The opening article examines homicide trends in Finland and 33 other countries since 1955, with a focus on the extent to which the Finnish homicide data and trends converge or diverge from similar trends elsewhere. Compared with other industrialized European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, Finland has a higher homicide rate, but homicide rates during the past decades have increased much less than those of Finland's Scandinavian neighbors. Another paper examines patterns of criminal homicide in Finland for 1960-1997, which provides a broad descriptive profile of Finnish homicide and changes that have occurred during the last decades. Using a unique comparative database, a third paper shows that homicide that occurs in the context of other crime is much more prevalent in the United States than in Finland. The authors conclude that it would be premature, in terms of both criminological theory and public policy, to view lethal violence as a problem entirely independent of other crime. A paper then discusses the regional variations as well as the psychosocial background factors of Finnish homicide in 1980-1999. The main thesis is that the overall analyses of Finnish homicide rates have largely neglected the fact that crime is significantly unevenly distributed across the country, with the homicide rate being much higher in the northern and eastern parts of the country. A historical analysis of the homicide wave in Finland from 1905 to 1932 addresses the core of the Finnish homicide issue by establishing the fact the Finland's exceptional international position vis-a-vis the homicide rate has a short history. The final paper widens the scope of the issues from lethal violence to less severe forms of violent crime, as it presents a profile of the development of assault offenses in 1950-97. In the model used, the public consumption of alcohol was of overriding importance as a factor in explaining changes in reported crime. References accompany each paper.