ABSTRACT
In post-apartheid South Africa, locally written crime fiction is one of the most popular ge+nres. Given its concurrence with democracy, criticism focuses largely on the form’s ability to reflect political transitions in the nation-state, and there has been little attention to ecology. This chapter maps out the use of ecology within crime plots in the past few decades and demonstrates the increasing hybridity of the genre demanded by a serious inclusion of environmental themes. The most hybridised texts interweave animal and human survival in a way that presents a new way of thinking about crime, the state and politics in a globalised world.
