The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology

Nathan Ashman is Lecturer in Crime Writing at the University of East Anglia and the author of James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction (2018). His research spans the fields of crime fiction, contemporary American fiction, and ecocriticism, with a particular specialism in the works of James Ellroy. He has published articles on numerous writers including Ross Macdonald, E.C. Bentley, Don DeLillo,Megan Abbott and Walter Mosley. His second book, James Sallis: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, is forthcoming.

Placing Crime Fiction and Ecology: An Introduction

Nathan Ashman

Part I: Space and Topography






Affect in Peter May’s Lewis and Harris Novels
Terry Gifford




"The Goshawk Did It": Nature Writing and Detection in Ann Cleeves’
The Crow Trap

Ian Kenny and Irina Souch




The Norfolk Saltmarsh: Elly Griffiths and Place in Contemporary Crime Fiction
Nicola Bishop




The Big Deep: The Ecological Turn in Nordic Noir
Michael Hinds and Tomas Buitendijk




Aesthetic Imaginaries of Nature and Nationhood in the Works of Arnaldur
Indriðason

Priscilla Jolly




Unsettlement, Climate and Rural/Urban Place-Making in Australian Crime
Fiction

Rachel Fetherston

Part II: Bodies and Violence




Pest Control: "Wasp Season" in Agatha Christie’s "The Blue Geranium"
Alicia Carroll




Green Machinations: Unknown Poison, Ecology and Female Criminal Agency in
L.T. Meade’s The Sorceress of the Strand

Caitlin Anderson




"Scorched Earth": Transgressive Bodies, Historic Criminality, and Colonial
Recursions in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

Malinda Hackett




"Animals Taking Revenge": Imagining Murder as an Ecological Encounter in
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Andrew Yallop




Protecting the Rhinos and Our Young Democracy: Nature and the State in
Post-Apartheid South African Crime Fiction

Colette Guldimann




"Look at Mother Nature on the Run": ‘The Troubles’ in Adrian McKinty’s Sean
Duffy Novels

Bill Phillips




Environmental Crime and the Dialectics of Slow and Divine Violence in
Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán

Rafael Andúgar

Part III: Epistemologies




"Holmes, that’s some Santa Claus shit": Reading Lydia Millet’s A Children’s
Bible as Ecological Crime Fiction

MaKenzie Hope Munson and Kevin Andrew Spicer




John D. MacDonald and the Advent of Ecocrime Fiction
Kristopher Mecholsky




Choking to Death: True Crime and the Great Smog
Anita Lam




"Every Crime Has its Peculiar Odor": Detection, Deodorization and Intoxication
Hsuan Hsu




In Paolo Bacigalupi’s Environmental Science Fiction, Immoral and Criminal are
not Synonymous

Patrick D. Murphy




From Crime Scene to Anthropocene in 2010s Argentinian Narrative
David Conlon




Ecologemes in Contemporary Australian Crime Fiction: The Case of Outback
Noir

Katrin Althans

Part IV: Criminality and Justice




Revising Crime in Fiction: An Environmental Invitation
Marta Puxan-Oliva




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

Rebecca Tillett




Environmental Racism and Post-Katrina Crime Fiction
Ruth Hawthorn




Seeking Environmental Justice: Muti in South African Crime Fiction
Felicity Hand




A Form of Wild Justice: Carl Hiaasen’s Deployment of Carnivalesque
Environmental Ethics and Moral Technology

Anna Kirsch




Environmental Concerns in Carl Hiaasen’s Crime Fiction
David Geherin




New Energy, Old Crime: Forms of Individual and Collective Responsibility
in Nordic Crimes Series

Leonardo Nolé

Part V: Energy, Globality and Circulation




"It Tasted Like Gasoline": The American Roman Noir and the Oil Encounter
in Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)

Nathan Ashman




Oil and the Hardboiled: Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy
of the American Century in Thomas King’s Cold Skies

Alec Follett




"The Whole World…Was a Gigantic Prison": Climate Crisis and Carceral
Capitalism in Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

Megan Cole




Reading Donna Leon as Mediterranean Noir
Valerie McGuire




The Circulation of Global Environmental Concerns: Local and International
Perspectives in the Verdenero Collection and Donna Leon’s Crime Fiction

Aina Vidal-Pérez




Magic Seeds and The Living Dead: Investigating Transnational Eco-Crimes

in Rajat Chaudhuri’s The Butterfly Effect

Damini Ray