Criminal Logistics

Abstract

This article investigates how globalized crime fiction is entangled in the infrastructural system of containerization and the production of our global age. My main examples are two widely circulated Danish contributions, namely Peter Høeg’s hybrid crime novel, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), and the TV-crime series, The Killing III (2012). Generally considered as contained by the regional moniker of “Nordic noir” these crime narratives can be seen to explore global “criminal logistics” (e.g. transportation networks, containerization, colonial administration, drugs and human trafficking, global capitalism) and their impact on the smaller local scales of states, families and victimized children. Conversely, with reference to David Simon’s The Wire (2002–8), the article considers how this “scale bending” between the local and the global is reproduced in the “down-sizing” of Ancient Greek myths and tragedies into the briefest but also most visible of citations on the hull of the ships at the centre of these transnational Danish crime narratives.