‘A Sense of Planet’: World Crime Fiction and the Imagination of Place

To describe crime fiction as a global literary genre may appear somewhat of a truism. Crime fiction is produced, sold and consumed on a significant scale in almost every country in the world, making it one of the most widely read and universally recognised forms of popular literature. It is the discernibility of its conventions and themes that has no doubt seen it develop into a type of international literary language, one through which specific national or regional examinations of crime, justice and the law can be readily interpreted and understood by a wider global audience. The genre is also highly mobile, consistently crossing borders and moving away from its various centres of production through the mechanisms of international publishing, translation and adaptation. It is this very merging of ‘familiar forms’ with unfamiliar or ‘exotic’ content that has become one of the ‘major selling points of global crime writing’, with crime narratives increasingly emerging as the newest forms of travel literature (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 1). As Eva Erdmann (Reference Erdmann, Krajenbrink and Quinn2009) notes: ‘On the map of the world there are hardly any areas uncharted by crime fiction, hardly any places that have not yet become the setting for a detective novel’ (13). Crime fiction criticism, however, has been comparatively slow in catching up with the genre’s global expansion. Scholarship has traditionally tended to substantiate a particular fixed chronology of the genre’s historical development, prioritising a foundational canon of Anglo-American texts (typically from writers such as Poe, Doyle, Christie and Chandler) and a particular set of allied literary traditions and forms (such as the locked room mystery and the hard-boiled, police procedural). Subsequent attempts to dismantle this entrenched ‘grand narrative’ of the genre’s development have therefore looked to deprioritise anglophone literatures, with excellent studies being produced on a variety of crime fiction narratives from competing literary traditions and locales. Whilst such works have certainly been successful in highlighting that the history and development of the genre is more complex and entangled than previous narrativisations have suggested, in doing so they have tended to construct ‘their own national canons’ in a manner not dissimilar from the very ‘Anglo American “centre”’ they are attempting to dismantle (Stougaard-Nielsen, Reference Stougaard-Nielsen and Allan2020, 75). In other words, much scholarship remains ‘largely committed to the idea of national literatures’ and scholars working on such literatures tend not to place them in the context of ‘broader global debates’ (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 3). This is, to a large extent, expressive of the deeper role crime fiction has played in the imagining and cultural construction of place. Formally emerging as a response to the rapid urban and industrial developments of the nineteenth century – as well as to the broader epistemic anxieties of empire – the genre offered its readers new ways of mapping and overcoming the perceived unintelligibility of the modern metropolis. Key to this knowledge production was the figure of the detective, who, through their heightened capacity to interpret material and spatial signs, worked to establish connections between various ‘types’ of individual, thus ‘revealing (and making meaningful for the reader), the social, political, economic, cultural and physical places they inhabit’ (King, Reference King2021, 1238). Barbara Pezzotti (Reference Pezzotti2012) therefore positions the sleuth as an evolution of the flâneur, where the ‘idler’ transmutes into the ‘searcher, digging into urban space to find clues beneath the appearance of the metropolitan exterior’ (1). Yet, even beyond these specific urban incarnations of the genre, the focus on place, be it the city or the country house, has always been constitutive to crime fiction ‘as a locus of meaning’ (King, Reference King2021, 1238). In this sense, the crime novel is perhaps the most quintessentially territorialised of literary forms, bound, perhaps more than any other, by its typically limited temporal and spatial frames. As such, one might question the extent to which the relative paucity of material on the global crime novel (as a mode or style) is in fact reflective of the crime genre’s deeper ties to the histories and machinations of the ‘modern, bureaucratic state’ (Pepper, Reference Pepper2016, 1). How capable is the crime novel, in other words, of looking beyond the local, particularly if we treat the local as a ‘synecdoche of the state’ (Pepper & Schmid, Reference Pepper, Schmid, Pepper and Schmid2016, 1)?

Recent crime fiction criticism has endeavoured to contest this dominant focus on local/national traditions, advocating for a more comprehensive understanding of the genre that emphasises postcolonial, transnational and comparative reading practices. In their book Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Pepper & Schmid, Reference Schmid, Pepper and Schmid2016), Andrew Pepper and David Schmid argue that ‘the production, circulation, and translation’ of crime fiction has in fact ‘always been an inherently transnational phenomenon’ (1). At the same time, they also acknowledge that ‘it is only in the last twenty years’ that the genre has truly ‘mushroomed beyond the familiar scenes of its foundational texts (e.g., London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles)’, becoming, in the process, ‘a truly global literary genre’ (1). The effort to expand knowledge regarding the ‘transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape of contemporary culture’ is continued in the edited collection Crime Fiction as World Literature (Nilsson et al., Reference Nilsson and Nilsson2017, 2), which examines not only the interplay between the local and the global in contemporary crime narratives but also the ‘literary systems’ and marketing mechanics that allow for the genre’s global distribution and consumption (5). The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (Gulddal et al., Reference Gulddal2022) similarly examines the translation and circulation of crime fiction, bringing together texts from around the globe as part of a broader strategy to elucidate ‘a new global history of the crime novel’ (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 21). For two of the editors, Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King, it is the genre’s inherent adaptiveness that makes it particularly adept at giving textual shape to the ‘interconnectedness of the local, the national and the global that characterises today’s world’ (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 1). These claims are mirrored in Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (Gulddal et al., Reference Gulddal2019), which likewise attempts to offer a new account of the crime novel’s history through a reading practice that emphasises elements of mobility and exchange, albeit via a focus on predominantly Western canonical texts. Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection (Piipponen et al., Reference Piipponen2020b) concerns itself more with the specific social, economic and political repercussions of globalisation and transnationalism, and how these forces have influenced the ‘kind of social criticisms crime narratives offer in the contemporary era’ (Piipponen et al., Reference Piipponen and Piipponen2020a, 3). In a moment where crime is ‘increasingly conceptualised as networked and embedded in historical and transcultural contexts’, it examines the extent to which crime novels are adapting their particular formal arrangements in order to more accurately conceive of crime that is no longer spatially or temporally delimited (Piipponen et al., Reference Piipponen and Piipponen2020a, 3). This focus on the specific impacts of internationalisation and globalisation on contemporary crime writing is shared by Crime Fiction and National Identities in the Global Age (J. H. Kim, Reference Kim2020) and Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction (Krajenbrink & Quinn, Reference Krajenbrink and Quinn2009), but with a more specialised emphasis on questions of identity and nationhood.

What unites these works is an attempt to ‘deterritorialise’ crime writing by replacing the ‘traditional Anglocentric understanding’ of the genre with a new ‘openness to [its] infinite variability’ as a global literary form (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 22). This rests on a particular type of cosmopolitan/humanist rationale, where deterritorialisation implies the possibility of ‘new cultural encounters’ by virtue of the ‘increasing connectedness of societies around the globe’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 10). Through its reach and popularity, crime fiction is thus seen as ideally positioned to map new forms of planetary imagination that move beyond place-based understandings of identity and belonging. Whilst this approach therefore offers a valuable methodological framework through which to establish connections between crime novels from around the globe, what tends to be less clear is how, specifically, the conditions of globalisation have impacted the formal features or narrative arrangements that such texts now employ. What is the ‘global’ or ‘world’ crime novel, in other words, and how is it responding to, or mapping, these new transnational complexities within its traditionally territorialised narrative structures?

Here the field of world crime fiction studies can be seen to intersect with a broader debate around globalisation that has dominated social and cultural theory in the last decade, where the very question of ‘what cultural and political role attachments to different kinds of space might play, from the local and regional level all the way to the national and global, has assumed central importance’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 4–5). This has taken on particular prominence in environmentalist thought and writing, where discourses have ‘evolved in a field of tension between the embrace of, and resistance to, global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 21). Much like the theoretical shift away from national or place-based reading practices that has characterised much of the recent work on world crime fiction, ecocriticism, particularly in the US and the UK, has similarly looked to move on from an ‘older-style romantic humanist’ tradition that typically focused on the ‘local and on retrievals or affirmations of more supposedly “natural” or “ecological” modes of living’ (Clark, Reference Clark2019, 41). This has since been superseded by a new kind of ‘green cosmopolitanism’, one which tends to emphasise the deeply imbricated scalar relations between the local and the global (Clark, Reference Clark2019, 41). The transition from local to global perspectives is typified by the work of Ursula K. Heise, who, in her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Reference Heise2008), emphasises the need to develop a new kind of ‘world citizenship’ that builds on ‘recuperations of the cosmopolitan project in other areas of cultural theory’ (10). Without intending to necessarily deny the substantial role that local attachments can play in ongoing environmental discourses, Heise argues that much ecologically orientated thinking has still struggled to reconcile itself with one of the most significant aspects of contemporary understandings of globalisation: ‘namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture that are no longer anchored in place, in a process that many theorists have referred to as deterritorialisation’ (10). Whilst acknowledging that deterritorialisation, particularly when imposed ‘from the outside’, can precipitate a kind of destructive dislocation and loss that should be rightly apposed, Heise argues that it can simultaneously imply a ‘broadening of horizons’ that many ‘politically progressive movements’ have tended to support. For Heise, the continuing challenge for writers and critics is to envision an ‘ecologically based advocacy on behalf of the nonhuman world as well as on behalf of greater social environmental justice’, one that is centred no longer on a rootedness in local places but ‘in ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole’ (10). It is a critical perspective that shares many commonalties with Laurence Buell’s concept of ‘ecoglobalism’, a ‘whole-earth way of thinking and feeling about environmentality’ that similarly looks to think beyond nationness, recognising how seldom ‘jurisdictional borders correspond to ecological ones’ (Buell, Reference Buell, Dimock and Buell2007, 227).

Given the theoretical proximity between the field of world crime fiction studies and that of contemporary ecocriticism – namely via their shared focus on the meaning and political value of particular forms of spatial attachment – it is surprising how little attention has been paid to environmental or ecological questions in existing critical discourse on the contemporary crime novel, especially in the global context. To date, none of the extended critical works on international, postcolonial or world crime fiction explicitly engage with environmental injustices or climate violence as part of their broader examination of transnational crime and detection. This is all the more notable given that most environmental crimes tend to be eminently global in nature, frequently extending beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the nation-state. Global environmental change and globalisation are, after all, inextricably interlinked, frequently leading to situations of ‘double exposure’ where those impacted by the negative effects of one process will often simultaneously feel the negative effects of the other (Leichenko and O’Brien, Reference Leichenko and O’Brien2008, 4). This critical oversight can, in part, be contextualised in relation to the unique challenge that environmental crime poses to the genre’s traditionally constrained spatial, temporal and jurisdictional scope, not to mention its resistance to many existing frameworks of criminality, law and justice. In a moment where much of the world’s environmental damage is being undertaken ‘legally’ by governments and transnational corporations, to what extent does the crime novel need to reconsider ideas such as agency and criminality? How can justice be enacted when criminals are no longer deviant or perverse individuals but abstract, global powers? And how does the crime novel reconcile its conventional drive towards resolution and certainty with the paralysing uncertainty of our future? These are undoubtedly challenging questions, but questions that need to be urgently addressed if we are to bring the study of world crime fiction into a more constructive dialogue with some of the most significant environmental challenges of our time.

Ecological Crime Fiction: From the Local to the Global

As noted, it has been only in shorter critical works by the likes of Stewart King and Marta Puxan-Oliva that the ecological dimensions of global crime fiction (and vice versa) have been scrutinised to a significant degree. For these critics, it is precisely the crime novel’s augmenting production and circulation as a form of ‘world’ literature, not to mention the ostensible capaciousness of its literary forms, that makes it particularly well placed to map and narrate ‘the global environmental crisis’ (Puxan-Oliva, Reference Puxan-Oliva and Allan2020, 365). Outside of the comparative methodological frameworks that both critics utilise – in contrast to the kind of locally, regionally or nationally situated readings that have tended to dominate ecocritical crime criticism to date – what sets these works apart is their careful consideration of the particular aesthetic blueprints that such crime fictions use, and how these blueprints might ‘point to ways of imagining the global that frame localism from a globalist environmentalist perspective’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 9). By examining the numerous techniques via which the genre might imagine or theorise ‘entangled locations and worlds’, they suggest that we can come to a more comprehensive understanding of how crime narratives are collectively responding to the climate crisis on a global scale (Stougaard-Nielsen, Reference Stougaard-Nielsen and Allan2020, 81). This Element largely seeks to continue the excellent work that has already been undertaken by King and Puxan-Oliva, thinking further about the crime novel’s textual strategies for representing the deep enmeshment and interconnectedness of global environmental crises. Yet, unlike these studies – both of which unequivocally assume the crime novel’s ability to representationally encompass such entanglements due to its history of geographical mobility and stylistic adaptation – this Element will be far more tentative and circumspect in its approach. Instead, it will follow Andrew Pepper and David Schmid in suggesting that there are certain ‘foundational limits’ to the capacities of the crime novel to accommodate, and interrogate, the scales and complexities of the global climate crisis within the parameters of its ‘most typical form (e.g. a local police detective, or surrogate, investigating a single murder in a particular place)’ (2016, 8).

As a prelude to this, Section 1 will examine a selection of local ecological crime fictions, questioning what role these more geographically (and narratively) enclosed texts can still play in producing understandings of, and resistances to, ecological crimes and/or violences that extend beyond the borders of the nation-state. Analysing representations of the carbon economy in novels by Attica Locke and Fernanda Melchor, as well as the relationship between settler colonialism and environmental justice in indigenous crime narratives by Julie Janson and Thomas King, this section emphasises the role of the critic in establishing ‘continuities of experience’ between fictions that might otherwise be constrained by the boundaries of place, or their particular narrative arrangements (Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2016, 62). As such, and irrespective of the types of scalar resistance that the climate crisis poses to the crime novel, these local ecological crime fictions can still contribute meaningfully towards demystifying the opaque global forces that connect places, and lives, across time and space. This relationship between the local and the global constitutes the basis for Section 2, which analyses ecological crime narratives – by writers such as Jassy MacKenzie, Qiu Xiaolong, Antti Tuomainen and Donna Leon – that consciously shift between different spatial scales. Though acknowledging the ways in which these ‘glocal’ crime narratives ‘apply pressure to the traditional features of the genre in an attempt to make it more responsive to a rapidly globalizing world’ (Pepper & Schmid, Reference Pepper, Schmid, Pepper and Schmid2016, 12), it suggests that they offer somewhat inert responses to the planetary dynamics they reveal, inhibiting the forms of ‘eco-cosmopolitan awareness’ that they are able to cultivate (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 59). Whereas some of these texts express a reconstituted conviction in the power of the state to ‘resolve’ global eco-capitalist threats or impending environmental disasters, others expose the state’s increasing ineffectuality and irrelevancy in the face of these very same pressures. The result is a somewhat stuttering confrontation between two visions of state power, neither of which is wholly successful in articulating forms of cross-cultural or global awareness. Nonetheless, these novels still point to the ways in which ecological crime narratives are attempting to develop new representational forms for conveying a ‘sense of planet’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 79). The final main section (Section 3) centres on hybridised forms of crime fiction, examining their capacity to generate more expansive ecological visions. Focusing on novels by Gabriela Alemán, Yun Ko-eun, Alexandra Kleeman and Jeff VanderMeer, it will interrogate not only how these texts enlarge the geographical and representational scope of the ‘realist’ crime novel but also how they disrupt the form’s dominant narratological orientation. Indeed, what separates these texts is a movement away from the crime novel’s typical concern with questions of guilt. In the process, they commit to radical, yet cautiously optimistic, visions of the future from within the otherwise volatile realities that they present, pushing the crime novel in new and potentially fruitful directions.

Of course, it may well be argued that the very existence of ecological crime fiction (in any form) is itself a cause for uncritical celebration, particularly in a world where conservative political forces are continually seeking to invalidate the material reality of the climate crisis. After all, does the genre’s framework of villains and victims, its tendency towards closure and resolution, not work to ground and/or humanise the crisis in some way, to make it less opaque and more digestible? Is there not value in this alone, especially given the genre’s broad global readership and its particular susceptibility to the sway of market forces? The answer is of course yes, but it is also myopic (perhaps even irresponsible) to argue that simply telling stories – without giving due consideration to how we tell them – is enough. Take Michael Crichton’s highly successful yet highly paranoid commercial eco-thriller State of Fear (Crichton, Reference Crichton2004), in which a cabal of fanatical eco-radicals and self-serving scientists conspire to manufacture climate change for their own ends. The novel has since played a significant role in popularising climate scepticism, with US Senator Jim Inhofe even making the novel required reading for the Senate Committee of Environment and Public Works, which he chaired between 2003 and 2007 (Trexler, Reference Trexler2015, 35–36). The way we tell stories does matter, and it would be a mistake to think that the crime novel need not adapt – formally and thematically – to confront the representational challenges posed by the global climate crisis, or need not rethink the meanings of justice, criminality and law in a world where such terms have taken on new and increasingly complex meanings.

Throughout this Element, I use the term ecological crime fiction not in reference to a subgenre of crime novels with a specific set of conventions or tropes but in allusion to a wider field of texts from across a range of geographical and historical locales, where ecological discourses may be latent, ambient or explicit within their formal and/or thematic content. In this sense, the ‘object’ of this form of criticism might be better understood as a particular methodological approach, a way of reading genre, rather than a select ‘corpus’ of literary texts (Heise, Reference Heise2013, 640). Whilst therefore acknowledging the long genealogy of ecological crime fiction, one that likely stretches back to at least the nineteenth century, this Element focuses exclusively on contemporary (post-millennial) texts. This is to reflect not only the ‘new global expansion’ of the crime genre over the last few decades but also the deepening forms of social, economic, political and ecological convergence that have unfolded during this high point of globalisation (Gulddal & King, Reference Gulddal, King and Gulddal2022, 2). This is similarly mirrored in my comparative methodological approach, which seeks to draw connections and commonalities between literary texts across temporal and geographical boundaries. As such, this Element aims to contribute towards the broader critical dismantling of the Anglo-American tradition of crime writing and criticism, placing emphasis not on the mode’s various subgenres and ‘subcomponents’ but on the ‘complexity and idiosyncrasies of the individual text’ (Allan et al., Reference Allan and Allan2020, 1). This includes a general movement away from considering crime fictions in the context of their distinct and separate national literary traditions, instead emphasising the global and transnational connections between works. As noted, the examination of local crime fictions, and the discussion of localism/local contexts, will still feature as part of this, but it will be situated within a broader exploration of ‘extra- and transnational forces of affiliation’ (King, Reference King2021, 1249).

Such an approach is not without its problems: my own linguistic limitations and the limited availability of translated texts have unavoidably directed the selection of narratives included here. Thus, whilst this Element contains a broad representation of ecological crime fictions from across the globe – including works from Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America and Oceana – there is still a far greater representation of anglophone literatures on display, particularly those produced in the United States and Continental Europe. And, of course, there is also the difficult subject of specialisation, which may well be deemed essential in order to appropriately investigate the scale of works and the range of socio-political, historical, literary and cultural contexts/traditions covered here. Yet, I follow David Damrosch (Reference Damrosch2018, 21) in arguing that we need not necessarily ‘face a strict either/or choice between total immersion and airy vapidity’ when constructing comparative dialogues. Rather, gathering a ‘full appreciation of world literature’ requires us to be ‘at once locally infected and translocally mobile’, which will be the aim of this study (Damrosch, Reference Damrosch2018, 21). Most significantly, my method is geared not towards the construction of a new history, tradition or subgenre of crime fiction but rather towards disrupting ‘fixed cannons’ by ‘forging fresh connections and mutually enriching links between disparate texts and traditions’, all with the aim of coming to a more complete understanding of how contemporary crime fictions are rising (or not) to the challenges posed by the global environmental crisis (Hutchinson, Reference Hutchinson2018, 4). In any case, if this Element does indeed contain limitations or oversights, as any study of this kind invariably does, it is my hope that, at the very least, it will be part of a larger conversation that pushes the study of crime fiction in new and vital directions.

‘This Has Everything to Do with Oil’: Crude Criminality in Black Water Rising and Hurricane Season

Locke’s Black Water Rising (Locke, Reference Locke2009) is a particularly prodigious example of a ‘local’ ecological crime novel that self-reflexively engages with the materialities of petro-capitalism within its thematic and formal content. Set in Houston, Texas, in 1981, the novel traces the combustible social and economic landscape of the nascent Reagan administration, where rising oil prices, growing financial inequalities and unstable labour relations are positioned as the inevitable consequence of a new and aggressive series of neoliberal reform policies, typified, most notably, by the removal of price controls on gasoline, propane and US-produced crude oil. Locke uses this broad historical canvas to trace the complex and ‘wide ranging entanglements of oil’ on various levels (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 133), revealing the ways in which, as protagonist and struggling lawyer/pseudo-detective Jay Porter later puts it, ‘this oil thing touches everything’ (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 417). Locke is particularly preoccupied with the obscured nature of oil, how its dispersed movements and disaggregated locations of extraction, production and consumption ultimately collude to stymie forms of collective resistance. As Stephanie LeMenager (Reference LeMenager2014, 132) suggests, Jay’s – and the text’s – quest is to demystify the complex and corrupt manoeuvrings underlying neoliberal economic structures by bringing them ‘back into public knowledge’, rebuilding the democratic principles of ‘civic space’ in the process. Yet the denouement to the text, which sees many of the narrative’s most powerful criminal agitators either frustrate or entirely escape the mechanisms of the law, reveals the limitations of traditional forms of the crime novel (and traditional forms of justice) in imagining resolutions that resist these multifaceted and far-reaching manifestations of power.

The tendrillic effects of petroleum energy are prefigured in the opening chapter of the text, when Jay surprises his pregnant wife Bernie with a birthday boat ride down the moonlit tributaries of the Buffalo Bayou. Looking out across the horizon of the swamp, Jay traces the movement of the polluted river – ‘black like oil’ – as it snakes through the ‘underbelly’ of the city, connecting ‘all the way out to the Ship Channel and the Port of Houston’ before eventually spilling out ‘into the gulf of Mexico’ (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 4). Whilst ostensibly symbolising the deep-seated corruption coursing through the veins of Houston’s political and economic institutions, this description of the bayou and its movements can equally be read as a material mapping of the viscous commodity flows of oil capital as it travels in and out of the city. This is fortified by the industrial sites of petroleum production that Jay sees crowding the skyline either side of the river, ‘mere clusters of blinking lights and puffs of smoke, white against the swollen charcoal sky’ (12). Locke is particularly interested in this relationship between petro-capitalism and the social/physical configurations of urban space, as underlined moments later when Jay hears the crack of a gunshot emanating from the direction of Fifth Ward: ‘one of the roughest neighbourhoods in the city’ (14). As Ryan Poll (Reference Poll and Kim2014, 176) suggests, Jay immediately assumes the particular typology of the crime – gang/street violence – owing to its proximity to an economically deprived and ‘predominantly African American’ region of the city. In this way, Locke quickly works to shape the reader’s ‘cognitive map’ of Houston’s stratified social space, underscoring the extent to which ‘crime must always be contextualised by a robust geographic imagination’ (Poll, Reference Poll and Kim2014, 176). Yet Jay is incorrect in his suppositions, as he realises when he pulls a terrified woman – ‘white and filthy’ – from the violent currents of the bayou (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 19). The presence of an expensively dressed white woman fleeing Fifth Ward brings the racial politics of the crime back into focus, prefiguring a central concern of the novel: ‘the persistence of racial segregation decades after Jim Crow culture ostensibly ended’ (Poll, Reference Poll and Kim2014, 176).

The legacies of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement enter the narrative most explicitly via flashbacks to Jay’s activist past, where we learn of his one-time affiliation with radical political organisations such as the SNCC and the Black Panthers. This culminated in a political rally where – before being detained as part of a COINTELPRO investigation – Jay intended to call for a ‘nationwide boycott of some of the biggest corporations in America’, particularly petrochemical companies like ‘Shell and Gulf Oil’ that were ‘continuing to benefit from a history of colonial and economic oppression of brown people’ (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 265). Jay’s subsequent arrest and narrow escape from incarceration signal the symbolic end of ‘counterculture radicalism’ in the United States, and come to define his present-day struggles to escape the country’s burdened racial history by conforming to a brand of middle-class, bourgeois respectability (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 132). Yet these inequalities continue to subsist in the stratified social arrangements that surround him, as typified by the racial tensions underscoring the fraught labour relations between the city’s striking stevedores. In one section, Jay describes money as ‘the new Jim Crow’ and nowhere is this more evident than in the permeating influence of petro-capitalism on the fraught political, economic and urban landscapes that the text reveals (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 75).

In Houston, ‘the fastest growing city in the country’, the text locates a potent geographical symbol of the rapid transformation of American life by the various manifestations of oil culture (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 36). Locke’s narrator notes how Houston has a ‘curious habit of razing its own history’, a point emphasised by the steel and glass high-rises – including the headquarters for Cole Oil – that now dominate the crowded downtown skyline, physically dwarfing other monuments of the city’s past, like the ‘squat limestone building’ of city hall. As Poll (Reference Poll and Kim2014, 191) suggests, what Locke sketches here is the emergence of a new ‘geographic history and symbolism’, where ‘oil capitalism has now eclipsed the power of the state’. The extent to which oil shapes the social and physical topographies of Houston is persistently underscored by Locke as the narrative progresses. We see this not only in the text’s various references to ‘specific sites of the oil economy’ – the Cole Oil refineries, the Houston Shipping Yard – but also in its ‘scenic descriptions’ of a more imbricated set of ‘petroleum infrastructures’, such as highways, gas stops and roadside eateries (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 133). Much like his hard-boiled antecedents, Jay’s investigative capacities are contingent on his automotive movement through the urban circuitry of the modern metropolis. Locke is hyperaware of her pseudo-detective’s deep imbrication in this crude oil commodity chain, as underscored by various scenes that depict Jay paying for gasoline at the pump, where his increasing financial precarity is articulated through the prism of rising fuel prices. In the process, Jay and his perambulations around the city come to reveal the highly uneven social geographies that oil capital – and neoliberal energy markets – conspire to produce. This is indicated by the stark inequalities of Houston, which, despite its financial prosperity, is barely ‘able to keep up with its own growth’ (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 36). Locke reveals a city ‘bursting at the seams’ with trash and waste, its municipal infrastructures unable to cope with the ‘new businesses and housing developments going up every week’ (37). This creates a parallel waste disposal market, where more affluent neighbourhoods pay private companies ‘to haul their shit away’, leaving streets like Jay’s – lined with ‘cheap rentals and shotgun houses’ – entirely at ‘the mercy of the city’ (37). Whilst oil purports to enable a ‘dynamic geography and population’, Locke shows that such mobility is far from ‘evenly distributed’, particularly along the axes of race, gender and class (Poll, Reference Poll and Kim2014, 192).

The local injustices produced by the systemic asymmetries of oil capitalism are brought into focus at the climax of the text, as Jay connects the parallel plots of murder and union unrest to the felonious machinations of the city’s largest petrochemical company. It transpires that Cole Oil has been exploiting the newly deregulated oil market to hoard mass reserves of crude in abandoned salt caverns around Texas, thus manipulating the price of petroleum at the pump. This literally bubbles to the surface when Jay discovers that crude deposits have been seeping through the foundations of a town above the salt mines. After being shown the extent of the seepage by the town’s one remaining resident – the obstinate Erman Ainsley – Jay reaches down to touch the crude, rolling it around his fingers like ‘melted gelatine’ and feeling the way it ‘coats his skin completely, covering his pores, clinging like a parasite that has found an unsuspecting host’ (Locke, Reference Locke2009, 318). The language used here projects something agentively pernicious onto oil’s viscous materiality, as Jay is unable to separate the unctuousness of the organic substance, its literal stickiness, from its pervasive commodity uses and effects. Yet what the text is really pointing to here is the kind of criminality that oil – in its commodity form – engenders, a crude criminality that clings to everything and everyone. As such, the various forms of violence and injustice that Jay encounters can all be connected to the same root cause. As the city’s port commissioner puts it earlier in the novel: ‘This has everything to do with oil’ (79).

Whereas Black Water Rising is explicit in its interrogation of the social, economic and ecological impacts of petroleum culture, grounding its plot in a key moment (and place) in the global history of oil modernity, Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017) offers a subtler examination of these same effects, tracing their more occluded materialisations in the ‘abject corners of extractive economies’ (González, Reference González2020). Despite therefore providing very different ‘novelistic registrations of oil frontiers’, together these texts construct a revealing imaginative map of the vast and highly uneven territories that bound the Gulf of Mexico, a region that, since the 1970s, has been markedly and disproportionately shaped by the dictates and infrastructures of the global oil industry (Macdonald, Reference Macdonald2017, 289). As such, the gulf has become ‘a forceful signifier’ not only of the inequalities and ‘contradictions’ produced by petro-capitalism but also of the ‘deep nexus between accumulation and the criminal realms hidden behind the zones of enclosure and transnational corporate rule’ (Morales Hernández, Reference Morales Hernández2022, 17–22). Hurricane Season grounds these fraught social and economic relations in the fictional town of La Matosa, a marginalised and deprived rural community located in the coastal state of Veracruz, some 700 miles south of Galveston Bay. The narrative ostensibly centres on the brutal murder of a local transwoman known as ‘The Witch’, whose rotting corpse is discovered dumped in an irrigation canal in the opening pages of the text. The Witch is notorious within the community for providing free abortions for sex workers and for hosting drug-fuelled sex parties where troops of local men come to fulfil their sordid sexual fantasies. Rumour and superstition encircle the Witch, with many believing – amongst other supernatural speculations – that she is in possession of a secret fortune stashed somewhere within the hollows of her decrepit mansion. Loved and despised in equal measure, she becomes a canvas upon which the community projects its deepest fears and desires, as well as a lightning rod for its repressed rage and simmering violence.

The novel is by no means a ‘whodunit’ in the traditional sense, as the guilty parties are revealed soon after the body is discovered. Instead, the circumstances that precipitated the Witch’s death are revealed incrementally across eight single-paragraph chapters, all narrated from the coalescing perspectives of several individuals from within the community. The febrile social relations of La Matosa become mirrored in the text’s frenzied, vulgar and highly digressive narrative style, where sentences run breathlessly across several pages and shift disorientingly between a diverse assemblage of voices and temporal markers. The result is a feverish swirl of erratic and highly unreliable narration, as Melchor draws deeply on the language of gossip, rumour and superstition to reveal a community blinded and immobilised by its own destructive mythologies. As such, the murder of the Witch becomes a prism through which Melchor examines the broader economic forces and political inequalities that have shaped, and continue to shape, modern La Matosa. Alongside the stark manifestations of homophobia, misogyny and sexual violence that the text reveals, it also provides several fractured references to the town’s turbulent recent history, beginning with the hurricane-triggered landslide of 1978, which saw the majority of the town and its residents buried under a ‘tumult of rocks’ (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017, 26). Although La Matosa was rebuilt in the aftermath – ‘dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of [the dead]’ – it was the discovery of oil deposits north of the town that precipitated the rapid reshaping of its material and economic geographies, beginning with the construction of a giant superhighway connecting the ‘port and the capital’ to the newly found wells (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017, 28). Soon repopulated by outsiders ‘lured by the trail of banknotes that the oil trucks left in their wake’ (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017, 28), the town developed by creating a ‘buoyant but precarious parallel market’ of cantinas, hotels and food stalls, all geared towards servicing the traffic of engineers and labourers shuttling back and forth from the adjacent oil fields (González, Reference González2020). Yet, despite their promises of prosperity, these extractive infrastructures only bring further pain and suffering, with the town steadily falling ‘victim to neoliberal austerity policies, economic crisis, and the rise of the drug trade’ (González, Reference González2020). What is left behind is a sparse and crumbling landscape of brothels, strip clubs and bars, and a populace ravaged by violence, disease, economic insecurity and energy poverty.

The oil company creates an economic stranglehold on the local community, with many of the residents seeing the highly coveted (and unionised) jobs at the wells as their only means of escape from the day-to-day struggles of life in La Matosa. This is typified by Luismi (the murderer of the Witch), who believes that he is destined for a technician’s job, having been promised one by his former lover, an engineer at the company. Yet Luismi’s stepfather, Munra, knows that this is a ‘goddam pipe dream’, as the company – one organised around private economic interests and nepotistic hierarchal structures – has ‘never hired anyone who wasn’t an immediate relative or recommended by those at the top’ (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017, 77). Luismi’s emotional investment in the benevolence of the oil company is both misguided and heavily ironic, indicating a broader obliviousness within the community towards the root causes of their own subjugation. As Barbara Halla (Reference Halla2020) suggests, the residents of La Matosa are unable to perceive the deeply imbricated relationship between their material hardships and these larger economic forces. Instead, they place blame on more ephemeral influences, be they the Witch’s satanic spells or the malignant atmospheric pressures produced by heatwaves and storms. This sense of abstraction is similarly evident in the aesthetic arrangements of the text itself, where the discordant fluctuations between perspectives and temporalities reflect the violent obscuration of cause and effect under neoliberalism. In the process, Melchor examines how these occluded extractive spaces, or ‘sacrifice zones’, allow for the proliferation of certain forms of violence, particularly those that are commensurate to the sustainment of the economic system itself (Lerner, Reference Lerner2010, 2). Although Steve Lerner principally uses ‘sacrifice zone’ to refer to frontline communities that have been disproportionately exposed to toxic or hazardous chemicals by state or capitalist enterprises, the term has also become increasingly associated with the ‘economic and political violence of extractavism’, particularly in the context of Latin America (Bolados García, Reference Bolados García and Bustos2023). In this sense, Hurricane Season reflects upon what James A. Tyner (Reference Tyner2016, 10) terms ‘the market logics of letting die’, that is, the strategic disavowal and abandonment of lives – through the enforcement of political, social and economic practice – that are deemed without utility or that otherwise ‘fail to conform to the dictates of capital accumulation’. As such, it becomes possible to read the brutal murder of the Witch and the other instances of unfathomable violence that the text discloses as the ‘inchoate symptom of an underlying socioeconomic condition’, one that the residents of La Matosa can neither perceive nor understand (Pepper, Reference Pepper2016, 234).

Although offering seemingly dissimilar and unconnected examinations of ‘oil’s frontierism’, Hurricane Season and Black Water Rising share certain ‘cultural affinities and world-ecological connections’ rooted in the ‘unifying resource systems of petrocapitalism’ (Macdonald, Reference Macdonald2017, 300). More specifically, they trace a compelling regional history of the second oil regime, revealing how, since the energy crisis of 1973, the communities and geographies that comprise the Gulf of Mexico have been dramatically and disproportionately shaped by oil modernity’s pervasive infrastructures and uneven commodity flows. In this sense, Hurricane Season can be positioned as a kind of spiritual sequel to Black Water Rising in that it obliquely reveals the detrimental consequences of the economic reform policies instituted in the early years of the Reagan administration. In the process, both novels work to demystify the forms of ‘crude criminality’ that oil culture engenders, underscoring not only the implicit and explicit relationships between petro-capitalism and violent crimes (murder, sexual violence, etc.) but also the more general permeation of oil in the workings of everyday life, where individuals are inculcated (often unknowingly) into forms of criminal complicity that disrupt clear boundaries between perpetrator and victim. Yet both texts ultimately struggle to offer forms of resistance to these highly dispersed dynamics from within the aesthetic and thematic bounds of the typically ‘territorialised’ crime novel, revealing the need for new modes of expression that move beyond the realms of the nation-state. Despite Black Water Rising’s ‘depictions of strike/labour conditions and worker unrest’, these protests soon collapse under political and economic pressure. Moreover, whilst Jay intends to file a civil suit against Cole Oil for property encroachment, there is little sense that this is a fight he can realistically win. Hurricane Season, meanwhile, ends with another impending storm threatening La Matosa, an elemental force that the residents blame for a new spate of violent crimes ravaging the town: ‘crimes of passion, as the journalists call them’ (Melchor, Reference Melchor2017, 220). Still unable to perceive the real cause of their plight, neither they (nor we) are left with any ‘hope that the situation will ever be any different’ (Pepper, Reference Pepper2016, 234).

‘Benevolent Colonialism’: Capitalism, Colonialism and Environmental Justice in Madukka the River Serpent and Cold Skies

The previous section looked to establish continuities of experience between two local and unconnected petrocrime fictions, tracing the criminal materialisations of petrocapitalism at the core and periphery of the world carbon economy. The next section will continue this examination of the relationship between crime and extractive economies, juxtaposing two recent indigenous crime fictions from Australia and the United States. Through their analogous examinations of Indigenous water rights, these texts underscore the extent to which ‘environmental justice must be placed at the centre of considerations of the Anthropocene, framing the latter as not just a geophysical concept but a biopolitical one’ (Manning, Reference Manning2024, 34). In the process, they expose the ‘inextricable links between settler colonialism and the violence of climate crisis in the anthropocene era’, making visible the legacies and continuations of harm that have defined, and continue to define, the relationship between land, race and power in both the United States and Australia (Tillett, 2024, 282). Nonetheless, this section will again question what forms of aesthetic resistance these texts are capable of producing, particularly from within the territorially and temporally confined structures of the ‘local’ crime novel.

Indigenous Australian playwright Julie Janson’s recent eco-crime novel Madukka the River Serpent is, in many ways, characteristic of a broader category of contemporary Australian crime fiction where the relationship between land and violence takes centre stage. Rachel Fetherston points to texts like Jane Harper’s The Dry (Harper, Reference Harper2016), Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek (Mclean, Reference Mclean2014) and Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road (Disher, Reference Disher2013) as indicative in this regard, all of which connect the ‘terror of the outback’ with a deeper (and often implicit) set of political and environmental anxieties (Fetherson, Reference Fetherston and Ashman2023, 78). Yet Janson – a Burruberongal woman of Darug Nation ancestry – moves beyond these more ambient examinations of place making and belonging, instead providing an unambiguous look at the relationship between the ‘criminal violences’ of settler colonialism – both historical and recurring – and the ‘equally entrenched’ and wholly related ‘criminal violences’ wrought against the environment as a result of these very same systems (Tillett, Reference Tillett and Ashman2023, 282). The novel takes place in 2020 and is set in the rural town of Wilga, northern New South Wales, a fictional community situated somewhere along the Darling River. As Stewart King suggests, Wilga is by no means an ‘idyllic country town’ (King, Reference King2023, n.p.), as emphasised in Janson’s opening description of its dusty desert landscapes, ‘ash-filled streets’, ‘iron mesh’–covered storefronts and ‘stinking green river of dead fish’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). For the omniscient narrator, this ‘dusty desolation’ is not only a stark reminder of how ‘outback towns were shrivelling up’ but also a recursive symptom of what they term ‘benevolent colonialism’. As indicated by her first novel, Benevolence, Janson is particularly interested in the discourse of ‘good intentions’ and how this has ‘propped up’ many of the ‘foundational myths of Australia since colonisation’ (Kavanagh, Reference Kavanagh2020). Through the economic and ecological depravation of Wilga, Janson thus continues her political excavation of what Bec Kavanagh (Reference Kavanagh2020) calls ‘the realities of kindness’, revealing ‘the damage, the arrogance, the violence that have been buried beneath the term’.

The protagonist of Janson’s novel is Aunty June, a ‘fifty-year-old’ aboriginal ‘beauty … born of the clay plains, dust and kangaroo’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). As the novel opens, June has just completed a ‘TAFE course in investigative services’, a thirty-hour online training program that qualifies her to operate as a private detective, ‘[just] like she had seen on a TV show … [a] brave woman fighting for justice’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). June’s first case, and the text’s primary mystery, centres on the disappearance of ‘cousin Thommo’, a Murri activist and ‘ecological hero’ with links to a radical environmentalist group. When the local police – led by the racist Sargent Blackett – refuse to treat Thommo’s disappearance as suspicious, June takes the investigation into her own hands. This missing person’s case becomes the conduit through which Janson explores a larger environmental conspiracy threatening to destroy the town, one that connects the rapid disappearance of the Darling River – a waterway already damaged by climate change – to the pernicious extractive practices of the cotton industry. The siphoning off of water by ‘big irrigators’ threatens not only to destroy the local community and its surrounding ecosystems – including the mass extinction of animal and plant life – but also to erase many indigenous ‘cultures and traditions that are deeply tied to the river system’ (Fetherston, Reference Fetherston and Ashman2023, 87). For June and the wider community, the Darling River operates as an important ‘dreaming track’, a ‘winding path’ of imagination, tradition and storied memory that connects ‘like a spider web to every living thing’, keeping culture and ‘hope alive’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). The drying out of the dreaming track, and the attendant extinction of sacred totems such as the Murray Cod, is therefore a ‘genocide’ to the spirit of the community. As one local Elder puts it: ‘[If] the totems die, then we die. How do we live when the animals become extinct?’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). The use of the word ‘genocide’ is significant here and points to the destruction of the river not only as an ecological crime but as a recursive expression of a more embedded form of colonial violence. Crucially, what Janson points to here is the way in which indigenous communities ‘often understand their vulnerability to climate change as an intensification of colonially induced environmental changes’ (Whyte, Reference Whyte2017, 154). In other words, anthropogenic climate change is experienced as both an extension and a concentration of the ideologies and practices that, under colonialism, allowed for the violent erasure of peoples and lands in the endless pursuit of profit. June’s brother William makes this connection explicitly later in the text, describing the community’s ongoing struggles with the impacts of capitalism as ‘invasion and conquering all over again’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.).

In the case of the disappearing Darling River, this violence is as much epistemic as it is ecological, and comes to signify the broader (and ongoing) effacement of indigenous cultures, narratives and histories. Janson is particularly interested in the relationship between memory and landscape, and, at several points, takes us back to buried moments in Australia’s violent colonial history. Early in the text, we learn that June’s family live adjacent to a spot ‘where terrible murders had taken place, the soil full of human fragments, skin, and hair and terror and murder’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). Although there are no material traces or monuments that speak to, or commemorate, these atrocities, June can feel their traumatic resonances ‘oozing from the grey earth’ like a ‘river [of] blood coming from below’, a kind of ‘stinking trickle, a miasma’ that ‘would never go away’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). The palimpsestic land speaks a brutal counter history of modern Australia, challenging the stories of ‘valiant English explorers and white pioneering spirit’ by exposing the death and destruction upon which these myths were built (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). Ghosts and hauntings become central to the text’s construction of an alternate knowledge system, one that counters the epistemologies, ontologies and discourses that served to legitimise the violent and discriminatory practices of colonial rule. This is typified by Aunty June’s methods of detection, which ‘unravel and disrupt’ these ‘epistemic sites of hierarchized power’ through the strategic destabilisation of ‘dichotomous categorisations’ such as “‘primitive/civilized”, “‘rational/irrational” and “traditional-modern”’ (Sharma, Reference Sharma2021, 25). As well as following material clues to Thommo’s disappearance – much like in the Western tradition of detective fiction – Aunt June is frequently directed by hauntings and materialisations from the spirit world. These ‘goonges’ not only actualise the otherwise invisible continuum of cruelties perpetrated against indigenous communities but also emphasise a deep ‘cultural and spiritual connection to place’, unsettling the ‘notion of terra nullius’ (Fetherston, Reference Fetherston and Ashman2023, 88). It is in this way that Janson moves the frame of the novel beyond Thommo’s death, as June’s investigation unravels a host of interlocking crimes – including political corruption, corporate maleficence, sexual violence, land dispossession, resource extraction, police violence and racism – that connect the injustices of the present to the injustices of the past. As June says when speaking of Thommo’s death: ‘It isn’t about one person. It’s about much more, who we are’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.).

In the same way that Janson presents other ways of ‘knowing and constructing meaning about the world’ through June’s methods of detection, she offers a similarly reconstituted understanding of truth and justice through the text’s highly spectral denouement, one that counters and disrupts the hegemonic (and discriminatory) mechanisms of the state (Dhillon, Reference Dhillon2022, 3). As Fetherston (Reference Fetherston and Ashman2023, 87) suggests, a significant part of the novel’s reclaiming of native identities comes from ‘undermining’ the ‘coloniser’s legal systems and processes’ – and its cultural vehicles, such as the detective novel – through the use of ‘indigenous cultural knowledge’. This is indicated not only by Steve Allunga – an ecological protester killed in police custody – whose ‘goonge’ proceeds to haunt the officers responsible for his death but also by Madukka the water serpent, a spiritual manifestation of the Darling River, which, at the climax of the text, enacts retribution against the corrupt Sargent Blackett by dragging him under water during a violent storm, ‘drown[ing] him in its rage and tumult’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.). The serpent functions as a form of political and ecological restitution, providing justice for those harmed (and erased) by the violence of the settler-colonial state, and returning clean flood water, ‘luscious and fast flowing’ (Janson, Reference Janson2022, n.p.), to the landscapes otherwise ravaged by the economic primacies of these same power structures. This forms part of a series of ostensible ‘resolutions’ at the novel’s end, including the solving of Thommo’s murder, which June connects to a violent local ‘bikie’ called Bam Bam. Yet Janson is also wary of neat endings, with the text’s closing pages underscoring the broader limitations of the crime genre – particularly its more ‘traditional generic forms’ – to provide ‘justice for the systemic violence experienced by Indigenous peoples’ (Pepper & Schmid, Reference Pepper, Schmid, Pepper and Schmid2016, 16; see also King, Reference King2023). The replacement of Brackett and Johnson with ‘two new police officers’ is indicative in this regard, suggesting a continuation, rather than a disruption, of what came before. This extends to the larger plot of resource extraction and to the forms of environmental discrimination that it permits. It is telling that, in the final pages, June and her family take the decision to leave Wilga for good, underscoring the ongoing displacement of indigenous peoples and communities in Australia.

Though praising Madukka’s excavation of the buried histories of Australia’s First Nations people, Stewart King (Reference King2023) suggests that the novel is less successful in fostering a ‘shared sense of community central to addressing the environmental catastrophe that affects us all’. Given King’s previous work on ecological crime fiction, what he is pointing to are the limitations of eco-localism (or reterritorialisation) as a means of political/artistic resistance to global environmental crises. More specifically, he is suggesting that there are certain aesthetic constraints that prohibit the novel’s capacity to cultivate a more encompassing planetary vision. Here King follows the work of Ursula K. Heise, who advocates for an eco-cosmopolitan approach to environmentalism that is premised no longer ‘on ties to local places but on ties to territories and systems [that] encompass the planet as a whole’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 10). For King (Reference King2021), as with Heise, this necessitates the cultivation of new forms and narrative strategies capable of moving beyond the typically delimited temporal and spatial scope of the (crime) novel. Whilst it is true that Janson’s text is largely circumscribed by the local scene – and thus symptomatic of the formal limitations of ‘local’ ecological crime fictions – this ‘sense of planet’ can be cultivated critically, I suggest, by tracing the commonalities and continuities of experience that connect ostensibly disparate local communities, and their respective struggles for sovereignty, from across the globe. It is in this way that Thomas King’s Cold Skies (King, Reference King2018), another localised ecological crime novel, can be brought into useful dialogue with Janson’s work, highlighting how the economic primacies of global capitalism, and its attendant ecological effects, manifest in comparable ways throughout the world. As such, local struggles for environmental justice can be positioned and understood within the context of larger global systems.

Cold Skies is the third in Thomas King’s series of six crime novels featuring Cherokee detective Thumps DreadfulWater, and, like Madukka the River Serpent, it similarly examines the relationship between the ‘criminal violences of capitalist driven settler colonialism’ and those of the ‘profit-driven climate crisis’ (Tillett, Reference Tillett and Ashman2023, 283). The text’s primary mystery centres on the co-owners of an engineering company called Orion Technologies, both of whom turn up murdered on the eve of a major water conference set to take place in the small town of Chinook. The pair had been due to share the results of a ‘revolutionary’ new technology designed to measure and map aquifers, one that could potentially ‘change the face’ of water conservation and groundwater management. Perhaps more significantly, this same technology could also theoretically be deployed to survey oil and gas deposits, which, as Thumps’ friend Archie notes, would have seismic consequences for the energy resource industry: ‘The last thing extraction companies want is a method that accurately measure reserves … it could be the end of their empires’ (King, Reference King2018, 129). The plot is further complicated by the location of the aquifer, a large section of which runs directly beneath the Blackfoot reservation. It transpires that, two years prior, Orion Technologies had negotiated a ten-year lease with the state to install monitoring wells along the Bear Hump, a section of tribal land previously demarcated as reservation territory. The Blackfoot chief, Claire Merchant, subsequently tried to file an injunction, only to find that the original 1836 land treaty had been ‘unilaterally changed’ by the US Senate without their knowledge. ‘There’s a strong oral record of exactly what we agreed’, Claire tells Thumps, ‘but every time we go to court, oral testimony has been ruled unreliable’ (King, Reference King2018, 205).

Here we again see ‘the intertwined processes of settler colonialism and resource extraction’, where the sustainment of rapacious capitalist infrastructures is contingent on the ongoing exploitation of indigenous lands and peoples (Follett, Reference Follett and Ashman2023, 382). Like Janson, King situates these present-day violences as a continuation of the historic atrocities inflicted upon native communities under the auspices of white colonial power, as he similarly looks to excavate the brutal and long-buried truths underpinning frontier mythologies. These repressed traumas are brought to the surface moments after Thumps learns of the alterations to the 1836 treaty, when the omniscient narrator takes us back to the Removal Act of 1830, which ‘allowed the government to strip the tribes along the eastern seaboard of their land’ (King, Reference King2018, 205). This laid the groundwork for the US army to ‘invade Cherokee territory’ eight years later, forcing ‘thirteen thousand people into concentration camps’ before marching them west to Indian Territory (205). ‘More than four thousand Cherokee died on the two-thousand-mile trek’, the narrator tells us, ‘two deaths for every mile’ (205). As with Janson, these surfacings (or hauntings) become constitutive to King’s construction of a knowledge system that challenges the dominant discourses of coloniality. Thus, notwithstanding its ostensibly ‘formulaic’ appeals to the conventions and traditions of genre, it is in this way that King’s detective fiction cultivates a form of aesthetic resistance to the deeply tangled structures of settler colonialism and anthropogenic climate change, one that Pascale Manning similarly identifies in King’s ‘literary’ fiction (Follett, Reference Follett and Ashman2023, 383). Focusing on two other of Thomas King’s novels, Green Grass, Running Water (King, Reference King1993) and Truth and Bright Water (King, Reference King1999), Manning (Reference Manning2024, 35) argues that, through their content and style, these texts acknowledge ‘states of dislocation, historical entanglement, and socio-material interconnection as the condition of reality in our catastrophic present’, thereby inculcating readers into ways of thinking that recognise ‘the indivisibility of the projects of decolonization and environmental justice’. For Manning, it is by ‘contextualising the realities’ of the present in this way – and situating readers in ‘narrative environments that reveal the interlinking forces conspiring to generate the climate crisis’ – that King is able to cultivate a form of ‘anthropocene realism’ (Manning, Reference Manning2024, 24) capable of contending with what Amitav Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2016, 63) describes as ‘forces of unimaginable magnitude’.

Whilst perhaps more formally constrained than the texts cited by Manning – owing, in large part, to its mostly orthodox adherence to the narrative expectations of the police procedural – Cold Skies still continues this work to some degree, revealing how ‘indigenous subject positions’ must ‘variously negotiate’ the ‘ongoing hazards of empire’ (Manning, Reference Manning2024, 34). As part of this, King interrogates the assumptions and stereotypes underlying many Euro-American conceptualisations of indigenous environmentalism, particularly the critical tendency to position indigenous peoples as ‘environmentalists par excellence’ (Nadasdy, Reference Nadasdy2005, 292). This is typified in an early section of the text, when Thumps visits the Blackfoot reservation with his friend Moses and Moses’ grandson, Cooley:

Here King alludes to a common stereotype, one rooted in the assumption that ‘indigenous people live in perfect harmony’ with the natural world and should therefore serve as an ‘inspiration for those in industrial society who seek a new, more sustainable relationship with the environment’ (Nadasdy, Reference Nadasdy2005, 292). For King, this outside co-option – or indeed production – of indigenous cultural knowledge is colonial power manifested in a different guise and thus works only to further substantiate pre-existing inequalities and injustices. As Paul Nadasdy (Reference Nadasdy2005, 293) suggests, not only does this perception of ecological nobility deny the reality of native people’s lives, thus reducing the ‘rich diversity of their beliefs, values, social relations, and practices to a one-dimensional caricature’, but it also imposes impossibly high standards that are incapable of being met. These tensions factor directly into the text’s ambivalent denouement, where Thumps discovers that the corporate interest in the Bear Hump actually stems from its rich deposits of red beryl. This ends with Claire Merchant negotiating a deal with rabid capitalist Randall Boomper Austin, one that will see the community financially remunerated for the mining of its lands. As Alec Follett (Reference Follett and Ashman2023, 384) suggests, on the one hand this can be read as a ‘hopeful’ conclusion, with Merchant’s deal ‘standing in contrast’ to the many times that indigenous communities have been forcefully dispossessed by extractive projects and fraudulent land claims. However, it also means that the novel is able to resolve its criminal plot only ‘within a settler-colonial framework, where Merchant’s options are limited’ to the extraction of beryl either ‘for a fee or for free’ (Follett, Reference Follett and Ashman2023, 384). As with Janson’s text, we are left with an uncomfortable sense of subsistence, the feeling that nothing has materially changed despite the text’s ostensible challenging of the conventions and knowledge systems most frequently aligned with the realist (and local) crime novel. The result is a somewhat orthodox denouement, one that awkwardly attempts to reconcile the complex environmental injustices it reveals (both past and present) with the crime novel’s normative drive for closure. Individually, then, both Madukka and Cold Skies are ultimately constrained by their appeal to a particular set of aesthetic parameters, limiting the forms of resistance that they are able to produce from within. Comparatively, however, they reveal a detailed picture of the systems and structures that connect many disparate and subjugated communities around the world, underscoring the important role that local fictions can still play in revealing, and demystifying, the small-scale and often occluded manifestations of larger global injustices.

Local Crimes from Global Seeds: Environmental Crime and the Reterritorialised State in Pale Horses and Don’t Cry Tai Lake

Jassy Mackenzie’s Johannesburg-based crime novels featuring private investigator Jade de Jong provide a particularly anxious examination of state sovereignty and South African democracy in the face of an increasingly rapacious global capitalist economy (see Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012). Drawing connections amongst untrammelled economic development, corrupt land reform and widening social inequalities, Mackenzie’s work forms part of a broader ‘post-apartheid fictional terrain’ where the ‘reconfigured contest over law and order’ takes centre stage (de Kock, Reference De Kock2016, 42). This is typified by Pale Horses, the third of five instalments in the series, in which de Jong is called to investigate the suspicious death of Sonet Meintjies, an aid worker and base jumper who was seemingly pushed from the roof of a Johannesburg high-rise. De Jong connects Meintjies to Willaims Management, an organisation that assists in land restitution cases on behalf of dispossessed indigenous communities. Prior to her disappearance, Meintjies had been helping the Siyabonga tribe set up a sustainable farming project following a successful land claim, one that resulted in Meintjies’ ex-husband losing commercial land that had been in his family ‘since the Boer war’ (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 62). When questioning the resentful Marthinus van Schalkwyk regarding his ex-wife’s death, Jade fights the impulse ‘to point out that indigenous communities might well have been living there for thousands of years before that’, realising that, in ‘Van Schalkwyk’s world, history only started in 1880’ (62).

It is here that Meintjies’ death coincides with the text’s other central mystery: the disappearance of the Siyabonga community. On speaking to Van Schalkwyk, Jade discovers that the reclaimed farmland, Doringplaas, has since transformed from a ‘successful commercial maze farm’ into little more than a ‘desert’ (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 63). Van Schalkwyk sees the decline of Doringplaas as evidence of the political failure of land reform to alleviate ‘wrenching poverty in the country’s rural areas’ and uses the fate of the Siyabonga to reconfirm his own racist ideologies: ‘[they] trashed it – it’s just a shell now. Ignorant, useless savages’ (63). This prompts Jade to visit the farmland herself, where she is struck not only by the ‘impossibly barren’ landscape – ‘as if a miniature Armageddon had taken place’ – but by a deeper feeling of despair (72). Presented with apparent evidence of the inability of agricultural and political restitution to adequately transform South Africa’s deeply ingrained inequalities, Jade can’t help but feel that ‘her own personal hopes for [the country’s] future had been crushed’ too (73). The relationship between Van Schalkwyk, Meintjies and the missing community would appear to point to a familial plot connecting the text’s central mysteries, albeit one with roots in the nation’s violent colonial past. This is seemingly confirmed by the disappearance of Meintjies’ sister, Zelda, a journalist who had been writing about ‘The War on Land Reform’ (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 175). Reading Zelda’s history of territorial contestation and dispossession, including details on the exclusionary zoning practices that gave shape to modern South Africa, Jade realises that ‘absolute power could indeed be gained through control of a nation’s agricultural resources’ (176). Whilst these questions of land ownership will prove central to the text’s denouement, Mackenzie ultimately shifts focus away from local ‘state policies’ to address the larger problem of ‘global capitalism’ (Guldimann, Reference Guldimann and Ashman2023, 146). In particular, Pale Horses examines the ways in which foreign capital and transnational trade can further compound pre-existing forms of environmental racism and injustice.

Through Zelda’s investigative work, Jade discovers that, prior to their disappearance, the Siyabonga farming community had been provided with a new and highly temperamental batch of maize seed by an American corporation called Global Seeds. Unwilling to subsidise the venture – deeming it not ‘remotely cost effective’ – the company proposed using the farms as ‘a testing ground’ for new hybrid strains of genetically modified maize (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 244). Developed with the intention of creating a faster-growing variety of plant – uniform in size and resistant to the effects of pesticides and herbicides – the seeds were spliced with cancerous cells to promote accelerated mutation. The experimentation had disastrous consequences, with the entire community developing highly aggressive forms of stomach and intestinal cancer. Global Seeds immediately moved to ‘kill the story’, destroying evidence and burying the contaminated human and non-human animal bodies (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 254). Later questioning Danie Smit, the general manager of Global Seeds, about the cover-up, Jade realises the extent to which the financial primacies of global capitalism work only to perpetuate pre-existing inequalities. As Smit explains: ‘The executives agreed [that] Siyabonga had been a very small and isolated community … these residents had been among the country’s poorest people and were, as such, not well connected to anybody in a position of power’ (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 256). Here Jade is confronted with a newly transformed social condition, one ‘that is no longer just national, just South African, but transnational in its dimensions and global in its derivations’ (de Kock, Reference De Kock2016, 36). Under these circumstances, the structures of institutional discrimination that existed in South Africa during the apartheid take on new yet equally destructive forms. The tragic fate of the Siyabonga community can be situated in the context of what Rice, Long and Levenda term ‘climate apartheid’, an emerging ‘system of discrimination, segregation, and violence based on various axes of oppression and privilege (race, class, gender, sexuality) that is produced by the material effects of climate change’ (Rice et al., Reference Rice2021, 627). As with previous or existing articulations of ‘state-sponsored separateness’, climate apartheid is embedded in the same practices of ‘colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy’ that, in the relentless pursuit of profit, render certain populations expendable (Rice et al., Reference Rice2021, 625–629). As such, the seemingly local environmental crimes that Jade investigates are the consequence of much larger and more opaque global forces, making the once ‘easier-to-define moral order of anti-apartheid struggle’ inadequate in lending shape to their complexity and scale (de Kock, Reference De Kock2016, 42). Pale Horses thus shifts its attention away from local or state anxieties towards ‘environmental degradation as a global issue’, raising questions about the positioning of ‘South Africa, and the global South’ as dumping sites for failed corporate experiments and other forms of waste (Guldimann, Reference Guldimann and Ashman2023, 147). For Colette Guldimann (Reference Guldimann and Ashman2023, 147), it is in this way that Mackenzie’s work begins to apply ‘pressure’ to the traditional structures of the detective text, making it more responsive to the realities of a ‘rapidly globalising world’. Guldimann (Reference Guldimann and Ashman2023, 147) suggests that Mackenzie is concerned not so much with how the state redresses the violence and injustices of the apartheid but more with how the processes of political restitution are ‘undermined by the devastating impact of globalised capitalism’.

Pale Horses is certainly effective in highlighting the ‘imbrication of local places, ecologies and cultural practices’ in larger, deterritorialised ‘global networks’, and, as such, usefully points to the ways in which contemporary crime fictions are attempting to represent and make comprehensible a kind of planetary environmental vision through their thematic and formal content (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 210). However, such a reading is problematised by the otherwise orthodox denouement of the text, which expresses a reconsolidated conviction in the jurisdictional power of the state to reconcile and resist these multifaceted and densely interconnected global systems. Following Jade’s investigation, Zelda Meintjies is eventually rescued from the clutches of paid mercenaries, with her story detailing the murder of the Siyabonga community making ‘front page headlines in every major newspaper’ (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2012, 297). Meanwhile, a team of detectives led by Jade’s on-and-off love interest Dave Patel move to arrest several senior managers at Global Seeds, along with other implicated parties from Williams Management. This exposure destroys Global Seeds’ international reputation and long-term solvency, as share prices plummet on the global stock market. What Pale Horses presents here is a form of political reterritorialisation, where the governing power and authority of the state are reconstituted, rather than diminished, in the face of global economic pressures or threats. This ‘insistence’ on reconciling the complex, transnational crimes that de Jong investigates within ‘clearly delineated territorial and jurisdictional limits’ consolidates a somewhat orthodox vision of state governance, and thus presents an ‘inadequate grasp of the complex interplay between the state and international realms in the contemporary era’ (Pepper & Schmid, Reference Pepper, Schmid, Pepper and Schmid2016, 7). This is particularly true of the state’s capacity to identify and prosecute global or extralegal environmental crimes through the traditional apparatus of law and order, a process that is presented here somewhat unproblematically. The text’s narrative framework therefore has the effect of regulating (and delimitating) the reader’s ecological awareness through illusions of control and order that obscure, rather than reveal, South Africa’s place within a more expansive planetary network. As Christopher Warnes suggests, this response can be situated within the broader context of the post-apartheid crime thriller, which, ‘far from being apolitical’, can be understood as negotiating ‘the threat and uncertainty that many feel to be part of South African life, creating fantasies of control, restoration and maintenance, and reflecting on the circumstances that gave rise to this unease’ (Warnes, Reference Warnes2012, 991). Thus, whilst Pale Horses can certainly be seen to offer some perceptive insights into the ‘history of colonisation and its impact on the environment and on the indigenous peoples’, these ecological preoccupations end up being subservient to the text’s ‘generic conventions’ (Naidu, Reference Naidu2014, 69).

Qiu Xiaolong’s Don’t Cry Tai Lake (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012) similarly strives to articulate the murky and entangled linkages between local crime and harder-to-grasp transnational systems. The seventh book featuring police detective Chen Cao, the novel extends Xiaolong’s exploration of the rotten underbelly of both capitalist and communist political systems, this time centring on the environmental destruction perpetrated by China’s barely regulated chemical and manufacturing industries. As the text opens, Chen is vacationing at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Centre, a luxury resort for party officials overlooking the seemingly idyllic Tai Lake. There he meets Shanshan, an environmental engineer at one of the chemical companies bordering the waterfront. Shanshan reveals that factories have been dumping industrial waste into the lake for decades, poisoning the local wildlife and leaving the surface ‘covered with a thick, foul-smelling canopy’ (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012, 23). When Chen queries how the companies have escaped prosecution, Shanshan points to a larger state logic that prioritises instant ‘economic success’ above all else: ‘All they care about is the particular moment while they are here. They don’t care about what might happen in ten years, or even one year’ (29). Here ecological neglect is situated in the context of China’s latest phase of economic reform, which sees state-run companies ceding power to private, commercial interests. This is precisely the case with Shanshan’s employer, the Wuxi Number One Chemical Company, which is due to be taken public by its corrupt general manager Liu Deming. As the largest shareholder, Liu is set to profit considerably from the deal, despite being directly implicated in the flagrant dumping of untreated wastewater into the surrounding lake. When Liu is later discovered bludgeoned to death in his office, suspicion falls on a local environmental activist suspected to have been blackmailing company officials with public exposure of their fraudulent environmental practices.

Counter to Pale Horses, which personifies global capitalism in the form of a villainous multinational conglomerate, Don’t Cry Tai Lake offers a subtler examination of its manifestations and effects. We see this not only in Xiaolong’s descriptions of a ‘rapidly and radically’ changing Shanghai – where local businesses are being replaced by new ‘stores, hotels and restaurants’ built in a homogenised ‘European style’ – but also via his cogitations on China’s moral decline (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012, 166). In one section, Chen explicitly links the rise of capitalism with the collapse of China’s ethical system, suggesting that ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Maoism’ have been superseded by a new ‘materialistic age’ (87). This perceived decline of China’s humanist and socialist traditions is signified via the avaricious capitalist Liu, a much-celebrated symbol of the country’s financial reform for whom profit is ‘more important than anything else’ (70). In one sense, then, Chen positions the despoilment of Tai Lake as the symptom of a distinctly national crisis, where decades of ‘unchecked, unbridled pollution’ have left much of the fresh water in lakes and rivers around the country ‘unfit to touch, let alone drink’ (119). Yet he also sees these phenomena as expressions of a wider set of economic conditions, with ‘human greed’ the inevitable by-product of a capitalistic worldview (120). As he tells Shanshan: ‘pollution isn’t a problem that pertains to our country alone … for a three hundred percent profit, a capitalist would do anything, commit any crime, even risk being hanged’ (120–121). In this way, the novel can be seen to subtly yet effectively manoeuvre between different spatial scales, highlighting, in the process, ‘the ways in which places – now fluid rather than fixed – become meaningful as they merge into a larger context’ (King, Reference King2021, 1239).

This interplay between the local and the global takes on greater significance given the positioning of Xiaolong’s work within the world literary marketplace. As the Chen mysteries are narratives set in China yet told for a primarily non-Chinese, English-speaking audience, the question of how to read and understand them in an era when ‘literary traffic between the English and Chinese speaking world is increasing in volume, intensity and complexity’ has been much debated (Hui, Reference Hui and Anderson2018, 47). In other words, should these texts be considered a ‘new development in overseas Chinese literature’, one that reflects the broader ‘rise of China and its role in globalisation’, or do they form part of an expanding and diverse canon of American literature (Hui, Reference Hui and Anderson2018, 50)? For Alan R. Velie (Reference Velie2009, 56), Xiaolong’s work represents a quintessential example of ‘the new globalized literature’, as indicated by its strategic combination of ‘Western critical methods’ with elements of ‘traditional Chinese culture’. Velie (Reference Velie2009, 56) stresses the presence of a decentralised cosmopolitan perspective, arguing that the texts combine ‘insight into the culture and cuisine’ of a rapidly transforming contemporary China together with a unique perspective on the way that Chinese literature ‘is viewed in the West’. Luo Hui, on the other hand, identifies a more ambivalent ‘creative impulse’ at work, arguing that Xiaolong’s narratives are energised less by a vague and ‘celebratory new-millennium cosmopolitanism’ and more by a tension between ‘the limitations and possibilities [that] confront a writer who works in a foreign language [in] a rapidly globalizing world’ (Hui, Reference Hui and Anderson2018, 47). For Hui (Reference Hui and Anderson2018, 55), Xiaolong refuses to ‘shy away from the constructs and artifices’ of ‘foreignness and exotism’, and works to combat cliché ‘through the mechanisms of deconstruction, simulation, parody and self-parody’. Thus, despite Don’t Cry Tai Lake’s ostensible accentuation of the mobility and hybridity of culture – as typified by its numerous references to the Western traditions of detective fiction – what Hui identifies here is an equal emphasis on elements of cultural difference, reflecting, perhaps, the text’s critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’s complicity with the logic of global capitalism’ (Stević & Tsang, Reference Stević, Tsang, Stević and Tsang2019, n.p.). The text appears deeply uncertain about the deterritorialising impacts of globalisation, and these anxieties come to inform its ultimately uneasy reconciliation of the vast and interlaced nature of environmental crime with the crime novel’s normative demand for narrative closure.

Although the murder of Liu is initially suspected to be linked to the chemical company’s hazardous disposal of toxic waste, it ultimately transpires to be connected to a parallel plot relating to its forthcoming initial public offering, one that implicates Lui’s disgruntled former secretary-cum- mistress Mi and a resentful corporate climber called Fu. Both parties were due to profit from Liu’s death and thus conspired to commit and cover up the murder. There is a moment, therefore, where the novel’s ecological crimes threaten to go unattended, as underlined by the arrest of environmental activist Jiang on the unproven grounds of corporate blackmail. This is to ensure that he doesn’t ‘blab to the western media’ about the country’s corrupt environmental governance (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012, 245). As the Wuxi police chief tells Chen: ‘Chinese people should be able to tell the difference between what is appropriate to discuss with the proper insiders and what one can discuss with outsiders’ (245). Chen is very much one of these insiders, and it is his connection to Comrade secretary Zhao, an influential member of the party, that allows him to elevate his ecological concerns to the higher echelons of government. Zhao assures Chen that he will raise the issue at the next politburo meeting, stressing his belief that the government ‘will follow a pattern of sustainable development’ and won’t ‘leave a polluted lake to [their] children’ (249).

Admittedly a less straightforward and celebratory account of bureaucratic power than presented in Pale Horses, the novel examines state complicity in the perpetuation of environmental crime in a way that still points to the persistence of sovereignty in some form. In other words, the text indicates that pollution, toxic dumping and other manifestations of ecological harm are still fundamentally issues of the state, and that a reconcentration of state regulation (‘more state’) is itself the solution. The novel only loosely connects China’s fraught environmental landscape with a wider set of global dynamics, meaning that its ecological vision is still largely bound by the territorially demarcated parameters of the nation-state and by the formal confines of the police procedural. Yet, the text is also conscious of its own mimetic limitations, as indicated by Inspector Chen’s parallel attempts to communicate the destruction of Tai Lake via an ‘ambitious multivoiced, multiperspective poem’ (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012, 98). The poem, also called ‘Don’t Cry Tai Lake’, is conveyed to the reader in fragments over the length of the text and thus emerges as an alternative mode of narrative representation running alongside the detective novel proper. The ‘disorganized’ lines and realities of the poem allow Chen to structure and communicate a different kind of narrative feeling, one less hampered by the crime novel’s typically limited temporal and spatial scales. It is for this reason that Chen sees poetry as ‘something worth doing’, despite Shanshan’s claims that ‘poetry can’t make anything happen’ (Xiaolong, Reference Xiaolong2012, 13). Staged within the novel’s ostensibly orthodox formal bounds, then, is a deeper philosophical rumination on the utility of art, as well as on the broader challenge that the Anthropocene poses to our extant aesthetic modes. In this way, Don’t Cry Tai Lake operates on two representational levels and can be seen to quietly anticipate some of the more hybridised forms of ecological crime fiction that will be discussed in Section 3.

Broken Borders and Climate Dystopias: Environmental Crime and the Deterritorialised State in The Healer and Earthly Remains

Tuomainen’s The Healer (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014) offers a similarly useful route into thinking about contemporary crime fictions that are pushing the mode’s formal boundaries via their treatment of environmental crime or catastrophe. Set in a near-future Helsinki, the novel presents a dystopian vision of ecological collapse, where untrammelled economic growth has disastrously accelerated the effects of global warming. Rising sea levels, forest fires and global pandemics are an unremarkable reality in the highly volatile terrain of the text, where some ‘650–800 million’ climate refugees have been displaced worldwide (4). Helsinki itself is a putrefying city battered by rainfall and flash floods, prompting many of its residents to abandon their homes and move north to the new ‘high security, privately owned small towns’ in Canada, Sweden and Norwegian Lapland (31). With municipal services teetering on the brink of collapse, private security is now the ‘only sector that is growing’ (65). The text’s primary mystery concerns the disappearance of protagonist Tapani Lehtinen’s wife, Johanna, an investigative journalist who had been researching a series of unresolved murders attributed to a man calling himself ‘The Healer’. The killer targets individuals who have contributed excessively ‘to the acceleration of climate change’, which, as the novel opens, already includes ‘nine executives and politicians [and] their families’ (12). This largely conventional murder mystery plot serves as a ‘surface narrative’ to a more ‘overarching meta-narrative reflecting on climate change as a series of criminal actions’ (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018).

What differentiates The Healer from the texts examined so far is its emphasis on the ineffectuality of the nation-state in the face of global environmental destruction. This is ostensibly examined through the localised context of Helsinki, where the near collapse of the city’s bureaucratic structures forces Lehtinen to search for Johanna, and the killer, outside of the traditional channels of law enforcement. Yet Tuomainen also moves beyond these limited geographical framings, emphasising Helsinki’s connection ‘to the rest of the world and what is happening in it’ (King, Reference King2021, 1246). This is neatly distilled in an early section of the text when, whilst travelling on a bus through the city, Lehtinen and the reader are exposed to the wider frame of ecological upheaval via a television screen attached to the back of the driver’s ‘bulletproof glass’ compartment (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014, 4). The almost collagic arrangement of catastrophes and conflicts that the screen displays – impacting nations as diverse as China, Spain, Italy, India and Mexico – allows for a zooming between local, regional and global scales, revealing to the reader the multifaceted and deeply imbricated nature of the climate crisis. The subsidiary effects of these ecological upheavals are also felt more materially in the rapidly changing demographic make-up of Helsinki itself, which, owing to the mass arrival of climate refugees, has ‘finally become an international city’, albeit not how Lehtinen ‘had imagined it’ (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014, 229). Stewart King points to Hamid, a displaced North African taxi driver who helps Lehtinen search for Johanna, as a ‘central figure of this recent multicultural transformation’, one who emphasises the text’s critique of the ‘focus on local concerns at the expense of global wellbeing’ (King, Reference King2021, 1246). Yet it is via Hamid that we can also begin to see the limitations of The Healer’s eco-cosmopolitan vision. Despite the novel’s attempts to imagine less territorially situated forms of belonging through Helsinki’s volatile and denationalised social terrain, it often struggles to develop a truly ‘cultural perspective of the global’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 207). In particular, the dynamic between Lehtinen and Hamid emerges from what Sarah Dimick describes as ‘a troubled lineage of interracial crime fighting duos’, with Hamid often performing the ‘brutal physical work’ in protection of the ‘cerebral detective’ (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 27). Tuomainen therefore risks ‘mapping these highly racialized roles onto the emerging politics of climate change refugees headed for Europe, assigning Lehtinen the role of protagonist while relegating Hamid to the narrative’s periphery’ (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 27). As such, the narrative remains largely circumscribed by the ‘local scene’ (and Lehtinen’s field of vision), which prevents other perspectives and discourses from developing in a productive way.

On the whole, the vision of deterritorialisation that the novel presents – symptomised by the collapse of nation-states worldwide – is both violent and alienating, rather than cosmopolitan and unifying. Tuomainen certainly attempts to situate the text within a broader set of global dynamics, yet these linkages often seem too vast or opaque to be comprehended in any kind of totality. This sense of abstraction is typified by the denouement of the novel, where Lehtinen confronts the killer – an eco-radicalist called Pasi Tarkiainen – as he attempts to board a train leaving Helsinki. Held at gunpoint, Tarkiainen situates his crimes as a form of vigilante justice perpetrated against those responsible for the collapse of the world’s delicate ecosystems: ‘I’m on the side of good, Tapani …. I have to make sure that good continues to live for as long as evil and selfishness do. Maybe justice isn’t winning, but it’s not completely gone’ (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014, 238). Tarkanian’s logic of environmental justice necessitates the construction of a clear conceptual divide between climate villains and climate victims, thereby ‘cracking the scale of human culpability in two’ (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 31). Yet elsewhere the novel reveals human culpability to be far more dispersed and relational, thus rendering such binarised conceptualisations of guilt as fundamentally incompatible with the larger crime of climate change. This extends to Lehtinen, whose prioritisation of Johanna’s safety (over all else) becomes symbolic of the forms of blinkered self-interest that produced the conditions for global ecological collapse in the first place. As one of Tarkanian’s henchmen says to Lehtinen: ‘[H]ow many of us are truly innocent anyway?’ (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014, 210).

The conclusion of the text is pervaded by bleakness and uncertainty, typified by Tarkanian’s disappearance following the showdown at the train station. Lehtinen is subsequently reunited with Johanna, but the text otherwise ‘spirals in resolution’ (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 28). In the final pages, we learn that environmental decay continues to grow ‘worse as time goes by’, with little optimism for change (Tuomainen, Reference Tuomainen[2010] 2014, 244). For Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann (Reference Milner and Burgmann2020, 127), this ‘view of the planet as already inevitably and irreparably damaged is as much the stance of the novel itself’ as the characters who populate it, meaning that the text knowingly leaves the reader ‘bereft of social hope’. In this way, the novel channels the sense of lingering anxiety most commonly associated with ‘the imperfectly finished plots’ of literary noir, where both protagonist and reader are implicated in a wider sense of societal guilt (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 136). Stewart King (Reference King2021, 1244), on the other hand, positions this resistance to closure not as a failure of ‘crimate fictions’ but as ‘a deliberate feature’, one that draws attention to the ‘specific behaviours’ that contribute towards climate catastrophe. As such, he suggests that The Healer seeks ‘to raise readers’ consciousness by incriminating those behaviours and attitudes that result in eco destruction’, therefore expanding ‘how we conceive of criminal behaviour’ (King, Reference King2021, 1244). Here King leans on a familiar critical argument often utilised when attempting to conceive of the value or utility of climate fiction; namely, that such texts help to spread awareness and/or motivate individuals to take effective action. However, the impact of climate messaging is extremely difficult to quantify in practical terms, and one cannot assume, as King seems to here, that ‘educating’ readers, either practically or ethically, will necessarily produce positive or constructive responses (or, indeed, that readers will actually be ‘educated’). In his study on the efficacy of cli-fi, Mathew Schneider-Mayerson (Reference Schneider-Mayerson2018, 473) found that ‘most works of climate fiction’ actually lead readers to ‘associate climate change with intensely negative emotions, which could prove counterproductive to efforts at environmental engagement or persuasion’.

Of course, that is not to suggest that the resolutions offered by a text like Pale Horses are any more effectual in lending shape to the multivalent and transnational terrain of environmental harm. On the contrary, these fantasies of closure only further delimit the reader’s sense of planet, as the text’s environmental thematics become subservient to the crime narrative’s generic demand for closure. Nonetheless, the hopelessness and doubt that pervade the final pages of The Healer produce an equivalent and similarly immobilising sense of narrative inertia, exposing the deep ‘formal misalignments’ between ‘standard’ crime stories and climate change (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 32). As Dimick suggests, this is particularly true of the varieties of ‘scaled culpability’ that climate change produces, which tend to be far more ‘difficult to narrate than the paradigm of discrete culpability’ that the genre ordinarily navigates (Dimick, Reference Dimick2018, 32). The environmental transgressions and harms that The Healer reveals far exceed the jurisdictional and epistemological scope of the lone investigator, disrupting the cause-and-effect relations that typically lend narrative shape to the crime novel’s disorganised assembly of clues. Thus, whilst the text does strive to contextualise its local crimes within the ‘larger context’ of the global – and to disrupt the boundaries of the detective novel through forms of genre hybridisation – these complex dynamics still seem to elude its limited frames of reference, resulting not in new forms of eco-cosmopolitan understanding but in feelings of incomprehension, impotence and guilt (King, Reference King2021, 1249).

At first glance, Leon’s Earthly Remains (Leon, Reference Leon2017) may not appear an obvious example of contemporary crime fictions that are forging new aesthetic templates through which to connect peoples and events across vastly different ‘ecological scales’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 206). The twenty-sixth volume in her Commissario Guido Brunetti series, the novel continues Leon’s focus on the local crime scenes of Venice and its surrounding lagoons, revealing a dark and murky criminal underworld behind these ostensibly picturesque landscapes. Yet the seemingly delimited spatial framing of the text belies a more complex relationship between the local and the global, one that is intimately connected to the distribution and popularity of the Brunetti mysteries within the international literary marketplace. Since the publication of Death at La Fenice in 1992, the series has sold over two million copies worldwide, prompting several translations, adaptations and spin-offs. Yet Leon has also received criticism for refusing to allow her works to be translated into Italian, a decision, she has argued, motivated simply ‘by a desire to protect her anonymity’ (McGuire, Reference McGuire and Ashman2023, 400). For some critics, this highlights a significant tension between the ostensibly localised (Italian) settings of the novels and their largely non-Italian readership. Aina Vidal-Pérez (Reference Vidal-Pérez and Ashman2023, 415), for instance, describes Leon’s work as an exercise in ‘ethnographic exhibitionism’, arguing that the excessive concentration on descriptions of Venetian places, cuisine and social codes comes close to producing a ‘touristic’ gaze. What we can begin to see here is the somewhat liminal position that Leon’s work occupies in relation to conventional definitions of the local and the global, which is of particular interest when considering her status as a self-proclaimed ‘eco-detective writer’ (Rustin, Reference Rustin2017). Indeed, it is how Leon explicitly engages with the ‘subject’ of environmental crime that is of primary concern to this section. Whilst Earthly Remains is, on the whole, largely conventional in its narrative arrangements – predominantly engaging with ecological discourses at a thematic level – its evocation of the imbricated nature of the local and the global allows for the production of a particular kind of ecological poetics. This is manifested most explicitly via Leon’s representation of the laguna, which exceeds the human scale and reveals the ‘deep-time environmental effects of climate catastrophe’ (Vidal-Pérez, Reference Vidal-Pérez and Ashman2023, 417). However, the atemporal and borderless nature of the Laguna also means that it surpasses the territorial jurisdictions of both the detective and the state, presenting a particular challenge to the crime novel’s drive for closure (as do the transnational crimes that it unearths). Thus, like The Healer, the novel is ultimately immobilised by the kinds of scaled culpability that it reveals, resulting in a similar sense of critical inertia.

The novel is predominantly set in Sant’Erasmo – one of the largest islands in the Venetian Lagoon – where Brunetti escapes for an extended vacation following a stress-related health scare. He is met at the villa by the custodian Davide Casati, who begins taking him out on rowing excursions around the vast tributaries of the lagoon. It is here, amongst the expanse of the salt marshes, that the reader is exposed to their first ecological crime scene, as Casati discovers that an unknown contaminant has been poisoning and destroying his carefully monitored beehives. For Casati, the environmental degradation caused by the flagrant dumping of chemical waste becomes a synecdoche for the larger failure of humanity to address its toxifying impact on the natural world: ‘“Look at that” …. [He’d] waved his left hand in a wide arc towards the mainland. “Everywhere, we’ve built and dug and tore up and done what we wanted with nature. And look at this,” he’d said, turning to his right and waving out over the laguna, “we’ve poisoned this too”’ (Leon, Reference Leon2017, 157). Casati’s arching gesture shifts the narrative perspective from the localised site of the lagoon to a larger planetary expanse, creating a ‘circle of inclusion’ that extends to non-anthropomorphic considerations such as ‘animals, waters, trace elements, the air we breathe, and the soils we traverse’ (McGuire, Reference McGuire and Ashman2023, 401). As Vidal-Pérez (Reference Vidal-Pérez and Ashman2023, 413) suggests, it is significant that ‘the first corpse to be discovered in [the] novel is not human’, indicating the text’s strategic efforts to zoom outside of the localised human stories it narrates by framing them within the context of broad spatial and deep-time scales. It is these deep-time scales that prove consolation for Casati, who imagines a future for the bees beyond the parameters of the Anthropocene: ‘Bees have had fifty million years [to] become what they are …. We’ll never manage to kill them all. They’ll survive us and what we’ve done to them’ (Leon, Reference Leon2017, 158).

The lagoon itself is central to Leon’s evocation of spatial and temporal porousness and is where Casati’s submerged corpse is later discovered in the aftermath of a ferocious storm. Although the man’s death is deemed an accident, Brunetti is unconvinced and initiates his own investigation into the circumstances surrounding it. This leads him to Patrizia Manetti, a soil scientist who, prior to Casati’s drowning, had been analysing mud samples from the poisoned beehives. Manetti was once stationed in Uzbekistan on behalf of the Food and Agriculture Organization, where she was tasked with examining the impact of the disappearing Aral Sea on the denuded lakebed. There she discovered that the vast water withdrawals needed to sustain the industrial growth of cotton had directly precipitated the draining of the sea, prompting the release of carcinogenic dusts, salts and other pesticides into the surrounding atmosphere. When she could no longer ignore the respiratory diseases and skin cancers impacting the surrounding villages, as well as the numerous ‘dead animals lying in the fields’, Manetti began recording these larger ecological impacts in her reports, ultimately leading to her dismissal and the suppression of her findings (182). At once pointing to the highly dispersed nature of environmental crime across traditionally demarcated geographical boundaries, the damage wrought against the Aral Sea and its surrounding communities becomes a cautionary tale for the future of the Venetian lagoon:

First reading the signs of ecological breakdown in the flora and fauna that surround her, Manetti ultimately expands her vision outwards, connecting these phenomena to a larger planetary derangement. For Vidal-Pérez (Reference Vidal-Pérez and Ashman2023, 416), her speech operates as a kind of ‘risk discourse’, where ‘the end of nature’ is positioned as ‘starting at the Venetian lagoon’ before encompassing ‘planet Earth as a whole’. The deterritorialised space of the lagoon becomes a symbol of such transnational connectivity, with Leon portraying how its waters ‘filter [out] like tentacles from the small canals of Venice’ towards ‘other oceans through the polluted Mediterranean’ (Vidal-Pérez, Reference Vidal-Pérez and Ashman2023, 413–416). In the process, the text exposes the inherent instability of the ideological and topographical boundaries of the nation-state, as well as the attendant problem of prosecuting environmental crime in a ‘global environment’ such as the lagoon, one which is almost impossible to ‘regulate, inhabit and settle’ (Puxan-Oliva, Reference Puxan-Oliva, Roig-Sanz and Rotger2022, 42).

This is what stifles Brunetti’s ability to apportion blame or enact justice. The detective comes to suspect that Casati was murdered for his attempts to expose GCM Holdings, a large petrochemical company situated in Venice’s industrial region. Brunetti uncovers evidence that the company has been dumping toxic waste (meant for transportation to countries around Europe) into the waters of the lagoon for decades and that Casati had been compiling proof – via soil samples – to bring this corporate malfeasance to an end. Yet Brunetti’s lack of jurisdictional power ultimately immobilises his search for truth, as does the sheer complexity and scale of the ecological crimes he is confronted with. This is neatly crystallised towards the climax of the text, when the detective tries (and fails) to make sense out of the ‘anomalous’ clues that confront him: ‘a few dead bees in a plastic vial, the Aral Sea, two thousand euros a week, a dark mud in another vial. If they were pieces on a board, would he be able to move them round so they formed a picture?’ (Leon, Reference Leon2017, 226). Brunetti’s inability to comprehend the larger planetary plot is rooted in his quest for culpability, which ultimately extends far beyond the particular criminal machinations of GCM Holdings. Like The Healer, Earthy Remains ends up devolving into uncertainty, with Casati’s death and GCM’s crimes ultimately left unpunished. Whilst the ‘intensely local nature’ of Earthly Remains is certainly a ‘red herring for the global scales of ecological (in)justice that it underlines’, these global injustices are also too opaque and implausible to find meaningful shape within the traditional formal bounds of the detective novel (McGuire, Reference McGuire and Ashman2023, 400). The result is a familiar sense of alienation, hopelessness and despair.

Satirical Eco-thrillers: Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells and Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist

‘Poso Wells does not appear on any map. How could it?’ This is how Alemán (Reference Alemán[2007] 2018, 13) introduces the reader to the fictional slum settlement of Poso Wells, a ‘stinking, forgotten hole’ in the depths of rural Ecuador. At once emphasising the politically deterritorialised and economically marginalised nature of the community at the centre of the text, it is an image that simultaneously foregrounds Alemán’s ‘preoccupation with the nature of borders’ (Riofrio, Reference Riofrio2010, 26). This not only manifests at the thematic level – where questions of gender, social class and political sovereignty will take centre stage – but can also be traced formally through Poso Wells’ cannibalisation of various forms, genres and styles. This is a strategic move on Alemán’s behalf and is expressive of her deep resistance to the rigid stratification of literary modes. As she tells Dick Cluster: ‘I understand that critics need definitions [but they] only flatten out the possibilities. I love crossovers between horror and fantasy [or] social realism and poetry’ (Cluster, Reference Cluster2018, n.p.). Acknowledging a certain ‘proximity’ to detective fiction as one of Poso Wells’ many layers, Alemán also identifies the importance of ‘satire’ in helping the reader ‘navigate the darkness at the centre of the book’ (Cluster, Reference Cluster2018). Although Alemán uses the term satire in a general sense here, what is particularly noteworthy is the novel’s appeal to the Menippean traditions of satire as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin[1929; 1963] 1984) identifies several characteristics that distinguish the Menippean satire from other classic ‘serio-comical’ genres, whilst also tracing its centrality to the development of the modern European novel. Key to the ideological and aesthetic conventions of the Menippean satire is the cultivation of a ‘carnival sense of the world’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin[1929; 1963] 1984, 113), where the carnival (as event and anarchic concept) represents ‘a liberating and subversive challenge’ to ideas of completeness, closure and the ‘political status quo’ (Ball, Reference Ball, Mittapalli and Kuortti2003a, 93). This is characterised by the genre’s ‘bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic’, where ‘extraordinary’ situations are created for the ‘provoking and testing of a philosophical idea [or] truth’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin[1929; 1963] 1984, 114). As such, many critics have drawn a parallel between the anti-hierarchical and anti-realist proclivities of the Menippean satire and the boundary-crossing tendencies of much postcolonial and postmodern fiction (Friedman, Reference Friedman2019, 16). This has a particular resonance in Poso Wells, where economic and ecological corruption are directly linked to the exploitative power systems of globalisation and neocolonialism.

The plot of Poso Wells centres on journalist Oswaldo Varas’ investigation into the unexplained disappearance of several women, placing him in situ to witness various other sensational events, beginning with the extraordinary death of a corrupt presidential candidate who, during a campaign rally, is electrocuted on stage after trying to covertly urinate in his trousers. Alemán’s exultant description of the event prefigures the carnivalesque energies of the novel as a whole:

Revealed here is one of the key components of the Menippean satire: the ‘organic combination [of] the free fantastic with [an] extreme and crude slum naturalism’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin[1929; 1963] 1984, 155). The candidate’s surreal, almost angelic ascension above the stage is immediately juxtaposed with the brutal realism and vulgarity of his scorched body, as Alemán works to collapse the ontological boundary between the ordinary and the incredible. His death and the phantasmic, schadenfreudic delight with which it is relayed thus represent a radical liberation from ‘hierarchical fixities’ and ‘prevailing truths’, evincing, in the process, feelings of uncertainty, change and renewal (Ball, Reference Ball2003b, 99). This transformative potential is channelled most explicitly into the image of the candidate’s grotesque body, which is marked by an openness and excess that, for Bakhtin, signifies the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture. Such breakdowns in authority continue in the aftermath of this scene, when Varas witnesses the candidate’s immediate successor Andres Vinueza – who is embroiled in a fraudulent deal to sell ecological reserve lands to a Canadian copper mining company – being kidnapped and taken underground by a cabal of old men ‘with no eyes’ (Alemán, Reference Alemán[2007] 2018, 23). It is this ancient subterranean community that is also responsible for the abduction of the town’s missing women, a reality Varas will unwittingly collide with when he stumbles across a traumatised victim in an underground tunnel network beneath the slum. Initially striving for a logical explanation that would explain the woman’s presence there, Varas decides ‘that no truth he was going to find would be sufficient to explain her. Or anything else’ (Alemán, Reference Alemán[2007] 2018, 59).

This positioning of truth as fundamentally inadequate in lending shape to the phantasms and abject realities of Poso Wells is indicative of Alemán’s attempts to ‘develop new forms of language’ and ‘ways of seeing’ that work against ‘dominant ontologies and epistemologies’, particularly the ‘scientific rationalism’ most frequently aligned with the Western tradition of detective fiction (Holgate, Reference Holgate2019, 3). As John Riofrio (Reference Riofrio2010, 27) suggests, the satiric and fantastic register of Poso Wells should therefore be understood as a composite part of ‘Alemán’s fervent desire to do something [to] shake off the subtle seductiveness of inertia’, as it pertains not only to forms of social, economic and ecological oppression but also to artistic modes. These energies are also traceable in Yun Ko-eun’s eco-thriller-cum-surrealist satire The Disaster Tourist (Ko-eun, Reference Ko-eun[2013] 2020), which offers a similarly caustic examination of how climate change is ‘inextricably bound up with the pressures of global capitalism’ (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2020). The protagonist of the novel is Yona Kim, a programme coordinator for a Seoul-based company called ‘Jungle’ which specialises in the design and delivery of tourist packages to ecological disaster zones. The increasing ‘frequency and strength’ of disasters around the globe and the ‘resulting damage to humans and property’ mean that dark tourism is now a thriving industry, as emphasised towards the beginning of the novel when Yona looks at a world map ‘transformed’ by annotations and coloured graphs indicating where ecological catastrophes have taken place (Ko-eun, Reference Ko-eun[2013] 2020, 4). Yona faces disaster of a different kind in the early sections of the text when she is sexually assaulted by her boss, Kim. In the aftermath, she agrees to take a one month, expenses paid vacation to Mui, an island off the coast of Vietnam renowned for its large ‘desert sinkhole’ (24). When Yona is later separated from her tour group – and forced to stay in Mui– she realises that the island is nothing more than an elaborate ‘theme park’, with paid actors and constructed ‘sets’ designed to create the illusion of an authentic and impoverished local community (81). The site’s real indigenous inhabitants are even further marginalised, forced to live offshore on ‘unlicensed’ shacks and stilt houses at the behest of the resort’s despotic owners: a faceless multinational corporation called ‘Paul’ (116). Referred to disparagingly as ‘crocodiles’, these people are prohibited from entering the carefully curated ‘tourist areas’ from Monday through to Saturday, so as to keep them ‘satisfactorily sanitized for the public eye’ (Ju, Reference Ju2020). The dissimulative, hyper-real terrain of the novel is amplified further when Yona is inculcated into a pernicious corporate scheme to script and manufacture a new ‘natural’ disaster, one that involves the deliberate collapse of several manmade sinkholes during an annual local festival. The motivation is ostensibly financial, with Paul hoping to benefit from an international ‘disaster recovery’ fund earmarked for places severely impacted by environmental catastrophes. Yet the company is also using the simulated disaster to cleanse the island of its indigenous inhabitants, all so it can take possession of the ‘fertile’ lands they currently inhabit.

Yona’s description of Mui as an ‘empty theatre [floating] on the ocean’ could well be read as a synecdoche for a broader postmodern reality, one so overrun by simulation that the line between truth and fantasy has been all but distinguished (Ko-eun, Reference Ko-eun[2013] 2020, 124). This collapse of conceptual boundaries is mirrored in the text’s steady deconstruction of the thriller mode, as typified by Yona’s strange complicity in the grotesque proceedings that surround her. Unwilling or unable to interrupt the company’s oblique and multifaceted plot, Yona allows herself to be swept along by its abstract currents and uses the ‘indirect’ nature of her work – which involves planning the post-disaster travel programme – as justification for her inaction (150). Yona’s positioning as ‘protagonist’ steadily fragments as a consequence, and she will eventually disappear from the narrative some twenty pages before the climax of the text, when she is killed by the company for use as a ‘Mannequin’ in the impending disaster. At once interrogating the relationship between myopia and the climate crisis – where a collective willingness ‘to look the other way’ can ultimately ‘accumulate in tragedy’ – here Yun Ko-eun self-consciously underlines the inadequacy of existing representational modes (crime/thriller) and literary archetypes (detective /hero) in lending meaningful shape to the absurdity of contemporary life (Buehler, Reference Buehler2021). For Brian McHale (Reference McHale2003, 172), it is this interruption of the unitary ‘ontological horizon’ of the ‘traditional genres of official literature’ that makes postmodernist fiction the ‘natural heir of Menippean satire and its most recent historical avatar’. Like Poso Wells, The Disaster Tourist embraces these carnivalesque elements of hybridity and fragmentation, even if, as Madeline Leung Coleman suggests, it does sometimes risk becoming too ‘oppressively real’ in its satiric vision of contemporary life (Coleman, Reference Coleman2020). Coleman refers to Northrop Frye’s discussion of satire, in which he argues that ‘at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque’ is required to prevent the satire from devolving into expressions of ‘puzzled defeat’ Reference Frye([1957] 1971, 224). Whilst the text’s association of ‘violence, suffering and death with black humour’ is partly what negates this kind of tragic inertia, it is the ambiently utopian energies of its denouement that provide a critical alternative to the immobilising uncertainties of noir: the crime genre’s most typically tragic mode (Greenberg, Reference Greenberg2019, 222).

Before examining the denouements of both texts, and the forms of ‘kinetic’ utopia that they represent, it is first useful to reflect on their shared elicitation of another characteristic central to the traditions of the Menippean satire: ‘the capacity to contemplate the world on the broadest possible scale’ (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin[1929; 1963] 1984, 115). Despite being set in local contexts, these novels are still eminently global crime fictions, in the sense that they make explicit connections between regional abuses, be they economic or ecological, and wider transnational forces. In particular, both texts examine how neocolonialism is tightly woven together with forms of gendered violence, racism and resource exploitation, positioning it as the primary driver behind climate change and other instances of environmental catastrophe. These dynamics are traceable in various forms throughout Poso Wells but embodied most explicitly in the shape of Holmes, a Canadian financier hoping to excavate Ecuador’s ecologically protected cloud forest for its copper minerals. This plan is ultimately impeded by the remonstrations of ‘the local, economically modest, indigenous, and mestizo residents’, causing him to shift his attentions elsewhere, to a potentially lucrative land deal that would see the summit of the Andes (between Chile and Argentina) transformed into a non-taxable ‘no-man’s-land’ for multinational mining companies (Riofrio, Reference Riofrio2010). Although bemoaning the obstacles presented by ‘peasants and environmentalists’ around the world, Holmes remains confident in the broader currents of global capital (Alemán, Reference Alemán[2007] 2018, 142–143). Towards the climax of the text, we see him planning future land acquisitions whilst travelling high above the clouds on a plane to Chile:

All of Holmes’ appearances in the novel are characterised by an acute dilation of time and space, where we find him either in transit, as in the extract above, or dislocated from temporal and spatial markers entirely. In this way, he comes to symbolise the rampant and untrammelled movement of international finance and is the means through which Alemán reveals the similar yet highly dispersed effects of these systems of power in different locations around the world. As Riofrio (Reference Riofrio2010, 30) suggests, Poso Wells therefore positions the exploitation of Ecuador’s resources in the context of ‘worldwide struggles over equality’, strategically linking the ‘resistance of one small community with the struggles of similar communities in Asia Africa, and the US’. The Disaster Tourist correspondingly situates the absurd happenings on the island of Mui within the context of these broader financial networks, thus similarly revealing ‘the short-sighted cruelty’ of neocolonialism (E. Kim, Reference Kim2020). Underscored mostly via the detrimental impact the corporate commodification of Mui’s land has on its local community, these global dynamics are also alluded to via Yun Ko-eun’s engagements with questions of global waste. As the novel begins, we learn that the debris created by a recent tsunami off the west coast of South Korea has accumulated into a floating mass of plastics and ‘forgettable knick-knacks’ destined to ‘swirl about’ in the ocean for decades (Ko-eun, Reference Ko-eun[2013] 2020, 2). Many predict that it might end up flowing into the notorious ‘garbage island’ in the Pacific Ocean, a gyre of human detritus and marine particles spanning from the west coast of North America to Japan. However, the waste returns in dramatic fashion in the closing pages, when, in something approximating poetic justice, it is swept up by an enormous tsunami that ends up engulfing the island of Mui. The planned simulated disaster is therefore superseded by a real-life ecological catastrophe, albeit one inextricably connected to human emissions and activities. Indeed, Yun Ko-eun satirises the myopia that characterises certain conservative discourses concerning anthropogenic climate change, particularly the tendency to situate human-induced environmental disasters as the consequence of ‘natural’ ecological cycles or shifts. We see this in a newspaper story that follows the tsunami, which claims that there was ‘no human connection to the [waste’s] unexpected divergence. The only explanation was a powerful wind current formed by the earth itself, an enormous flow that pushed the trash island off kilter’ (180). As such, the trash island not only symbolises how the actions of one group or nation can circuitously impact the lives of another but also underlines the extent to which many of our disasters are, in some form, manufactured. The latter point is pushed to its hysterical extreme in the shape of the simulated sinkhole tragedy on Mui, yet Ko-eun is also sure to highlight the more trivial yet equally impactful manifestations of these same processes.

This apocalyptic ending to Ko-eun’s novel may not, on the surface, appear to embody the elements of social utopia that Bakhtin sees as characteristic of the Menippean satire. The same could be said of the volcanic eruption that closes Poso Wells, which likewise conjures images of ecological cataclysm. Rafael Andúgar (Reference Andúgar and Ashman2023) suggests one possible route into this, pointing to the forms of ‘divine justice’ – including the death of the cabal of blind men and the release of the captive women – that the eruption catalyses. Yet, and as Andúgar admits, this kind of reading also overlooks Holmes’ escape from justice, not to mention the uncertain social and political terrain that the novel leaves us with. Moreover, the positioning of nature as a ‘divine’ force risks substantiating a nature–culture divide that only further obscures the very direct role that human activities play in many ‘natural disasters’, a point vividly underscored by The Disaster Tourist. The endings to both texts are more uncertain than this, resisting the crime genre’s characteristic drive for closure and preoccupation with individualising guilt. Yet, crucially, neither do they lapse into the kind of ‘lingering anxiety’ that tends to define the more ‘open’ plots of noir fiction and film (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 136). Rather, both commit to more cautiously optimistic visions of the future from within the otherwise uncertain worlds that they present, visions that become rooted in the principles of community and commonality. Alemán finds social and political hope in the bond forged by her three central characters, all of whom cross their stratified ideological positions in the aid of causes bigger than themselves. As Riofrio summarises: ‘Varas risks his job to investigate the unexplained disappearance of scores of women …[;] his close friend Benito … risks his security to come to Varas’s aid; and Bella, the beautiful victim of violence …[,] refuses to remain on her side of the gender border’ (Riofrio, Reference Riofrio2010, 32). As they return in a taxi to Guayaquil in the closing pages, Alemán emphasises the obstinance and resilience of local people, telling us pointedly that ‘escape did not seem to be anyone’s priority in this car’ (Alemán, Reference Alemán[2007] 2018, 157). Whilst the novel clearly positions rootedness as a means of resistance against the forces of global capital, it is a form of rootedness that acknowledges the deep interconnectedness between similarly exploited peoples and communities across the globe. In this sense, Poso Wells is a novel ‘about the many faces and places of social injustice’ (Riofrio, Reference Riofrio2010, 31). A similar vision is offered by The Disaster Tourist when, in the aftermath of the tsunami, we discover that the majority of the survivors are from the indigenous population of the island and were protected from the destruction by the ‘ancient trees of the mangrove forest’ (Ko-eun, Reference Ko-eun[2013] 2020, 178). Although perhaps veering a little too close to allegory, Yun Ko-eun similarly situates localism as a counterpoint to the anaesthetising and destructive effects of untrammelled capitalism. And, like Alemán, she frames this localism within the context of a larger planetary consciousness, highlighting the inherent ‘imbrication of local places, ecologies and cultural practices in global networks that reconfigure them according to [the] logic [of] deterritorialization’ (Heise, Reference Heise2008, 210). It is in this way that both texts can be seen to channel the utopian energies of the Menippean satire, albeit a utopianism defined not by static idealism but by a more ‘kinetic’ sense of ‘hopeful, forward movement’ (Johns-Putra, Reference Johns-Putra2019, 142). Utopia, in this sense, is not an unrealistic end point but an ongoing process of social and political transformation, one that expresses hope for a changed future without obscuring the unjust and violent realities of the present. Thus, whilst not speculative narratives – as might be typically defined – both novels draw on the satiric tradition to deconstruct the positivistic foundations of the crime novel, all the while presenting open-ended mystery plots that ‘suggest different outcomes and make them visible’ (Cluster, Reference Cluster2018).

‘People Aren’t the Future’: Ecocentric Posterity and Speculative Noir in Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun and Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander

Furthering this examination of hybrid crime narratives, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021) is a particularly productive example of how contemporary climate narratives are employing the themes and structures of noir fiction in their interrogation of future ecological collapse. The text follows Patrick Hamlin, a middle-aged writer who travels to Hollywood to oversee the adaptation of his novel Elsinore Lane, an autobiographical family drama based on the ‘buried trauma’ of his father’s death (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 34). On meeting the film’s shadowy producers, Brenda and Jay, Patrick quickly realises that his production role is not as substantial as he first imagined and that he is expected to ferry around lead actor and former child superstar Cassidy Carter. This disappointment is further compounded when he arrives on set, where he discovers that the finished screenplay bears scant resemblance to his original novel. Whilst ‘the names are the same’, the script has otherwise transmuted into a gaudy supernatural horror flick, literalising the more ambient and metaphorical hauntings present in the source material (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 58). These elements of horror extend beyond the parameters of the film into Kleeman’s near apocalyptic rendering of a near-future Los Angeles ravaged by urban congestion, drought and unremitting forest fires. In this highly combustible post-water landscape, the residents of California are now wholly reliant on a factory-made commercial substitute called WAT-R, which comes in a variety of price tiers and ‘flavours’ boasting elusive names such as WAT-R Pure, WAT-R Wildly Wet and WAT-R Misty Morning Dew. As Jennifer Wilson (Reference Wilson2021) notes, the subject of water politics knowingly recalls Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (Polanski, Reference Polanski1974) and is one of many conscious engagements that Kleeman makes with the traditions and conventions of noir. Patrick is particularly preconditioned by the residual power of these narratives, his expectations of Los Angeles deeply mired in stories about ‘writers going to work in Hollywood and detectives tracking down the murderers of beautiful women’ (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 25). In the early sections of the text, he struggles to reconcile these cinematic fantasies with the otherwise abstract and plotless city he encounters, a space so vast and disaggregated that ‘nobody can see the whole picture’ (16). Growing increasingly disoriented, Patrick seeks refuge in old reruns of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, an episodic TV show starring a younger Cassidy Carter as a high-school private investigator. After noticing some strange and unacknowledged recurrences between episodes, Patrick becomes immersed in an online forum called Kassi Keene Revelators, a space where dedicated fans engage in ‘deep reading and analysis’, searching for missing connections and hidden conspiracies beneath, or conjoining, the more customary episodic mysteries (206). The forum is particularly preoccupied with ‘The Big Reveal’, a plot point and ‘mega narrative event’ that was (they speculate) originally planned for the cancelled sixth season and would have ‘cast all of Kassi’s investigations in a new, darker, more unified light’ (157).

This paranoid, conspiratorial logic bleeds into Patrick’s experience of reality as he is confronted with a series of mysterious happenings that point to an analogous ‘mega crime’ exerting its influence over the city of Los Angeles. This includes the discovery of a mystery illness called ROAD (random-onset acute dementia), a form of degenerative brain disease impacting swathes of Californians across all age demographics. Patrick and Cassidy steadily transmute into pseudo detectives as together they attempt to piece together an intricate plot connecting WAT-R Corp, ROAD and the derailing production of Elsinore Road. Yet Kleeman uses this mystery as ‘a scaffolding rather than an engine’, with much of the novel’s ‘power’ deriving from its deeper ‘devotion’ to the ‘plot’ of ecological collapse (Gunty, Reference Gunty2021). Whilst we see this ambiently in the smouldering wildfires surrounding the city, these themes enter the narrative more explicitly via Patrick’s deteriorating relationship with his wife Alison. Early in the novel, Patrick learns that Alison and their nine-year-old daughter Nora have taken up residency at Earthbridge, a nature retreat located in the Adirondack Mountains. Rather than being geared towards conservation and sustainability, Earthbridge is centred on managing the effects of eco-grief, placing emphasis on ‘mourning as the healthiest way of processing the inevitable decline of the planet’ (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 147). Alison tells the other ‘Bridgers’ that Patrick is in Los Angeles caring for a sick relative; her aim is to avoid ‘a lecture [on] the role that Hollywood plays in celebrating the human at the expense of all else that lives and suffers’ (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 278). As Daisy Hildyard (Reference Hildyard2021) suggests, Kleeman is particularly interested in this ‘accusation’, one that could equally be ‘levelled at the tradition of the novel’. It is a propensity that Something New Under the Sun consciously disrupts, creating ‘tensions between the intimate human stories that are the mainstay of literary fiction and the non-human worlds in which these stories happen’ (Hildyard, Reference Hildyard2021). Kleeman cultivates this perspective through an intensifying series of passages that shift the narrative focus on to what Hildyard (Reference Hildyard2021) describes as ‘unseen worlds’. This includes an intense engagement not only with the minutiae of non-human animal and plant life – birds, cactuses, cayotes, frogs – but also with a number of inanimate and elemental existences, such as bushfires, industrial sewage pipes, cloud formations and desert fog. There is a scalar flexibility to these narrative divergences, as Kleeman moves from the momentary sensations of a beetle navigating the ‘high-pile carpeting’ in Cassidy Carter’s guestroom to the deep-time scales of an ancient shoreline where ‘many millions of years’ of biological and geological change are mapped in a few spare sentences (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 333, 325). In the process, Kleeman expands the otherwise ‘localised’ setting of the novel, constructing a planetary vision that extends to non-human ‘planes of reality’ (284).

These moments of ‘extra reality’ intrude upon the narrative with greater regularity in the latter parts of the text, as the human-centred mystery plot steadily devolves into abstraction (Hildyard, Reference Hildyard2021). Although Cassidy and Patrick will confront the novel’s ersatz villains, Brenda and Jay, about their involvement with WAT-R Corp, there is no ‘big reveal’ that ties the disparate elements of the text together. It is a ‘mystery [that] lacks a plot’ (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 82), leaving Cassidy and Patrick grasping – much like the Kassi Keen Revelators – for some deeper and more ‘unified’ meaning. Soon, Patrick steadily succumbs to the amnestic effects of WAT-R, disappearing into the desert where he is later followed by a similarly deteriorating Cassidy. The concluding pages of the text then move away from these human-centred stories, offering a vision of the future that extends far beyond the scale of the Anthropocene:

Kleeman’s prose emulates the effect of time-lapse photography, revealing a planetary surface unmade and remade by a coalescing current of climatic, geological and biological forces. The remnants of the Anthropocene are ‘rubbled’ into abstract shapes and forms, becoming the fossils of a future not yet known. Disrupting the typical spatial and temporal discontinuities of the (crime) novel, this evocation of deep time forces a delineation between the end of our world and the end of the world. It is a vision of the future palpably devoid of the doom and anxiety that permeate the text elsewhere, as Kleeman redirects the uncertainty and open-endedness of noir towards a more radical, ecocentric ‘ethics of posterity; that is, the application of moral considerability to the future of ecosystems, and their species’ (Johns-Putra, Reference Johns-Putra2019, 27). As such, the novel concludes with an acknowledgement not only that ‘endings do not bring neatly resolved meanings’ but, more significantly, that ‘the future need not resemble us’ (Johns-Putra, Reference Johns-Putra2019, 167). As Nora tells her friends at Earthbridge, perfectly distilling the divergent energies of speculative noir: ‘People aren’t the future’ (Kleeman, Reference Kleeman2021, 276).

Such radical conceptualisations of posterity are traceable in VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (Reference VanderMeer2021b), a speculative thriller that similarly draws on the aesthetic traditions of noir in its evocation of a near-future climate dystopia. VanderMeer’s work is commonly associated with the stylistic heterogeneity of the ‘new weird’, a ‘type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer, VanderMeer and VanderMeer2008, xvi). For VanderMeer, the strategic breakdown of literary genres is what makes the ‘new weird’ particularly adept at capturing the disorientation of environmental change on a planetary scale. Here VanderMeer’s work aligns closely with that of Timothy Morton, who likewise situates the ‘weird’ as a useful ‘ontological category’ for conceptualising the ‘twisted, looping’ nature of ecological awareness (Morton, Reference Morton2016, 6). It is this grappling with the ‘ontological strangeness’ of Anthropocene realities that Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford see as a key marker of VanderMeer’s work, typified by his formal merging of ‘established realist genres’ with elements of ‘fantasy, horror and speculative fiction’ (Economides & Shackelford, Reference Economides, Shackelford, Economides and Shackelford2021, 3). Whilst identifying a political bent behind this formal experimentation – arguing that VanderMeer’s fictions are designed to ‘jar us out of complacency’ – they also point to the broader incompatibility of realism with a contemporary reality where ‘there is no quotidian, habitual background to rely on’ (Economides & Shackelford, Reference Economides, Shackelford, Economides and Shackelford2021, 3, 4). Rather than ‘distorting’ the real, VanderMeer’s work shows us that ‘ontological reality in the 21st century is always already surreal’ (Economides & Shackelford, Reference Economides, Shackelford, Economides and Shackelford2021, 4).

Described by VanderMeer as ‘a thriller-mystery set ten seconds into the future’ (Gardiner, Reference Gardiner2021), Hummingbird Salamander follows Jane Smith, a six-foot-tall suburban mum and former high-school wrestler who works as a ‘vulnerability analyst’ for a cybersecurity firm (Gardiner, Reference Gardiner2021). Jane is thrown into the unlikely role of detective when she receives an anonymous note, one that leads her to a storage unit containing the taxidermied body of an extinct hummingbird. It was left to Jane by Silvina Vilcapampa, a missing corporate heiress turned eco-radicalist with links to environmental and animal rights extremist groups. As Jane is swept through this murky underworld of corporate espionage, wildlife smuggling and bioterrorism, she slowly unravels a secret connecting Silvina to her own traumatic past. The novel is structured as a written testimony, bearing the stylistic traces of the kind of confessional and fatalistic narrative forms commonly associated with the tradition of noir fiction. This sense of creeping inexorability is heralded in the prologue, where, as well as portending her own death, Jane clarifies that she ‘is here to show [us] how the world ends’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 2). Such narrative and aesthetic borrowing extends to Jane’s narrative voice, which channels the ‘snappy, poetic weariness of the hardboiled’ detective (Brookins, Reference Brookins2021). These conventions are explicitly acknowledged by Jane, who describes her search for truth as being dependent on her capacity to see ‘things from the point of view of the private eye’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 113). This necessitates the development of a ‘paranoid’ worldview, as well as an acceptance of her own complicity in the degradation that surrounds her (113). Like The Healer, Hummingbird Salamander unfolds against the backdrop of global ecological collapse, where failed nation-states, pandemics and extreme weather events now constitute the fabric of contemporary life. Jane is initially inured to these everyday horrors, more inclined to focus on the ‘ways life was better, even if the world wasn’t’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 41). Yet the search for Silvina steadily brings Jane to an awareness of her own ‘fatal adaptation’ (35), particularly as it pertains to the ‘ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts’ (98). She comes to perceive not only just ‘how many dead things haunt us in our daily lives’ but also how our minds are trained to render these mass atrocities as ‘setting’ (98). As these complex and ‘hidden lines of connection’ slowly begin to emerge, Jane wonders: ‘How did I not see the damage for so long?’ (99).

Part of what the novel is attempting to reveal is the extent to which ‘humans are connected to the rest of nature, even when we’d rather not think about it’ (Berlatsky, Reference Berlatsky2021, n.p.). Within this, exposing the horror of mass animal death is as much an aesthetic concern as a thematic one. In an article on his personal website, VanderMeer points to the work of nineteenth-century German naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt as a key inspiration behind the novel’s composition, particularly his ‘Naturgemalde’, a revolutionary painting of nature that emphasises the interrelations amongst all forms of life. For VanderMeer (Reference VanderMeer2021a), it is the responsibility of writers to keep in mind some version of this precept, to reveal the ‘complexities of ecosystems’ and translate them formally into narratives that ‘incorporate useful granularity without lapsing into the didactic’. This involves drawing a distinction between ‘information’ and ‘story’, as shown through VanderMeer’s juxtaposition of the language of scientific discourse, such as in the ‘inserted’ descriptions of a hummingbird’s anatomical features and migration patterns, with Jane’s deepening immersion in the horrifying lived realities of the animals being systematically destroyed around her. The influence of Von Humboldt is similarly traceable in the political and architectural logics of Unitopia, a sustainable environmental community founded by the missing Vilcapampa. Constructed out of recycled plastics, the centre was initially designed as an eco-artists’ commune oriented towards cultivating sensitivities to the natural world’s various forms of communication, particularly those exceeding our ‘primitive five senses’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 170). Searching the abandoned commune, Jane discovers not only a graphic displaying ‘sedimentary layers within the earth and levels above’ but also a manifesto speculating on what could be accomplished ‘if we could truly see the hidden underpinnings of the world’ (169). The manifesto imagines a future where, through either an ‘immersive virtual reality or other method’, humans are able to perceive the most subtle environmental shifts, down to the ‘chemical signals in the air from beetles and plants’ or the ‘pheromone trails laid down by ants’ (170). Initially interpreting this as an aesthetic philosophy, an endeavour to alter human perception through art, Jane later uncovers a more complex ecological conspiracy connecting Silvina and Unitopia with bioterrorism. Prior to this, her search for truth will meander itinerantly over several years, as she tries (and fails) to uncover a master narrative connecting the varying and intensifying symptoms of ecological collapse. Yet climate change is not solvable within the traditional parameters of the detective novel, leaving Jane chasing ‘even staler breadcrumbs, convinced that just one more clue [will] bring [her] the solution’ (278). In the process, she abandons her husband and daughter, sacrificing the obligations of home and family in commitment to a different, more radical ethics of posterity. In this way, the novel disrupts what Johns-Putra describes as the idealisation of ‘posterity as parenthood’, where the ‘obligation to future generations’ is typically situated as the very basis for environmental action (Johns-Putra, Reference Johns-Putra2019, 7, i). Like Something New Under the Sun, it instead advocates for an alternate form of environmental ethics, one where this responsibility to the future – a future that is, in essence, unknowable – is conceived outside of, or beyond, anthropocentric considerations.

This is cemented at the climax of the novel, when Jane discovers the body of Silvina in an underground bunker inside an excavated mountain. Prior to her death, Silvina had been working on a ‘magic elixir’ made from the ‘defensive toxins’ produced by salamanders and the ‘alkaloids in flowers preferred by the hummingbird’, one that would theoretically harness ‘their power’ and produce in humans ‘a new, true seeing’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 343). Knowing that the serum might kill her, she constructed a fail-safe within the body of the mountain, an artificial micro-habitat of animal and plant life to be released into the outside atmosphere a century into the future (345). On discovering Silvina’s work, Jane injects herself with the one remaining vial of elixir, figuring that it is ‘worth the price’ to ‘change the world’, even if she dies in the process (348). ‘I may not know what happens next. Or even recognize it,’ she says in the final moments of the narrative, leaving her own fate and that of the planet entirely unresolved (349). Through this sacrifice, Jane commits to a radical ecocentric ethics of posterity, where the ‘moral considerability to the future of ecosystems and their species’ is placed above all else (Johns-Putra, Reference Johns-Putra2019, 27). Unlike Kleeman, VanderMeer stops short of contemplating what this future might look like, acknowledging that such a world likely exceeds our imaginative capacities and existing narrative frameworks. Jane is left pondering these uncertainties, unsure if she and the planet are shuttling inexorably towards death or if they will emerge again as ‘some new thing’ (VanderMeer, Reference VanderMeer2021b, 349). Whilst embracing uncertainty, then, the denouement to VanderMeer’s ‘speculative noir’ resists the straight pessimism and negativity most frequently associated with the noir mode, with the ‘open plot’ instead impelling the reader into ‘a kind of production’ (LeMenager, Reference LeMenager2014, 136). This is cultivated not only through Jane’s direct address to the reader in the final lines but also through VanderMeer’s use of paratextual elements throughout, such as a series of inserted images that appear at various section breaks throughout the novel. Whilst some of these refer to real sources, such as the image of Von Humboldt’s ‘Naturgemalde’, others expand upon the fictional world of the text, as exemplified by the architectural blueprint for Unitopia. VanderMeer’s affiliated websites similarly encourage further narrative engagement, as well as forms of participatory activism.Footnote ¹ The novel thus stands as a powerful call to action, at both a political and an aesthetic level.