Introduction to Green Letters: Crime Fiction and Ecology

Abstract

Since its rise in the mid-nineteenth century, crime fiction has been highly responsive to developments in science and technology, including forensics, photography, telecommunications and computing. The quintessential detective figure has, to paraphrase Stephen Knight, been invested with authority to wield new technologies and new ways of knowing the social order, in order to contain deviancy and assuage social anxiety. In the long history of crime fiction, threats to the social order have necessarily changed, and so too have the powers and responsibilities of detectives. Sensitive to the shifting nature of capitalism and the state system, writers of detective fiction have also responded to new forms of political and social organisation, and to demands for representation emerging in postcolonial and post-industrial contexts. Now, in an era of widescale environmental crisis, the detective's reassuring and restorative functions must, once again, be reconsidered. This special edition of Green Letters offers ecocritical readings of crime narratives, and also reflections on ecocritical theory and environmental philosophy informed by detective fiction. The authors take up Patrick Murphy's suggestion that ecocritics should study 'nature-oriented mystery novels. .. in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction' (Murphy 2009, p. 119). However, they also demonstrate that crime fiction is not only a benchmark of how effectively a specialist knowledge has been popularised. Crime fiction is a form of specialist knowledge in its own right, with its own distinct contributions to make to cultural understandings of human-nature relations and environmental crisis. Within ecocriticism, the figure of the detective is richly suggestive. Whether as a singular or collective agency, the detective has been constructed as a figure capable of perceiving systematicity and apprehending totality. Emerging from the crowded conditions of the nineteenth century metropolis, canonical figures like Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes perform an epistemological function: transforming the chaotic multiplicity of the city into a series of links in a chain, leading back to a verifiable 'truth'. But in the face of their overwhelming responsibilities, the detective figure has often become distributed, collective, cyborg, even liquid. In postmodern crime narratives, such as the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) franchise, the detective function is fragmented into a team of specialist investigators equipped with military grade, nascent and often fictional technologies, capable of penetrating the mysteries of the most obtuse crime scenes. The 'detective', now a composite figure, has access to and is implicated in a globalised network of surveillance, data gathering and analysis. Literary detectives, of course, have not only guarded against social deviance, but have held multiple positions and narrative functions. We have the detective as villain; as accomplice; as disrupti...

Breaking the Silence

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Polar Bear in 'Fortitude'. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change

“…Ecological catastrophes do not confine themselves to national borders, and this trend is detectable for example in recent television crime series that address the cross-national connections and impacts of ecology-related crimes from a local vantage point. A number of television series such as the Swedish-Danish Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011-2018, the Finnish Tellus (2014), the Swedish Jordskott (2015-2017), the Finnish Karppi (2018), the Danish Bedraeg (Follow the Money, 2016) and the Swedish Thin Ice (2020) target ecological crimes with crossnational impacts and address ethical questions in the contexts of ecoterrorism, normative humanity and ruthless profit-seeking in the energy business.…”

CrimateFiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place

“…Murphy has a somewhat limited view of crime fiction, seeing the genre as a mere vehicle for articulating environmental concerns to a popular audience. More recent scholarship, however, has sought to understand not only the emergence of these concerns in crime fiction but also the ways in which generic conventions can shape our perceptions of the environment (Trexler 13; Walton and Walton 1). Critics like Lucas Hollister and Marta Puxan‐Oliva, for example, note that while the genre’s conventions—“frames of intelligibility, … temporal and spatial delimitations, … actantial and narrative causalities, and … definitions of violence”—are seemingly “incompatible with or useful to contemporary ecological thought” (Hollister 1012), these conventions can also provide a “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” (Puxan‐Oliva 362).…”