates how traumatic experience can be depicted in ways that correlate with concerns and general tendencies in trauma studies and in contemporary society, including perpetrator trauma and pretrauma, inviting political awareness in readers. Examining both written and visual crime narratives from the Global North to the Global South, the authors argue that trauma complicates and renders time, agency, and guilt ambiguous and reinvents the genre by causing the boundaries to bleed between the traditional roles of detective, perpetrator, and victim within the crime genre and between the crime and trauma genres, thus contributing to the growing hybridisation of the crime genre.

Marinella Rodi-Risberg, Affiliated Researcher at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her previous books include Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women’s Novels (2025), Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers’ Incest Novels from the 1990s (2022), and Transnational Crime Fiction, co-edited with Maarit Piipponen and Helen Mäntymäki (2020), and she has published book chapters including in Trauma and Literature (2018), and articles in American Indian Quarterly, Crime Fiction Studies, Ecozon@, among others.

About the Author: Helen Mäntymäki is Senior Lecturer Emerita of English Literature and Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is the co-editor of Transnational Crime Fiction. Mobility, Borders and Detection with Maarit Piipponen and Marinella Rodi-Risberg (2020), and the author of several articles and chapters on crime fiction, among others in the journals Crime Fiction Studies, Ecozon@, and NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.