Introduction: contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction / Paula Arvas and Andrew Nestingen -- Part I. Revisions of the socially critical genre tradition. 1. Dirty Harry in the Swedish welfare state / Michael Tapper -- 2. The well-adjusted cops of the new millennium: neo-romantic tendencies in the Swedish police procedural / Kerstin Bergman -- 3. Meaningless Icelanders: Icelandic crime fiction and nationality / Katrín Jakobsdóttir -- Digging into the secrets of the past: rewriting history in the modern Scandinavian police procedural / Karsten Wind Meyhoff -- Part II. Questions of place. 5. The place of pessimism in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series / Shane McCorristine -- 6. Gender and geography in contemporary Scandinavian television crime fiction / Karen Klitgaard Povlsen -- 7. Straight queers: Anne Holt's transnational lesbian detective fiction / Ellen Rees -- 8. Next to the final frontier: Russians in contemporary Finnish and Scandinavian crime fiction / Paula Arvas -- Part III. Politics of representation. 9. Swedish queens of crime: the art of self-promotion and the notion of feminine agency--Liza Marklund and Camilla Läckberg / Sara Kärrholm -- 10. High crime in contemporary Scandinavian literature--the case of Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's feeling for snow / Magnus Persson -- 11. Håkan Nesser and the third way: of loneliness, alibis and collateral guilt / Sylvia Söderlind -- 12. Unnecessary officers: realism, melodrama and Scandinavian crime fiction in transition / Andrew Nestingen.