Scandinavian countries have gone from mostly importing crime fiction to being, in the twenty-first century, the genre’s lead exporters. The chapter considers this transnationalization from three perspectives, showing how Scandinavian crime writing adapts international genres to local concerns, how notable examples of the genre engage with the wider world, and how novels and TV series circulate within transnational networks. It argues that Scandinavian crime fiction is bound up with transnational and transmedial networks of influence, appropriation and innovation. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s procedurals reflect popular geopolitics while their proto-typical Scandinavian cop longs for a Swedish welfare utopia. Cross-border crimes in works by Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and Peter Høeg critique global structures of social and racial inequality and challenge the demarcation between the local and the global. More recent global bestsellers by Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø employ hybrid genres to tell stories of a globalizing world where the relationship between the welfare state and global neoliberalism, and between the bounded nation and an increasingly transnational world are key ingredients.

This chapter discusses Nordic innovation and its sources, in particular, Nordic educational system(s). A special emphasis is placed on cultural products like Nordic Noir novels and Nordic food and coffee. The Third Wave coffee industry, which appears to have originated in the region, is a particularly fascinating case study of technical competence combined with social consciousness that characterizes the Nordic Model.

This chapter investigates the uses to which climate is put in a range of Nordic noir novels and films. In the majority of such texts, climate functions as both a feature of particular locales (usually, the stark meteorological and ecological settings associated with the Nordic lands) and a way to emphasise or otherwise give aesthetic expression to human actions. Strikingly, however, a small number of texts could be identified as what Linda Rugg terms ‘ecocrime’ fiction. In these, non-human nature appears as an actant in its own right, for it figures as the victim of crime. However, criminal investigation in these texts is displaced from non-human to human victims, thus deferring inquiry into the non-human and underlining non-human nature as an aporia of meaning or as the site of trauma.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.