Abstract
Crime Fiction has been very popular among Europeans and Americans since the nineteenth century. However, the situation in the Arab world is not the same, and the intrigue and suspense known to the genre fail to engage Arab writers and readers. Critics have dedicated little attention to find out why the lack of appetite to write or read crime fiction in this part of the world, despite the abundance of Arabic translations of Victorian and classic crime novels. Employing both the comparative and historicism approaches, the paper aims to unravel the reasons behind Arab writers and readers. disinterest in the genre. It seems that the matter is not unrelated to culture, political, social, educational, and philosophical reasons, which indicates even deeper distinctions between east and west. This paper can be a small part of a bigger body of self-suggesting research, part of which is to explore the recent rise of noir, hardboiled novels, and film in Arabic literature, which comes in correspondence to the bloody unrest in the region since the "Arab Spring". Such is among several literary phenomena calling for further research and deeper investigation.