Is There such a Thing as a Hungarian Nordic Noir?

In Hungary, the last few years were witness to an increasing appropriation of Nordic Noir aesthetics. Books, films and a television series were written and produced under a ‘Scandinavian’ crime label on this small-scale market, adapting, relatively late, the bestselling genre of the last two decades. Our aim is to situate this tendency in the context of Hungarian creative industries by underlining the most important discursive elements involved in the remediation of Hungarian crime stories within a “network of similarities” (García-Mainar 2020) with Nordic Noir. An investigation of the paratexts of these cultural products sheds light on the main idea behind the creation of those different mediatic appropriations: in Hungary, a market where the crime genre has had, and still has, a difficult and discontinuous affirmation, adopting the label of a globally successful (sub)genre may help crime fiction through its process of cultural institutionalization.