European Scenes of Crime: Peripheries at the Centre

Abstract

Departing from a post-pandemic situation and a European continent at war, the chapter highlights the European continent as a geographical region in flux. The present cultural attention towards borders, subdivisional regions, and places in television crime series has recently pushed the genre towards rural areas and peripheries. On the one hand, the chapter showcases this tendency as a method of differentiation on a saturated market, but on the other hand, the focus on European peripheries in various spatio-generic subgenres such as Brit Noir or Nordic Noir is also read as a re-negotiation of how the notion of Europe should be understood. Interpreting Europe as an ‘unfinished continent’ through television crime series, the chapter—and the book—asks one specific question: Why was this specific European television crime series placed at this specific location, and what are the representative and ‘textual’ consequences of this placement strategy? The chapter, then, outlines five spatial references for each analytical chapter: Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir.