ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is the first comprehensive examination of crime fiction and ecocriticism. Across 33 innovative chapters from leading international scholars, this Handbook considers an emergent field of contemporary crime narratives that are actively responding to a diverse assemblage of global environmental concerns, whilst also opening up ‘classic’ crime fictions and writers to new ecocritical perspectives. Rigorously engaged with cutting-edge critical trends, it places the familiar staples of crime fiction scholarship – from thematic to formal approaches – in conversation with a number of urgent ecological theories and ideas, covering subjects such as environmental security, environmental justice, slow violence, ecofeminism and animal studies. The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is an essential introduction to this new and dynamic research field for both students and scholars alike.

chapter |11 pages

Placing Crime Fiction and Ecology

An Introduction

part I|78 pages

Space and Topography

chapter 2|13 pages

The Goshawk Did it

Nature Writing and Detection in Ann Cleeves' The Crow Trap

chapter 3|13 pages

The Norfolk Saltmarsh

Elly Griffiths and Place in Contemporary Crime Fiction

chapter 4|12 pages

The Big Deep

The Ecological Turn in Nordic Noir

part II|86 pages

Bodies and Violence

chapter 7|12 pages

Pest Control

“Wasp Season” in Agatha Christie's “The Blue Geranium”

chapter 8|12 pages

Green Machinations

Unknown Poison, Ecology and Female Criminal Agency in L.T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand

chapter 9|13 pages

“Scorched Earth”

Transgressive Bodies, Historic Criminality, and Colonial Recursions in Louise Erdrich's The Round House

chapter 10|11 pages

“Animals Taking Revenge”

Imagining Murder as an Ecological Encounter in Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

chapter 11|12 pages

Protecting the Rhinos and Our Young Democracy

Nature and the State in Post-Apartheid South African Crime Fiction

chapter 12|12 pages

“Look at Mother Nature on the Run”

‘The Troubles’ in Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy novels

part III|87 pages

Epistemologies

chapter 14|12 pages

“Holmes, That's Some Santa Claus Shit”

Reading Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible as Ecological Crime Fiction

chapter 16|12 pages

Choking to Death

True Crime and the Great Smog

chapter 17|13 pages

“Every Crime has its Peculiar Odor”

Detection, Deodorisation and Intoxication

chapter 20|13 pages

Ecologemes in Contemporary Australian Crime Fiction

The Case of Outback Noir

part IV|91 pages

Criminality and Justice

chapter 21|15 pages

Revising Crime in Fiction

An Environmental Invitation

chapter 22|13 pages

Criminal Violences

The Continuum of Settler Colonialism and Climate Crisis in Recent Indigenous Fiction

chapter 24|13 pages

Seeking Environmental Justice

Muti in Southern African Crime Fiction

chapter 25|13 pages

A Form of Wild Justice

Carl Hiaasen's Deployment of Carnivalesque Environmental Ethics and Moral Technology

chapter 27|10 pages

New Energy, Old Crime

Forms of Individual and Collective Responsibility in Nordic Crime Series

part V|78 pages

Energy, Globality and Circulation

chapter 28|15 pages

“It Tasted Like Gasoline”

The American Roman Noir and the Oil Encounter in Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)

chapter 29|13 pages

Oil and the Hard-Boiled

Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy of the American Century in Thomas King's Cold Skies

chapter 30|12 pages

“The Whole World … Was a Gigantic Prison”

Climate Crisis and Carceral Capitalism in Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room

chapter 32|13 pages

The Circulation of Global Environmental Concerns

Local and International Perspectives in the Verdenero Collection and Donna Leon's Crime Fiction

chapter 33|12 pages

Magic Seeds and the Living Dead

Investigating Transnational Ecocrimes in Rajat Chaudhuri's The Butterfly Effect