ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop a more considered understanding of the role of place both in individual crime fiction narratives and in the experience of reading crime fiction. It explores the notion of unstable places through an analysis of Catalan crime writer, Teresa Solana’s Un crim imperfecte. Place as “seeing, knowing and understanding the world” emerges through three aspects of place identified by political geographer John Agnew, for whom place consists of locale, location and sense of place. Place in crime fiction, however, is much more important than Gary Hausladen’s more limited sense of place. Critics have tended to examine the function of place within specific novels or series of novels, focusing on how places are constructed, whether they contain convincing representations and the ways in which they can inform the very crimes that form the basis of the stories.
