ABSTRACT
Art, news and entertainment cultures all converge in a contemporary mediascape where unseen places and unknown actions unfold for viewers around the globe as a part of everyday life through films, posters, books, images or news reports, in print or on screen. This chapter explores how crime fiction narratives – based on paratextual source material – present themselves on the transnational book market. Paratextual validation is about positioning the novel within the crime fiction genre as a whole, vouching for its quality and uniqueness as well as for its belonging to a genre with a long heritage. The pre-eminent theorist of paratextuality is French narratologist Gerard Genette whose seminal Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation analyses the complex relationship between the production of literature and its institutional and cultural contexts. An important aspect of paratextual validation is the framing of a novel within a certain aesthetic that enables the reader to identify the work as a crime novel.
