Chapter 3 shows that in the Mediterranean novel, food becomes a powerful tool through which Mediterranean writers deconstruct homogeneous national identities and celebrate transculturality in the Mediterranean area. In spite of significant differences, some common traits emerge. These include the representation of eating and drinking habits as a collective practice that involves an extended family, including non-national individuals often belonging to the Mediterranean basin; the portrayal of meal sharing as an event that facilitates communication among different cultures, and a way to celebrate a more extensive Mediterranean culture and identity; the use of food as a tool to present a critique of assumed formulations of regional and national identities; and finally, through the contrast between tradition and modernity, food is used to express anxiety for cultures perceived to be under threat from external, and often global, forces. The chapter concludes that food in Mediterranean crime fiction celebrates unity and a common culture in the Mediterranean area, bringing down national borders and expressing once more the transcultural nature of Mediterranean crime fiction.

This chapter shows that due to the old configuration of the Mediterranean city and decades, if not centuries, of political corruption, Mediterranean detectives are confronted with a problematic urban environment, which they blame on political greed and laissez faire capitalism. Alongside this negative perception of urban development, through their work and private life, Mediterranean detectives attempt to resist a dominant culture of exclusion, and experience and build transcultural spaces where history and culture are shared. The Mediterranean detective feels a sense of belonging to the different communities that populate the Mediterranean city. By interacting with different people and ethnicities, and by inhabiting inter-class, transcultural and inter-ethnic places, the Mediterranean detective constructs an urban environment that overcomes stereotypical representations of the city as a dangerous and divisive place. Finally, this chapter shows that a focus on the Mediterranean Sea, as an ‘in-between’ space of both clashes and exchange, adds a new literary map in which traditional postcolonial distinctions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are overcome.

Chapter 5 argues that, because of the specific transcultural history and culture of the Mediterranean area, the Mediterranean crime novel articulates a criticism of prevalent ideas of homogeneous national identities that disregard complexity, and instead of unifying, fracture and alienate cultures and individuals. It contends that Mediterranean crime fiction contributes to the discourse on identity with a sophisticated, multilayered analysis that develops at three levels: national, postcolonial and supranational. What brings together these different discourses on identity and belonging is the theme of internal Orientalism, that is, the tendency of nations or regions to view the cultures and religions to some of their parts ‒ typically the South and East ‒ as more conservative and primitive. As this chapter argues, building on a discourse started in Chapters 1 and 3, the Mediterranean novel reflects the discriminatory cultures and practices of the nation-state and advocates for inclusion. In so doing, they provide a counter-narrative to the current political moment in Europe and in the world, which is marked by stasis, borders and exclusion.

This chapter examines the problem of the region in world crime fiction – the extent to which a regional approach to crime fiction offers a way of moving between the national and global. It focusses on the Mediterranean and what is called Mediterranean or Southern European noir and examines works by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Andrea Camilleri and, more pointedly, the Mexican writers Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It seeks to tease out the complications produced, first, by attempts to locate what is distinctively Mediterranean in Mediterranean noir, and second, by attendant moves to distinguish between different taxonomies of geographical and political space. Attention is paid to the fusion of cultures central to and produced by an understanding of the Mediterranean as matrix and to the ways this cultural mixing has also been exploited by organized crime networks for profit. However, to fully interrogate the place and problem of the region in world crime fiction, and to tease out its political possibilities, this chapter looks at the complex entanglements between texts, readers, publishers and contexts, and hence new ways of doing critique.