Abstract: Translated novels (Eastern thrillers, and Western thrillers about Eastern Europ) draw attention to the way in which cultural encounters are evoked in this foreign literary production : 1/ the embodiment of the status of the passer-by; 2/ the use of cross-cultural clichés; 3/ the universes in which the plots impose cross-cultural encounters (in the East? in the West?); 4/ the powerful generic magnetism of the Anglosphere. On the one hand, Eastern novels are a tiny proportion of the novels translated into French. On the other hand, they are distributed between two poles: their national universe and their desire to join a globalization of criminal narrative fiction.