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.

Chapter 4 argues that by being imbued with a complex transnational identity that predates the formation of the current nation-states, the Mediterranean detective investigates the processes of democracy and rhetoric of nationhood from a disenchanted perspective. A common history of colonialism, dictatorship and a difficult transition to democracy have spurred Mediterranean crime authors to problematise periods of political uncertainties during which Mediterranean peoples had to adjust to a recently gained liberty and overcome the trauma of dictatorship. Typically, through the investigative act, Mediterranean narratives highlight an historical ‘short circuit’, related to the passage from different forms of dictatorship to democracy, which has lasting effects in terms of illegality and corruption on the present. Indeed, these narratives imply that the disturbances of the present day can only be understood in reference to the events that led to a flawed decolonisation or democratisation. This chapter also shows how some authors return to the very origin of the new state and expose the violence, illegality and exclusionary practices that lay at the core of their foundation.

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.

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.