From Mobile Crimes to Crimes of Mobility

Piipponen, Mäntymäki and Rodi-Risberg suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. They propose that such mobilities and crossings reflect on recent sociocultural developments on local and global levels and communicate specific geopolitical anxieties. They position their own mobilities research perspective within existing crime fiction scholarship, especially within the so-called transnational and spatial turns. Introducing some key observations of mobilities research, they suggest that mobility can be considered both as an object of study in its own right and a critical lens through which contemporary crime narratives can be examined. The chapter identifies several key areas where crime texts engage with types and practices of mobility to offer social critique: crimes across borders and global flows of capital; the means for expanding and curtailing human mobility; and generic exchange and especially the mobilisation of affect through genre hybridisation.