The popular genre of crime fiction not only reflects, but also shapes the prevailing perceptions of criminals in a certain culture. In order to yield a thorough historical understanding of literary (and social) imaginations of criminality and social class, as well as the ways in which these are determined by cultural and ideological contexts of production, I propose to compare representations of criminals and social class in British crime stories and their Dutch-language translations, in two ideologically opposed Flemish newspapers (the Catholic paper ‘Het Volk’ and the socialist paper ‘Vooruit’). I will focus on the 1920s and 1930s, the Golden Age of detective fiction. My project will start with culturalhistorical and institutional research into the contexts the translations were published in. A digital alignment of all source and target texts will then provide a macrostructural indication of the intercultural and intermedial adaptations. Lastly, Schneider’s theory of literary character will be used to compare the representations of criminal characters in terms of their social class: culturally, between the English target and Dutch source texts, and ideologically, between the feuilletons in 'Het Volk' and 'Vooruit'. This project contributes to the growing research into crime fiction translation, but adds a uniquely systematic focus on the cultural and ideological imaginations of criminality and social class, thereby highlighting the genre's capacity for social critique.