John D. Macdonald and the Advent of Ecocrime Fiction

There is no obvious lineage for ecocrime fiction as there is for some other subgenres of fiction. Nevertheless, characteristics of John D. MacDonald’s fiction reveal indebtedness to a few eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary trends that contribute to the rise of ecocrime fiction in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In particular, MacDonald’s crime fiction, in which his ecological concerns surfaced, seems to derive most directly from two traditions related through anxiety over urbanisation and industrialisation: the Western genre and naturalism. In his work, MacDonald tempers the Western’s Romantic influence on ecocrime fiction (as it stemmed from crime fiction at the turn of the century) with a fatalistic Greco-Calvinist attitude.