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What changes when a crime story is set not in London or New York, but in Beirut, Cairo, Pietermaritzburg, or the Niger Delta? How do the postcolonial detectives conduct their work, combining local and native skill with western-borrowed police methods? How do they apply measures of truth-seeking under the yoke of authoritarian regimes, where access to knowledge is delimited by state power? We address these questions through a selection of postcolonial crime novels from/about the Global South: by Lebanese Elias Khoury, Egyptian Magdy El-Shafei, the Kenyan-American Mukoma wa Ngugi, the British James McClure, the Algerian-Italian Amara Lakhous, and Helon Habila from Nigeria.