ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the genre is especially well-equipped to mark environmental problems as a result of crime, which makes it a unique tool not only for depicting and discussing ecological crises and abuses, but also for directly exposing the criminal acts they involve and their violent effects on people and the environment. It addresses the ways in which crime fiction authors engage with the environment in novels where environmental crime is a central theme and/or a means of interrogating genre boundaries. Crime novels may be helpful in updating discussion of the “wilderness”, or the “environmental imagination” of the wilderness, as Lawrence Buell puts it, by situating crimes within places such as forests, rivers, oceans, deserts or mountains. The local environmental project of digging wells resonates with and is infiltrated by the global toxic waste deposits beneath the desert, which are buried away from the world’s gaze, under the surface of a spectacular wilderness.
