Right now librarians in Britain are reporting an upsurge in the borrowing of crime novels - seven out of ten of the books most borrowed last year were crime titles; booksellers - it is true of all Europe - are catering to an unprecedented interest in the genre; and British publishers have begun to follow the lead of their Dutch and Scandinavian colleagues in shaping lists within lists for crime writers in order to meet this demand. Statistically Britain is a long way behind Europe in the sales of certain crime writers. In the tiny book market that is Norway Karin Fossum's novels sell prodigious numbers of copies; Henning Mankell's books regularly sell 300,000 copies in Sweden, as also by the million in Germany. Fred Vargas' novels sell 650,000 copies in France. The signs are that readers in Britain are alive to the riches that await them in translation. Nevertheless the British Crime Writers Association (CWA) took a bold decision in the autumn of 2005. Writers in translation would no longer be eligible for the CWA's principal award, until then the Gold Dagger. On the very day the ban was announced the last Gold Dagger was awarded to Arnaldur Indridason's Silence Of The Grave, translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. Arnaldur's fictions are prodigiously clever, dramatic, gripping, psychologically acute and they strip away one narrative assumption, as also one preconception of Icelandic life, after the other. The reviewer of the book in the splendid (and now embattled) Ottakars bookshop chain in-store magazine described it as ‘not just a great crime thriller, but an excellent piece of fiction that can hold its own against the best of any genre’.

Arnaldur's winning book is translated by an English poet who has lived for 30 years in Iceland and is married to an Icelandic academic, yet one reason for the ban was given by a CWA committee member as being (so friends of his had told him) that much was lost in the translation of foreign crime novels. In spite of this perceived general failing, four writers chosen by the CWA jury for the shortlist of six were foreign, a strange thing, perhaps the too-provocative thing. Of the four writers in translation one was published by Bitter Lemon Press (Friedrich Glauser) and three by Harvill Secker (Arnaldur, Fossum and Vargas).

It was also complained of that the competition for the Gold Dagger was in danger of being hijacked by writers from abroad, and it is true that in the previous four years Henning Mankell's Sidetracked and Cuba's Jos Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders had also won the top prize. Not a few of the best critics of the genre, those, that is, who have read widely in both English-language and translated crime writing, take the view that the foreign crime writer is simply not ignorable. The sagest of these critics, Marcel Berlins, wrote: ‘It is no fluke that so many crime novels by other European crime writers are occupying shortlists and winners' podiums. The best of them are very good indeed. What is sad is that the CWA has reacted to the new realities... by, in effect, accepting that if we can't win the prize in fair competition, we'll just eliminate some of those who might beat us. That can only devalue an award that, up to now, has been considered one of the two highest international tributes to crime fiction.’

The membership of the CWA seemed not to have been consulted and the decision was widely criticised. A poll taken by the trade paper the Bookseller found for the opponents of the ban by a very striking margin. The new sponsor of the next year's prize, Duncan Lawrie, a private bank, was quite wrongly supposed to have been instrumental in bringing about the ban. Duncan Lawrie have indeed gone some way to repair the damage that the ban does by creating in addition to the new premier award (which originally was to have replaced all the assorted Daggers) a separate award for translated crime writers. At £5000, with an additional £1000 to the translator, it is worth a quarter of the prize to the premier award winner, more than the old Gold Dagger, and yet manages to be an anomaly, an affront even, which the bank will in time perhaps see fit to mend.

The new English-only prize will endeavour to concentrate the attention of booksellers on the English-only shortlist; foreign crime writers and their publishers will be grateful for the lesser prize; and the readers will have to make up their minds which winner to choose.

Publishers will tell you that some of their best literary authors have, within the last decade, turned to crime. Karin Fossum began her literary career as a poet, Fred Vargas is an archaeological historian, and also a literary wit; 15 years ago Henning Mankell was a playwright and the emerging author of outstanding literary novels set in Africa, one of which, The Eye of the Leopard, a Swedish critic has described as the finest post-war Swedish novel. And even as fine writers in Scandinavia have begun to explore the field of crime writing, so their books have earned the collaboration of the finest translators not only in Germany, Holland and France, but in Britain too.

The verdict of the reviewer who judged Arnaldur's fiction to be the match of any in any other genre underlines the need for translations of the best possible quality in a genre which has not been taken seriously by some readers, by many critics, often unfairly. Over the past three decades Harvill have translated literature from 34 languages; our translators have won a great many prizes and almost invariably critical acclaim. The in-house editors have most often been translators themselves, notably Guido Waldman and Euan Cameron. I am utterly persuaded that a crime writer deserves the best translator a publisher can commission. Fred Vargas' first two novels to be published in English were translated by David Bellos, head of the French department at Princeton, the third by Professor Sian Reynolds; Henning Mankell is translated by two academics, Laurie Thompson, now retired from teaching, in Britain, and Ebba Segerberg in America.

Indisputably the translator is a book's best reader. Richard Ford, the American literary novelist, describes his exchanges with his translators as sacred texts, and yet some translators exchange almost nothing with an author, and some authors swiftly reach the point of being forced to do without those sacred texts by dint of having 25 translations to answer questions about - had they the time and the ability - and 25 foreign publishers who would be grateful if you would come and promote your new (the one you wrote three years ago) title in their countries.

Harvill began to publish their European crime list almost inadvertently. In the late 1980s we were publishing some of the best English-language crime writers and thriller writers, some of the best storytellers too: Martin Cruz Smith, Gerald Seymour, George MacDonald Fraser. And then we shared with Roger Straus in New York Peter Hoeg's novel - also on the basis of readers' reports. In truth we had no conception of the commercial success that was in store for the book. We persuaded ourselves that whatever else we might achieve with the publication it would be striking a blow for Danish literature. Every modest expectation was shattered: Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow sold more than a million copies on each side of the Atlantic, sells still, ten years later. It was a book deeply liked, I felt, and sold by word of mouth. It also revived the attention of readers, and publishers, in the English-speaking world to the work of other writers in Scandinavia. Two decades had passed since the last success of Sjovall and Wahloo, the famous Swedish creators of Martin Beck, the grim and alcoholic predecessor of a platoon of following grim and alcoholic detective inspectors, usually dour, often alone in the world, generally having alarmingly unsatisfactory eating habits. Miss Smilla, amateur detective, fierce scholar, dauntless seeker after truth, had no such flaws, although she had eccentricities of her own, to be sure, and will be remembered for them for a very long time.

In the same season as we published Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow we published Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement, and then out of sheer admiration republished his oeuvre in Harvill paperback editions. As a young reader I had read a great many Simenon novels. Japrisot seems to me to have had greater gifts, greater range too. One Deadly Summer, not a straightforward crime novel, though a novel about a crime, seems to me one kind of masterpiece and The Girl In The Car With The Glasses And The Gun a classic crime story of a very different ambition.

If European crime fiction is attractive to British and American readers now in part it must be the attraction of the unfamiliar location, the unfamiliar politics. Petros Markaris' stories of municipal corruption in a brilliantly-rendered Athens are infinitely more instructive and entertaining than the wearisome regurgitations of many-times digested plots of political and union warfare in North America. American publishers have begun, in step with British publishers albeit only in earnest in the last three years, actively to publish European crime writers.

The processes by which foreign writers come in to English is one of very many filters, but the crucial fact is that in translation from all the languages of the world there will only be a miniscule percentage (3% at the last reckoning and a scandalously inadequate percentage it is) of the 125,000+ titles published in Britain every year. If there is a grain of consolation in this humiliating indictment (it compares with, for example, circa 25% of French publications being in translation) it is that what is finally bought by a British or an American house has been through many readings, perhaps has been even more closely read than before its first publication. Harvill's readers have almost always been scholars of the language, by all means, but more importantly of the literature. And of the genre? The least important, because you are not trying to reproduce the routine crime novel.

You are sometimes tempted to suggest to an author that a degree more attention to forensic study and results would be appealing to a British readership well versed in these matters. Karin Fossum told me once that she had written a thousand or more pages of forensic ‘stuff’ but had thrown them away because ultimately they were not what interested her about the case. She has proved the wisdom of writing her own books in her own way over and over. It is what gives her a huge following throughout Europe.

Harry Willetts, Solzhenitsyn's favoured translator, was Harvill's best reader, fluent in 14 languages. He read crime novels for us in many languages because they amused him. Probably he would have at once picked Peter Hoeg, but he had no time to learn Danish, he said. The very few books that survive the filtering by English-language editors are, almost by definition, the best of the best. And not the least of the committee of readers a publisher has is the group of European publishers with whom he most often works and with whom he shares his reports, his experience. And beside those publishers are a most valuable group of national bodies, the Swedish Institute, the Goethe Institute, the French Institute, Norwegian Literature Abroad, The Dutch Foundation for the translation of their literature, and their equivalents in almost every country. There is no limit to the attention that these bodies give to the needs of translating publishers, along with subventions to help with the cost of the translations.

Fred Vargas’ Commissaire Adamsberg and Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer, Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Arnaldur’s Erlendur direct their investigations and their teams in ways that each of the others would recognise but would not necessarily approve and temperamentally could not themselves adopt. For the habitual reader of crime fiction this sort of variation of technique in an investigation, as in the context, is a pleasure, one that grows with familiarity.

What gives the publisher pleasure is that a reader in New Brunswick or Kerala, or anywhere in the English-speaking world sees unfolding an intricate pattern of another way of life altogether, accepts as read the crime the familiar starting point, nothing foreign about crime but learns another place, another set of manners, another society. When one day the BBC makes a television series of Henning Mankells novels they will make them in Ystad, in Skåne southern Sweden, and Wallanders very pretty adopted seaport will become as known to us as Morse’s Oxford is to the wide world, perhaps more so since the real Oxford hardly exists in the television series of Colin Dexters creation. Karin Fossum’s city is a city in her mind alone, and Fred Vargas Paris, she says, is no, not at all a character in her novels. Not many cities in 20th century literature are as vivid as Chandlers L.A. or John D. MacDonalds Fort Lauderdale. Carl Hiaasen, the American crime writer on the 2005 CWA shortlist, said of MacDonald (the last of whose Travis McGee novels I published at Collins in the early 1980s) that he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-centre, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty. When MacDonald died, Hiaassen wrote, millions of fans world-wide wondered what would become of Travis McGee. Not me, I wondered what would become of Florida.  

It is one feature of crime books much less common in literary fiction that the hero and the setting survive from book to book to feed the appetite or the addiction of the reader. Thus it is that readers adopt the detectives whose cases they follow. Henning Mankell tells the story of being stopped in the street in Stockholm by a man who wants to know: How will Inspector Wallander be voting in the referendum on Sunday? An English bookseller told me that she wanted, whenever he were next in London, to meet Henning Mankell so that she could sew on his buttons, see that he got a square meal and a good night's rest.

Our own rules, as it were, for a crime novel at Harvill came to be, first, that it had to be in translation, second that it involved a crime and that the crime was (more or less) solved by a police detective and a team with all the modern supporting services, unravelling a crime, not necessarily unravelling it successfully - Wallander's investigations are very often solved by the reader (at the author's arranging) long before Wallander catches up. Karin Fossum has intriguingly left one investigation not wholly resolved.

John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee would have failed on both counts. I don’t know how many private-eye novels there are nowadays. It is one of those genres that rise and fall in popularity, as do certain kinds of thriller without the central element of the mystery of a crime unravelled, as did the cold war novel, which was once very regularly at the top of the bestselling tree.

It has been our habit to preserve in the translation as much of the context, the warf and the weft, intact. Street names should stay the same, as if on a map, and if a city or a countryside is not an invention there is a strong case for adding a map to orientate the reader. We made it a rule to put all translations into ‘English English’, even those undertaken by American translators. Nowadays it is a straightforward business, using disks, to turn sidewalks into pavements and if the pavements in question begin their lives in European cities then pavements they must in English be, at least in Britain.

I think that from time to time a text has gained in translation. This may be because the prospect of an English language version will have tempted the author to muse once more about this or that loose end, this or that detail, to recognise that the English translation is one that may be counted second in importance to the original, because quite often more easily read by editors in other countries, more than Finnish, or Greek, or Tibetan. The books may already have been bought on the basis of a reader's report, but an English version will simplify the process. It works in the other direction that an English editor will generally more gladly read a German or French or Italian translation of a Hungarian text, for example, than rely solely on a reader's verdict. The collaborations that flourish between publishers, not all of crime fiction, do much to extend the reach of our writers, all of whom by definition are writers in translation. It has always been our practice to seek to plant these writers in as many languages as possible, to give to our readers not simply a publication in the world’s largest language but the chance to find readers in as many languages as possible.

Christopher MacLehose is publisher and editor at Harvill Secker and recently won the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievment Award in International Publishing.