At least from the time of Charles Brockden Brown, writing American fiction during the formative years of the early republic, mysteries have proven a highly popular genre of fiction with a strong fan base containing readers who often read every new book by a given author. In the United States they continue to sell millions of copies every year and are perhaps only outpaced by thrillers, which also often have a fundamentally mystery-based plot. In recent years, numerous authors working in this genre have increasingly made use of environmental justice issues and an emphasis on nature to deepen the intellectual and affective dimensions of their stories. For some authors, this use seems more or less a matter of using a convenient topical variation to change the setting or the backdrop for their formulaic plots. But for others, nature conservation and environmental justice appear as deep-seated beliefs held by the authors who have found ways to bring their causes into the production of commercially successful novels.
For at least a quarter of a century, ecocritics have been entering pleas for their colleagues to increase their nature literacy by reading more widely beyond the canonically defined literary texts in realms of various types of non-fiction. In this chapter, as in some of the others in this book, I want to call on my colleagues to read more widely in the realms of popular genre fiction to understand better the ways that their neighbors and students are being exposed to ideas about nature conservation and environmental justice that raise their consciousness while entertaining them with tales in their favorite genre of pleasure reading. I place the word pleasure in italics because I do not want it confused with the notion of escapism, which is certainly one of the functions of all forms of pleasure. But, as with many other forms of pleasure experiences, the novels I will discuss here do not encourage their readers to escape anything, but rather educate them about the realities of various environmental crises and issues, while entertaining them with recognizable plots and characters. Further, they frequently rely on noncathartic or only partially cathartic conclusions, so that readers will not have the freedom to imagine that the environmental conflict or problem they raise has been solved by novel’s end, but remains a problem in the world beyond the fictional work.
In contrast, we would have to label escapist those works that do leave the reader with such a sense of closure and completion, since such a cathartic release would work against environmental awareness and the potential for such awareness to lead to action in the world. For instance, when Clive Cussler reassures his readers near the end of Trojan Odyssey that, as a result of Dirk Pitt foiling a Communist Chinese plot, the Gulf Stream will never slow or stop in the future due to climate change, he both falsifies the climatological record and discourages any concern about the potential effects of global warming on the North Atlantic current, encouraging both escapism and passivity on the part of his readers. Cussler encourages a similar escapism in regard to the international trade in toxic waste in Sahara, by suggesting that deep burial in Saharan Africa will solve the problem of disposing of the world’s nuclear waste without contaminating any of the world’s water (2003, 539–40).
Most writers of mysteries and detective stories rely on developing a series of novels built around a single character, or occasionally a team. These characters are usually long-term inhabitants of a particular locale, which facilitates the overlapping of this fiction with literary regionalism. Most intermittent readers and nonreaders of the genre would imagine such locales to be urban centers, such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Chicago. That belief arises more from televisions series and movies than it does from the novels themselves. Die-hard fans know that cities only account for a portion of the environs of their mystery heroes. And even for heroes who travel incessantly, they may find themselves in specific places defined by their regional particularities or disparate settings linked by some type of common features, as in the case of the novels of Nevada Barr. In fact, while Barr’s name has become synonymous with adventures in national parks, other authors’ names have become synonymous with other nature-emphatic settings. For John Straley the setting is Alaska, both urban and wild; for John D. Mac-Donald and Carl Hiaasen it is Florida, particularly coastal communities in the throes of environmental despoliation; for David Poyer the sea for one set of novels and northwestern rural Pennsylvania for another set; for Jane Langton New England towns, and Mary Morgan Puget Sound. Writers associated with cities who treat environmental topics include Sara Paretsky with Chicago and Barbara Neely with Boston. Then there are writers who turn to the mystery or thriller plot as just one more narrative experiment, such as Neal Stephenson, without making any long-term commitment to the genre.
For the sake of simplicity, I am going to limit the discussion in this chapter to just four writers: John D. MacDonald, Nevada Barr, Judith Van Gieson, and John Straley. Their novels are clearly written as popular, and some would even say commercial, fiction. Their body of work is defined by a recurring major character, whose attitudes toward nature and environmental issues count thematically (although MacDonald’s best novels from an ecocritical perspective don’t use that character, his series established the readership and their expectations for such novels). They all write in the realist mode standard for the genre.
JOHN D. MACDONALD
John D. MacDonald stands out as the most widely read mystery writer to date to consistently address environmental issues. Some two dozen of MacDonald’s novels are currently in print, many of them translated into other languages, and millions of used copies circulating throughout the country. In his lifetime he wrote seventy-eight novels, twenty-one of them as the Travis McGee series, with seventy-five million copies in print at the time of his death in 1986. The Travis McGee series provides detailed descriptions of the land, waters, locales, and weather of Florida. Although McGee has his houseboat docked near Fort Lauderdale, he travels the state on his many unsought adventures. With this series we do not get an overt attention to environmental issues or struggles for environmental values, although acts of degradation and the historical amnesia that facilitates their frequency are emphatically pointed out. Rather, McGee provides a consistent attitude of disdain for tourists, newcomers, and greedy Florida businessmen, who have no interest in experiencing or inhabiting the actual, geologically developed nature of Florida, but rather are bent on making and experiencing the entire state as one big combination of Disney World and Miami Beach. McGee and his buddies, from 1964 on, regularly remind readers of the Florida that is being bulldozed, filled, and redesigned for retirement housing and vacation resorts, all resting on unstable environmental and financial foundations.
In other mystery novels outside the series, MacDonald also described Florida in vivid detail, as in the case of the 1956 Murder in the Wind that provides a frighteningly accurate hurricane as its setting. For those of us living in Florida who experienced the state’s being hit by four hurricanes in a matter of two months in 2004, followed by two more direct hits and one near miss in 2005, MacDonald’s depiction of a Gulf hurricane suddenly changing course and slamming into land far sooner than expected provides a chilling foreshadowing of the behavior of Hurricane Charley that significantly changed direction just six hours before landfall at Punta Gorda and drove up Interstate 4 through the middle of Orlando. The irony of that, as with the characters in Murder in the Wind, who thought they were heading north and away from that hurricane, comes with the knowledge that thousands of residents of the Tampa Bay area had fled inland toward Orlando based on the projected path of Charley. Instead of finding safety, they found themselves in the eye of a major disaster. Nearly fifty years later and with all sorts of meteorological technology advances, MacDonald’s warning about the unpredictability of catastrophic natural events ought to be required reading for anyone crossing the state line.
If MacDonald had left his environmental awareness at Travis McGee’s level of attention or limited it to a graphically realistic portrait of one hurricane, however, his novels would not be worthy of anything more than passing ecocritical attention today. But he presented his ideas and his exposés beyond the sentiments of McGee in other novels, beginning as early as 1962 with A Flash of Green, developing his critique of developers further in Condominium in 1977, and continuing to rip corrupt real estate speculators up until his death with the publication of Barrier Island in 1986. Even before the invention of Travis McGee, MacDonald’s reputation sufficed for A Flash of Green to become a best seller. As Hugh Merrill, a noted biographer of Mac-Donald, observes, these environmental fictions represent a turning away from “assembly-line thrillers” (2000, 106). In particular, Condominium, which he published in 1977, and which stayed on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks, weighed in at three times the average length of his formulaic mysteries.
MacDonald’s first environmental novel, A Flash of Green, also longer than his Travis McGee novels, reflects the hard-boiled, antiheroic style prevalent in detective and mystery novels of the day. A novel filled with bitterness and failure, it exposes the complicity of local businesspeople, corrupt politicians, greedy good old boys, and opportunistic professionals in a housing development scheme that requires the substantial filling in of a natural Gulf Coast bay, and which will significantly increase population and traffic density in the locale, with an attendant expansion of strip malls and chain stores. MacDonald’s bitterness here does not arise from the desire for mere stylistic conformity, but reflects the reality of the losing battles in which he had begun participating in the late 1950s by writing a regular column that frequently focused on environmental topics in a Sarasota area monthly magazine and then writing occasionally for the Sarasota Herald Tribune (Merrill 2000, 103–4), which included opposition to efforts to fill in portions of Sarasota Bay. The true-to-life loss by the conservationist constituency of the community in A Flash of Green makes for depressing reading. But it also educates readers who may be thinking of taking up such a cause and organizing grassroots resistance to environmentally destructive development (is that a redundant phrase?) as to just what they may find themselves confronting when they question the development at all costs mentality prevalent in Florida and so much else of the United States.
It also, in 1962 mind you, warns conservationist readers of the necessity to remain continuously vigilant, since the tragic heroes of the novel had previously prevented approval of a smaller development scheme a few years earlier and complacently imagine early in the novel that they can turn back another attempt just as easily—a complacency that proves disastrous for themselves and the bay they would protect. MacDonald, however, places the most fatalistic remarks in the mouth of the vicious local Floridian kingpin behind the development, who admits that newcomers to the state will never realize how much damage has been done to the local ecology because they will only see what remains and will dismiss the old-timers who lament the losses as just nostalgia for an imagined Florida golden age (1962, 95). Nevertheless, the tragic antihero, Jimmy Wing, who after initially selling out the conservationists, continues to the last page of the novel to resist the owner of those words. Long after any hope to reverse the local development has faded, his ongoing actions help to prevent the villain from realizing his larger political and economic ambitions. At novel’s end, Jimmy visits the bay where fill dredging is under way; when a security guard warns him away saying that he is trespassing on private property, he responds that that’s the whole trouble with the situation (MacDonald 1962, 335). The natural world is ceaselessly turned into a commodity for processing and profit.
Need MacDonald say anything more? One would think not. But actually, MacDonald had been saying more in those occasional newspaper columns he wrote. As early as 1960, for instance, he wrote in The Lookout, a monthly paper, “Every zoning-buster, anti-planner, and bay filler is degrading us for the sake of his own pocketbook, be he individual or huge corporation, citing the holy name of progress on his terms. . . . There is no valid justification for filling one more foot of bay. Profit is not progress” (quoted in Merrill 2000, 103–4; emphasis in original). Unfortunately, one of those huge corporations decided to undertake just such a project, and planned to build it next door to MacDonald’s home on Siesta Key. Equally unfortunate, the outcome was little different from the one presented in A Flash of Green. The experience, however, did provide readers with MacDonald’s most accomplished novel, Condominium.
Condominium served as MacDonald’s revenge against the Arvida Corporation, which had planned an eight-story condominium project for the lot next door to his house. When MacDonald prevailed on the local zoning commission to deny permits for the project, Arvida foiled the action by threatening to convert the project into an apartment building instead, which would meet existing zoning regulations. In October of 1974, a judge issued an order requiring the zoning board to grant the permits Arvida needed for its condominiums and fueled the indignation that drove MacDonald’s writing. Less than a year after the loss in court, MacDonald submitted a manuscript to his publisher triple the length of his typical Travis McGee story. When it was published in 1977, readers kept it on the New York Times hardback best-seller list for nearly seven months. The following year it spent three months on the paperback list (Merrill 2000, 187).
This novel contains over twenty significant characters, most of whom have bought into the retirement-in-the-sun propaganda that drove much of Florida’s latter twentieth-century growth (in recent years low unemployment and rapid job expansion, especially in tourist and entertainment industries and construction, have formed the basis for population growth, significantly lowering the average age of new Floridians, at least in Central Florida). The dreams and the realities for such retirees usually prove painfully discordant, not only in terms of the day-to-day emptiness that many of them experience after having cut themselves off from former friends, family, and the communities in which they worked and realized most of their achievements, but also in terms of the economic hardships caused by the unscrupulous developer of the complex. These hardships range from a sudden, budget-breaking increase in monthly service fees to repairs resulting from substandard construction. They also include unexpected injuries and the deaths of loved ones, as well as the onset of senility, the resurgence of alcoholism, and a general loss of meaningful, self-defining activity. Of course, for the most part, both the victimizers and the victims would manage to muddle along and largely survive their day-to-day tribulations, if the sunshine state’s idyllic weather remained perfectly benign. But the novel’s epigraph warns against such naïveté through discouraging complacency by quoting Dr. Robert H. Simpson, former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
The opening chapters are largely devoted to introducing readers to a majority of the characters and their personal tribulations and failings, as well as the corrupt management system of Golden Sands, the condominium building in which these characters live, and its substandard construction. The latter is revealed through the eyes of Gus Garver, a veteran engineer of commercial construction projects. His curiosity also enables MacDonald to educate his readers about the geology of the Florida Gulf keys, which makes construction flaws potentially more serious in this location than if they occurred on a more solid land base. Having established some empathy for the condominium inhabitants, MacDonald introduces the developer, Marty Liss, and begins the process of educating readers about the inner workings of Florida land development, a project he had already undertaken at some length in A Flash of Green. Marty is sandwiched between profiles of other Golden Sands residents, many of whom are paying 8.5 percent interest on their mortgages, typical for the time period of the novel. As with contemporary Americans in 2005 living at the outer limits of their incomes, purchasing homes with interest only mortgages and other forms of creative financing that leave no room for unexpected adversaries, many of the Golden Sands residents living on fixed incomes find themselves in financial crisis. For some, the huge increase in maintenance fees and numerous repairs they must pay for themselves push them over the edge financially; others face unanticipated medical bills due to accidents and injuries to themselves or their spouses.
We soon learn that Marty Liss has little interest in the Golden Sands residents because he has bigger development projects he is attempting to get under way, which require not only significant financing in a bad market, but also the bribing of commissioners and other local officials to short circuit the environmental and zoning review process. MacDonald introduces this element of the plot not only to present his withering view of developers but also because the rush job on this development will directly imperil, and ultimately contribute to the destruction of, Golden Sands.
Many of the residents try to find ways to cope with their situations. With his wife in a nursing home, Gus Garver spends time studying construction and geology patterns on the key. Thelma Mensenkott, while her husband Jack is always sea fishing, explores a jungle ecosystem behind the condominium and becomes an amateur naturalist trying to catalog what she finds there. Howard Elbright, whose wife is quite happy in retirement, also enjoys this jungle area as he traverses it for fishing. He is the first to notice that surveyors are marking off this land that the residents have assumed is a protected conservation area. Rather than being protected, it turns out to be the site of Liss’s next big project and through illicit means he gets a wrecking crew out there on a Saturday to clear the land before anyone can attempt to stop him. The Messengers are another important couple at Golden Sands, an elderly and very wealthy invalid husband and his young, loving wife and caregiver. As a result of conversing with Gus about construction flaws, they arrange for Gus to bring in a hydraulic engineer named Harrison to analyze the situation at Golden Sands.
Harrison’s research quicky reveals what most coastal Floridians and the Florida government perpetually deny: the beaches along both coasts of Florida routinely appear, disappear, and migrate. Natural weather patterns lead to the eventual replenishment of most beach locations over time, but that process is bad for tourism and development. Hence, developers, often encouraged by local governments, build right up to the beach edge, building retaining walls and other illusory forms of protection from ocean storms and surges, which actually contribute to beach erosion and circumvent natural processes. At the same time, such development also destroys the mangrove swamps and other thick vegetation that actually did provide some protection from the effects of a storm surge. The keys themselves are relatively temporary islands (MacDonald 1977, 241), rising, falling, and moving, with hurricanes and tidal processes splitting some apart while reconnecting others, raising up new ones and submerging old ones. Generally only a few feet above sea level the Gulf Coast keys and many other coastal areas are subject to hundred year storm surges several yards above high tide. In the case of the particular key in this novel, that would mean a hurricane-driven storm surge could create waves at high tide that were twenty to twenty-five feet high, which would wash over the entire key with a relentless pounding that would destroy any buildings in its way. Such has been the case with numerous Gulf hurricanes, such as Camille (1969), Ivan (2004), and Katrina (2005).
But, it is important to remember that this novel is set at the end of a cyclical period of relative hurricane calm along the Florida coastline. Many of the recent arrivals in Florida had never experienced a hurricane, while others seeing the destructive force of Camille in 1969 would write it off as a rare event. And, in general, their acts of denial would be reinforced by the widespread policy in Florida, among politicians and boosters alike, of minimizing the impact of hurricanes on the state. As a result, when reports of hurricane Ella first start appearing on the news, most Golden Sands residents disregard them. As the intricacies of the plot accelerate as the hurricane approaches, readers learn that the FBI is creating a storm of its own investigating Liss and his various business partners and corrupted officials; some Golden Sands residents are preparing for the worst, while others are preparing for a hurricane party; and various factual information about the forces of nature are threaded through the story by MacDonald. For example, as a category 5 hurricane, MacDonald’s imagined Ella would be condensing 20 billion tons of water a day out of a cloud mass with an eye 35-miles wide and 40,000-feet deep (1977, 348–50), much like Hurricane Rita in 2005 at its peak, and spawning tornadoes, especially on its northeast side, a phenomenon not commonly known outside of hurricane territories. Further, MacDonald works to get readers to understand that the track and landfall of hurricanes can intensify their effects, especially when they encounter the Gulf Stream and if they make landfall at high tide (1977, 364).
As has repeatedly been the case, even to some extent with Hurricane Rita following upon the heels of Hurricane Katrina, many people refuse to evacuate believing, as one character does, that his house has been hardened against hurricanes (MacDonald 1977, 399) or, as many in the Florida Keys like to think, that hurricanes never land where they live, or who believe they can ride it out if they just have enough supplies. One by one, MacDonald has each purveyor of such illusions experience the full fury of his hurricane, as well as various innocent bystanders who simply did not realize what was coming. MacDonald, in his efforts to get readers to recognize that the forces of nature can decimate any human-made construct is careful not to leave the impression that shoddy construction made the difference in the Golden Sands collapse. It made matters worse, but, finally, with a large enough hurricane no human structure built too close to the ocean can remain standing, no matter how well designed. The first recognition he has a character state in the novel’s denouement is a biocentric one: people don’t own land in any permanent sense but only temporally make use of it (MacDonald 1977, 476). The second one makes a comment on why, despite all of the previous hurricanes of the last hundred years or so in the Gulf, beginning with the one that destroyed Galveston, people continue to refuse to learn the lessons nature makes available because they are fooled by cyclical lulls in the frequency of hurricanes, seize short-term tax advantages over long-term risk, and remain generally optimistic in terms of personal exceptionalism (MacDonald 1977, 477).
For the many readers who would know where MacDonald lived at the time of writing Condominium, the first recognition helps him position himself as one who understands the risks he takes by building and living where he does, but who does not as a result deny the realities of the natural world, but rather accepts them, knowing that nature may come to reclaim what he has borrowed at any time. The second recognition is directed against the developers who insisted on building a condominium next door to his home, who, like so many Florida developers, don’t even live where they build and most assuredly never educate their potential buyers about the ecosystems they have disrupted and the increased vulnerability they have generated. Throughout the novel MacDonald also makes a larger point about social ecology in regard to Florida. That point consists of his continuous critique of the American practices for the warehousing of the elderly that encourages them to dis-integrate from their communities, disintegrate physically and mentally, and define them as obsolete and useless. And, as a result of their social denigration they are routinely cheated and victimized. Although he does not explicitly draw the connections, an instrumentalist mind-set willing to commodify everything and everyone functions as the ideological villain linking the multiple plots of this novel.
In reflecting on these novels by MacDonald I am struck by the power of the “hard-boiled” dimension of his realism for affecting readers’ perceptions about the environments in which they live. Unlike many works of nonfiction nature writing that end on idealistic notes of faith or hope or other mystery novels and thrillers that totally disempower common people, MacDonald’s novels refuse to depict nature as either benign or malevolent. Rather, it is phenomenal, with a certain degree of general predictability but with an even greater degree of unpredictability that constitutes an integral part of human engagement with our surroundings. While not preaching a particular scientific theory or interpretation, in Condominium he extols the virtues and the needs for amateurs to learn about botany, ecology, and geology, even in relation to the assumedly mundane task of picking out a condominium. His sensibility, then, would be far more affable, say, to my daughter and her generation, than many of the nature writers I so enjoy reading and whose visions of reality I would like to believe, even as I realize that MacDonald’s vision is far more likely to help me survive my stay in Orlando for however many years it may last.
NEVADA BARR
Nevada Barr has become quite well known and popular for her Anna Pigeon series of novels, each of which is set in a national park, with only a few of the stories having her return to the same park for more than one adventure. As of 2005, she had written a dozen of these published over the same number of years, beginning with Track of the Cat in 1993. Her writing regimen results from a contract signed with Putnam calling for the production of a new novel annually and she has managed so far to maintain this pace without any apparent slackening of artistic quality, although she does appear to be using some retreaded plot lines. As must be expected, however, the amount of attention to the natural world and to environmental issues rises and falls from one novel to the next, appearing at this point to have begun to decrease once Park Ranger Pigeon moved to the Natchez Trace Parkway for Deep South, published in 2000. Nevertheless, nature always receives significant attention in every novel, even when the murder plot revolves around racial conflict, drug smuggling, or illegal immigration.
It may be the case that the plot and theme of her first Anna Pigeon novel, Track of the Cat, established expectations that go beyond her own commitments. In various interviews, she has emphasized that her commitment consists of a celebration of America’s natural places and to the national parks system, as well as its individual parks, not only for their preservation of natural areas but also for their preservation of American history (see Barr 1999b). As a result, she can fulfill that commitment just as well by having Anna Pigeon working at the Statue of Liberty in Liberty Falling as she can by having her work at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas in Flashback, or Yosemite in High Country. While poaching does appear as a repeated plot device, even it does not take on the same sense of environmental urgency or nature conservation from one novel to the next.
In Track of the Cat, however, poaching does represent a serious crime against nature that leads to a series of crimes, specifically murders, against human beings. Poaching also represents a consumerist attitude toward the wild that leads to the destruction of large tracts of wild land not protected by the national parks system. Her opposition to that kind of attitude and its attendant practices becomes immediately clear in the first few pages of Track as Barr introduces readers to the personality and mind-set of Park Ranger Pigeon. Resting in the wild, observing a nearby lizard, she remarks quite trenchantly the she is just a temporary visitor, acknowledging the lizard’s status as resident (Barr 1993, 2). By the second page readers know that she just as easily could have said “We’re just passing through,” meaning all humanity, and desiring it as much as believing it.
Not surprisingly, Anna’s job this day in the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, involves studying shit, or rather cougar scat. While the rangers seek to protect the species, the ranchers, Barr makes clear, would rather see them exterminated, and, in fact, twenty of the radio-collared ones had disappeared in fewer than thirty-six months (1993, 4). Shortly into the story, Anna Pigeon discovers a dead ranger who appears to have been killed by a big cat. That death provides the excuse for a cougar posse and the killing of another of the park’s allegedly protected animals. Eventually, in pursuit of the truth of the murder and the piling up of clues that contradict the official story, Pigeon exposes a poaching conspiracy, involving both a ranger and ranchers. The novel ends on a hard-edged note reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective stories from the pulps. Rather than showing Pigeon bringing the various criminals to justice, she leaves the guilty ranger in the desert with a broken ankle and a high risk of dying before anyone finds him. Barr seems to suggest by this ending a perspective that states that “turn around is fair play,” that nature has a right to exact its equivalent of revenge, even when its instrument is one human pitted against another.
In her next several novels, nature invariably comes out looking better than civilization, whether Barr is writing about drug smuggling on Lake Superior or Georgia coastal islands in A Superior Death and Endangered Species or firefighting in California in Firestorm. Her novels do not necessarily focus on environmental justice, but do give considerable attention to accurate description of the natural world and the wonders and value of the national parks system. While most of the novels take Pigeon from one park to another, Deep South and Hunting Season, are both set along the Natchez Trace Parkway. In both, nature recedes relative to a focus on the history and legacy of slavery and racism, yet Barr does not allow them to appear unrelated. Attitudes toward the land and the concept of property affect the treatment of both wild and domesticated places and the people who inhabit and visit them. But in Hunting Season, Barr shows that she understands the difference between the poaching of endangered species that both benefits corporate ranchers and rich sport hunters and local, traditional poaching of a few deer from a healthy population for personal consumption. But, as in Track of the Cat, Pigeon’s wrath is reserved for the corrupt ranger who kills both people and other animals for his personal financial gain. It may be that Barr just finds herself terribly irritated by those few corrupt rangers who betray their calling to compensate themselves for their inadequate pay. But it may also be that Barr views these characters as metonymic figures for all of the government functionaries who betray their obligations to the national trust for money, corporate profits, and political expediency. I would express my only concern with such a representation as a fear that Barr demonstrates too much subtlety at times.
In Blood Lure, Barr returns explicitly to poaching as a topic. But unlike her previous attention to the problem, in this novel she takes on the mis-treatment of wild animals turned into performers in cheap roadside attractions. The bear as victim actually appears very late in the story, but like the plot of Track of the Cat, Anna will become involved in a murder investigation in the course of ranger work initially focused on species preservation. And in both cases, the murder of the human casts suspicion on the animal species as a perpetrator of murder rather than a repeated victim of it. Blood Lure opens with Anna having traveled to the Montana side of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park to participate in a bear DNA tracking project. Quickly, Barr educates her readers about the power and danger of wild bears, tearing down the romantic notions of bears harbored by wilderness park tourists. She also observes that this particular park has actually conserved an untrammeled portion of wilderness, in contradistinction to the majority of parks, which display a wilderness loosely termed as having undergone rehabilitation. Pigeon is working with Joan, the lead ranger on the project, and a twitchy volunteer assistant named Rory, whose father and stepmother are actually camping not far from where the DNA research team is working. In addition to Rory, a suspicious teen hiker named Geoffrey materializes briefly and then disappears into the forest.
A few chapters later, Pigeon and company’s campground is rifled by a bear and Rory has either fled in panic or been carried off by the bear. Barr goes out of her way to have Joan, the bear expert, explain to Pigeon not only the rarity of such a campsite attack, but also, as they search for the missing Rory, the clearly out-of-character-for-a-wild-bear behavior of their attacker (Barr 2001, 55–59). Then, within ten pages a dead body turns up, obviously mauled and dragged by a bear: a woman with a significant portion of her face torn away, making identification difficult (Barr 2001, 69). But quickly, Barr thickens the plot by having Pigeon realize that the woman’s face has not been eaten by a bear, as initially believed, but cut away, thus suggesting the woman may have been murdered by human hands rather than killed by a wild force of nature. Clearly, for Anna Pigeon, the prospect of a human murderer poses a greater danger to all concerned than a deadly bear, perhaps because the corpse forces her to confront the fact that she, like almost everyone else, relies on that sheen of civilization she seemed to deride at the opening of Track of the Cat to provide a means for defining safe interaction between humans. And when that sheen slides away, people become far less predictable and far more dangerous to other human beings than wild animals who tend to behave more consistently than their human relatives.
When Rory turns up with a story about getting lost in the woods while trying to flee the bear that ransacked their campsite, he comes under suspicion by Pigeon as a potential suspect in the still unidentified woman’s murder. Barr increases Pigeon’s suspicion and readers’ with her when they learn from Rory’s father, Les, that Rory’s stepmother has gone missing for two days and Pigeon has a fleeting thought that the stepmother and the dead woman may be one and the same (2001, 99). As the story unfolds and Pigeon learns that Rory’s father has been the victim of physical abuse at the hands of his now-dead wife and that she may have been cavorting with another camper named McCaskil—a petty criminal—something of a contest develops between which of the men most likely killed her. In addition, Barr reveals that Rory’s stepmother was wearing another man’s jacket, perhaps McCaskil’s, at the time she was killed (2001, 178). Typical of quality red herrings, this jacket points readers away from the real killer and keeps them focused first on Les, and second on McCaskil, who is clearly missing a coat (Barr 2001, 195).
But then, the trail toward the killer takes a strange turn when Pigeon turns up evidence that the killer had gone up to very high altitudes to an area where bears search for army cutworm moths, but also where plants valuable enough for poaching also grow. This bit of evidence turns readers back toward bears and the marauding bear that had faded from the story for dozens of pages, but also provides Barr an opportunity for a little education about ecosystems: spraying crops against moths in Minnesota reduces the sources of food for grizzly bears in the Rockies (2001, 216). Pigeon’s encountering bears feeding on such moths lets Barr expand on her nature education narration, but the end of her trek brings her into contact with two hikers who put her on the trail ofthe mysterious Geoffrey introduced in the first fifty pages of the novel and then ignored for two hundred pages.
Eventually, Geoffrey gets connected with an abandoned truck and trailer in the park that belonged to someone who had a roadside attraction in Florida, one that would have included a variety of wild and tame animals on display, perhaps including a bear. Typical of Barr’s mysteries and so many others, various clues and loose ends come rushing together in the final fifty or so pages. On page 301, Anna, Joan, and Rory spot a trophy-sized Alaskan grizzly in the park that attacks but only roughs up Anna. Meanwhile, a retreating Joan and Rory are captured by the now-armed petty criminal McCaskil, who is screaming into the trees that “Balthazar’s mine” and demanding that an unnamed someone come out of the woods (Barr 2001, 313), as Anna comes upon them after dark. With the bear soon upon the scene, Pigeon disarms McCaskil and she learns that Geoffrey and the bear grew up together in Florida. Geoffrey has been attempting to reintroduce the bear into the wild at the park, teaching him to search and hunt for food, while McCaskil has been attempting to recapture the bear in order to sell him to a trophy hunting resort where he would be killed as if he were a wild animal (Barr 2001, 325)—just the kind of exotic trophy ranch that Carl Hiaasen will ridicule in his novel Sick Puppy.
But what of the murder that provides the main plot for the novel? Rory’s philandering stepmother had been wearing McCaskil’s coat when the two had stumbled upon each other, and the woman, instead of respecting the reality that bears are wild animals, wherever they may be found, began using a flash camera to take pictures of him. The bear killed her ostensibly in self-defense, thinking she was McCaskil based on the smell of the coat. Of course, despite Geoffrey’s best intentions, Balthazar cannot be returned to the wild, nor settled in a national park, no matter how much wilderness it contains, with any expectations for the animal’s survival. Fortunately, an animal trainer for Hollywood films takes both the bear and the boy. Unlike Track of the Cat and some of Barr’s other novels, then, Blood Lure proves to be a murder mystery in which no murder has actually taken place, but rather a killing, and an accidental one at that, although complicated by an intentional cover-up. She used a similar plot the following year, when writing Hunting Season. In each case, the murder investigation provides the opportunity for Barr, through Pigeon, to provide exposition on the natural beauty and complexity of the ecosystems of her settings. With Blood Lure the plot also allows her to reiterate statements in previous novels about the fundamental wildness of animals, whether found in parks or roadside attractions, and the foolishness of wilderness tourists who discount that innate and fundamental wildness, both in the park animals and the human park visitors.
But not all of her novels give that much attention to natural lessons as Track of the Cat and Blood Lure, nor should we expect them to do so. While Hunting Season, for instance, takes up poaching, the local deer poaching by Mississippi residents who consume what they kill is not placed in the same category as the poaching of endangered species treated in other novels. Rather, race relations form the main topic for Barr’s commentary in this novel. Similarly, while smuggling has proven as convenient a plot-driving device as poaching, it is treated with differing degrees of relationship to the national parks system and to its environmental impacts. For example, in the 1997 Endangered Species, set on a Georgia coastal island, Barr educates readers about conservation work in support of sea turtles and the marshland particularities of Atlantic barrier islands, but the smuggling of drugs doesn’t especially endanger the environment any more than the deer poaching of Hunting Season. And in the 2003 Flashback, set at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, the smuggling involves Cuban refugees, who pose no threat to the keys or the ocean ecology. In fact, this novel devotes very few pages to natural description and environmental lessons.
The 2004 High Country, however, set in Yosemite, does suggest the ways in which the drug trade is endangering the safety and ecology of national parks. Although the marijuana in this instance has been spread across the land during a plane crash rather than through cultivation, marijuana cultivation and its trafficking have become an increasing problem for the national park systems, as a recent article, “Sequoia Park Goes to Pot,” points out: “officials report five encounters between gun-wielding growers and visitors on national-forest lands in California this year. . . . The growers poach wildlife, spill pesticides, divert water from streams and dump tons of trash” (J. Robinson 2005, A31). While Barr clearly details the threat the drug trade poses for parks, her need to set the story in autumn in Yosemite and to have Anna Pigeon working in the restaurant at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel for plot purposes limits her opportunities for depicting the scenic grandeur of America’s first national park. Her 2005 novel, Hard Truth, with its focus on a sadistic religious cult, continues this reduced attention to nature and environmental themes. Perhaps future novels will return to a stronger emphasis on environmental education, more similar to the earlier novels rather than the more recent ones. But, then again, they may not, because unlike MacDonald, whose perception of nature-human relationships and sense of environmental crises developed over the decades, Barr’s view seems to remain static throughout the series. Pigeon becomes more adept at understanding human motivations and behaviors as the series proceeds, but she doesn’t seem to be gaining much of a deeper or more systemic knowledge of the world in which those behaviors are acted out.
JUDITH VAN GIESON
Judith Van Gieson’s first mystery novel with female lawyer Neil Hamel was published in 1988. North of the Border was followed by seven others published through 1998 before the author shifted to writing another series. Interest in Neil Hamel has led to the University of New Mexico Press reprinting the first three books. In addition to enjoying good mysteries, readers most likely read this series because of its rich depictions of the New Mexico landscape, rather than environmental issues. The plot of North of the Border, for instance, doesn’t focus on an environmental issue, but does include passing criticism of a plan to develop a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico. The same can be said of most of her other novels, such as The Other Side of Death and Hotshots. The environmental issues do, however, often contribute to Hamel and the reader focusing on the wrong suspects to heighten the mystery.
Of these novels, Raptor, Parrot Blues, and The Wolf Path best held my interest because of the tight connection between plot and environmental themes. The plot of Raptor takes Neil Hamel away from New Mexico to Montana. She has been made the executor of her aunt Joan’s estate, and Joan turns out to have been an avid bird watcher, who was scheduled to take a trip to Montana. The organizer, who is affiliated with the Falcon Fund, invites Hamel to take her aunt’s place on the trip to see an Arctic gyrfalcon and she accepts in part as a type of fulfillment of her aunt’s wishes. Having the aunt as the expert and Hamel as an uninitiated novice allows Van Gieson to provide the reader with significant information on raptors as Hamel educates herself in preparation for and during her trip. For instance, Hamel’s reading from Joan’s journal allows Van Gieson to quote it at length, including a full-page description of raptors with information about the Arctic gyrfalcon (1990, 13). In the second chapter Van Gieson reminds readers about the damage that DDT did to falcons, particularly the peregrine (1990, 18–19). She also points out that some ranchers oppose the existence of any predators other than the human one, not only falcons and other raptors, but also wolves (Van Gieson 1990, 20), the animal that forms the focus of her third Neil Hamel novel. In contrast to the division the rancher claims between the human predator and all others, Van Gieson, humorously describes the participants in this Falcon Fund outing in terms of their resemblances to various birds.
It soon becomes clear that some individuals have not come to view this particularly rare species of raptor, but to poach it for financial gain or to add to their personal collection. Early in chapter 3, one of the birders begins telling Hamel about contemporary falconry and the fact that falconers provided the breeding stock to reintroduce peregrines to the wild after the banning of DDT (Van Gieson 1990, 32–33). The plot thickens when the birding group finally arrives at the park location for sighting the Arctic gyrfalcon. While the veterans are watching the bird, Hamel accidentally witnesses a death, as a man falls from the ledge where the bird has its nest. The man who invited Hamel up and led the group to the site, March Augusta, is then identified as the prime suspect in the murder of known poacher, Sandy Pedersen, by the federal prosecutor. Neil, naturally, becomes involved in March’s defense. Through her discussions with March, Neil learns not only about the international trade in falcons but also the weak laws and lack of attention for prosecuting poachers.
As Neil Hamel digs deeper into the case, readers are treated to her musings about the similarities and differences between the natural landscapes of Montana and New Mexico, as she travels out into the countryside for an appointment. There she meets an Arab prince who is looking for someone to steal the Arctic gyrfalcon for him, and hopes March will undertake the task now that Sandy Pedersen has been killed. This prince enables Van Gieson to highlight the international and high stakes character of illegal trade in the most exotic of birds, in contrast to the kind of smuggling she will document a few years later in Parrot Blues. This meeting also leads to an exchange between Neil and March about trophy hunters that encourages a thematic comparison with Barr’s Track of the Cat, published three years later. A couple of chapters later, Van Gieson has Hamel driving down the highway, meditating on the role of the hunter in culture and nature. The true hunter, according to this meditation, represents no threat to wildlife and has not caused the extinction of species because hunters appreciate the need to maintain the balance of a natural system, while cultivators tend to view all predators as threats to be eliminated (Van Gieson 1990, 89). This anthropological distinction will be addressed again in greater detail in Van Gieson’s next novel, The Wolf Path. But probably more important for her average reader than a consideration of human-the-hunter versus human-the-farmer comes from Van Gieson having March emphasize the overall failure of the Endangered Species Act, which has few success stories to be told (1990, 78).
While mystery readers may be satisfied with the revelation by novel’s end that the man committing murder in this novel also captures endangered species to collect stuffed specimens before they become extinct, many nature-oriented readers will no doubt experience disappointment. As with several of Barr’s novels, we encounter the problem here that mysteries often work best when an insider or someone presumably on the same side of the unjustly accused is revealed as the murderer. Such a plot device, however, likely under-cuts the potential for these novels to encourage their uncommitted readers to consider participating in environmental activism. The perpetrator of both the human murder and attempted raptor murder in Raptor, gives a brief, utterly cynical defense of his actions on the basis that conservation organizations are uniformly failing to stop environment destruction. Fortunately, however, all of the other Falcon Fund members provide examples of right and even heroic behavior in defense of wild nature. While they may be fighting a losing battle, the novel seems to suggest, they have chosen the right path by going down fighting rather than capitulating to the commodification of everything in this world. This fight-the-good-fight mentality is not critiqued either by Hamel or by the author and indicates an unresolved dissonance between the foundational assumptions about justice posited by this and most other mystery novels and the disempowering conclusion that suggests injustice may rule the day. While the latter thesis would certainly make sense in the current political conjuncture, it is unlikely that readers need to read a novel to reach that conclusion or that they read in order to have that conclusion sustained.
Van Gieson continues with the same issues in The Wolf Path that she introduced in Raptor, focusing on wolf reintroduction, a far more controversial project than peregrine reintroduction. As a result, she develops a broader cast of characters representing a greater range of opinions than in the previous novel. As with Raptor, Van Gieson has Neil Hamel representing a positive character on the environmental side of the divide who is wrongly accused of murder. Along the way Van Gieson educates us about the differences between Mexican wolves and northern wolves, and the alacrity with which New Mexican ranchers wiped out the wolf population in a matter of a few decades (1992, 10), as well as the virtues of wolf reintroduction. At the beginning of the story, readers are also taught about the differing landscapes of northern and southern New Mexico.
Quickly Van Gieson lays out some of the formidable opposition that faces any wild animals trying to regain a foothold in land coveted for grazing, not only individual farmers but also the branch of the Agriculture Department known as the ADC, or Animal Damage Control, which shoots first and asks questions later (1992, 34–35). There are also the animals’ allies, which in The Wolf Path, includes a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bob Bartel, who unfortunately becomes the murder victim, while the champion of wolf reintroduction, a California radical self-named Juan Sololobo, soon becomes the prime suspect Hamel works to clear. Better than Barr in her novels, Van Gieson succeeds in The Wolf Path in establishing a politically and enviro-philosophically diverse range of characters as true speaking subjects, requiring readers throughout much of the novel to take their positions seriously, even when they clearly contradict the thematic thrust that the author develops. Bartel’s dialogues with Hamel before he is murdered are particularly compelling in justifying the actions of those who work from within the system. At the same time, Van Gieson also shows how the ranchers’ position often reflects genuine fears and sincere economic concerns, as represented by Don and Perla Phillips. Only the ADC man comes off, probably appropriately so, as nothing more than a caricature of the shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions school of environmental eugenics. Van Gieson’s success in this area results primarily from the unusual delay between the start of the novel and the actual murder around which the case revolves—not until page 96 of a 232-page murder mystery do we actually have a murder reported.
After Bartel’s death, Van Gieson brings another character into the novel to aid Hamel in her investigation, an environmental activist named Charlie Clark, who becomes instrumental in helping her break up an illicit wolf breeding mill and catch the real murderer of Bob Bartel. A look at the political positions and environmental philosophies embodied by Bartel, Clark, and Hamel in this novel suggest that Van Gieson sees the need for a range of participants and a spectrum of activism, from governmental wildlife biologists, to radical activists, to aware and engaged public citizens who will support the previous two when needed. What I particularly like about this novel, which also appears to a lesser extent in Parrot Blues, is that Van Gieson has enabled her readers to choose from a range of characters with whom to identify, without always having to identify with the hero of the novel while at the same time not having to reject the hero in order to make an identification with another character. The murder mystery as a popular genre certainly does not facilitate this kind of multiple characters as speaking subjects and internally persuasive environmental discourse structure, but Van Gieson succeeds nevertheless in developing such a story within the standard middle length of the genre. At the same time, she is able to provide overwhelming support for wolf reintroduction programs through facts and statistics, as well as to denounce, once again, illicit trade in exotic and endangered species, which she will even more forcefully emphasize in Parrot Blues. Thus, unlike Raptor, The Wolf Path educates and empowers readers without trying to foist on them a singular philosophy of environmental activism.
Parrot Blues lacks the range of characters as internally persuasively speaking subjects found in The Wolf Path, but it makes up for that with an increased amount of reader education about parrots and parrot smuggling, deftly interwoven throughout a plot with more switchbacks than a good mountain road. While again, the murder takes place later in the novel than usual for a murder mystery, the novel begins with an apparent kidnapping of both a woman and a parrot. When the husband hires Neil Hamel in order to ransom the parrot with little concern for the wife, reader attention focuses on the parrot and its relations. Extensive education about parrots becomes, then, quite appropriate and necessary, since Neil Hamel knows little about the animals. And, as with The Wolf Path, the education comes largely in the form of dialogue with various levels of expertise represented by a variety of characters.
From an ecocritical perspective the real power of this novel comes primarily from gut-wrenching detailed description of parrot smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. Through Hamel’s eyewitness account, Van Gieson describes the birds being removed from a hiding place behind the taillights of a car, with most of the ones removed already dead and the few left alive in miserable condition. She also implicates pet shop complicity in such smuggling by providing a retail outlet for the birds smuggled into the country. With Raptor and The Wolf Path the poaching and smuggling was done for the benefit of a small, wealthy clientele, but in Parrot Blues Van Gieson reveals that many pet owners of ordinary income also contribute to the problem through their interest in purchasing exotic species. At the same time, as with any good regionalist writer, Van Gieson provides strong descriptions of the New Mexico landscape that do not merely present its surface features but also inform the reader about geological history, local ecologies, and the particularities of flora and fauna.
While smuggling often forms a standard plot for American mysteries, it too often is connected only with the drug trade, as Barr does in several of her novels, in such a way that the complicity of middle- and upper-class Americans in this environmentally and socially destructive business is ignored or only tangentially reported so that recreational users can overlook their role in helping to sustain it. Van Gieson’s Raptor suffers from the same problem in that only a handful of ultra-rich are indicted in that novel. In contrast, in Parrot Blues Van Gieson points her finger at many of her readers who have too often looked the other way and not asked where and how the objects of trade, whether animal or not, were obtained. She thereby reduces the comfort level usually felt at mystery’s end and increases the potential for the kind of cognitive dissonance that critical science fiction often generates.
JOHN STRALEY
Many authors have chosen to write about Alaska, but none that I know of have done so with such a stubborn antiromantic position as that held by John Straley, a criminal investigator by profession. Between 1992 and 2001 he had published six novels featuring detective Cecil Younger, with his current web-site promising more novels in the future. As with Barr’s novels as distinct from Van Gieson’s, Straley’s works would have to be classified as more nature fiction than environmental fiction, although with at least one exception. By that, I mean the plots often do not revolve around a particular issue of environmental destruction or necessarily even depict one with significant attention. Rather, the nature of Alaska, as realistically portrayed as possible, invariably constitutes more than mere backdrop, and often as much a character as any of the humans in a given story. Straley’s decision to have his hero, Cecil Younger, live in Sitka facilitates his antiromantic position, given its damp, rainy climate, and its lack of the awe-inspiring grandeur that the word Alaska evokes in most readers’ imaginations. Not that Straley never depicts sublime locations or nodes of experience, but these do not constitute the reality of most days and most individual daily lives.
Straley begins the Cecil Younger series with The Woman Who Married a Bear; yes, a retelling of that widely told Northwestern native story. In the opening author’s note, Straley indicates that his novel is based on a story told him by a Tlingit woman. He also acknowledges the poetic and scholarly work on the subject that precedes his rendering of it in fiction, as well as pointing out that only one of the cities in the novel has been invented, while the others are real enough and can be found on any map. Thus, Straley situates his novel in several ways in his opening remarks, going beyond Barr’s use of national parks, by placing it in a regional location that has not only a geographic dimension, but also cultural, historical, and aesthetic ones as well. He implicitly claims this work as a localist, ecoregional one. Verisimilitude, then, can go beyond a simplistic, secular, American consensual reality, and participate in a regional realism with a dialogical interanimation of wild nature and civilized human nature. The interface between these along the last American frontier becomes the theme of the novel, while the plot is built around Younger’s efforts to solve a murder mystery. This distinction in types of verisimilitude is clearly represented in Younger’s remark to himself that, while the police take down oral histories, he collects folklore (Straley 1992, 9). In fact, the mother of the murder victim does not want Younger to solve the murder, so much as to learn the entire story wrapped around it.
As Younger begins to piece together the murder of the Native hunting guide, Louis Victor, who apparently had both a white wife and family and a native girlfriend, he reflects frequently on the ways of the natural world around him, since the investigation takes him not only to several Alaskan cities but also out to a remote hunting camp and a small town. One such revelation comes from a memory of his deceased father who tells him that Nature, with a capital N, is an orderly system and while that system is not based on benefit to humans it does have purpose (Straley 1992, 55). The convicted murderer of Louis, Alvin Hawkes, tells Younger when he visits him in prison, that Louis comprised, in essence, more a part of nature than a part of culture: “I thought that Louis was a bear and he was going to kill me. And that his children were half-bear, half-human and they wanted me to kill him so they could eat him” (Straley 1992, 73). Although considered insane by others and by himself, Hawkes’s explanation begins to take on more than an allegorical truth. Particularly when Younger encounters Louis’s children. The son clearly views himself as half-wild, speaking of the back country where he and his sister are staying: “I see nothing. Nothing to get in my way, and nothing to stop me from doing exactly what the fuck I want to do. That’s what wilderness is for. That’s what brought the pioneers here” (Straley 1992, 141).
But the son doesn’t understand the whole story of his own life, much less of the magnitude of the natural life welling up around him. Straley evokes, implies, and suggests this gap between human concerns and the natural immensity of Alaska in varied ways throughout the novel. Perhaps this gap appears no greater than when he pauses from the plot to describe two humpbacked whales feeding on herring, alive with that greater sense of purpose to which Younger’s father has alluded (Straley 1992, 194), but certainly that scene lacks the drama of his being attacked by a bear sow (207–8). And the gap appears again when Louis’s wife and daughter explain why Louis had to be killed and why the daughter—and not the man convicted of the murder—killed him. His wife explains that Louis was part of the world of Alaska of which she, a white newcomer from San Francisco, could never fully know, never completely inhabit. And the daughter came to face the contradictions experienced by so many mixed-race children in America, of identifying with one heritage and rejecting the other, of wanting to “pass” into the mainstream and being forever barred from it by visible ethnicity and biculturality. As in the mythic story, the wife and children must sacrifice the bear husband/father to save themselves from destruction at the hands of the wife’s brothers, at the hands of the dominant society.
Straley treads carefully with a dangerous subject here, opening himself up to accusations of essentialist stereotyping, by identifying the Native man as being closer to wild nature than the white people of the story. But rather, through the interior monologues of Younger’s first-person narration and his dialogues with other characters, including natives and whites, he avoids this pitfall by positing that the conflict comes down to one between inhabitants and settlers, on the one hand, or, to phrase it another way, between ennatured cultures and denatured cultures. Certainly, one can read the original myth in this manner, by positing that the bear represents an ennatured culture, while the woman’s brothers represent a denatured culture that seeks to murder the bear rather than accept either the bear’s entry into their community or their sister’s entry into the bear community. On the other hand, the conflict can also be interpreted as one between destroyer cultures and coexistence cultures. By novel’s end it is revealed that the mother, the son, and the daughter, have committed murder, attempted to commit murder, or are prepared to commit murder to protect their existence, even though that has meant destroying ones they love. Straley emphasizes that all three identify with the destroyer culture rather than the coexistence culture through both their actions and their words, as when the son identifies with the “pioneers” and a false notion of wilderness as providing freedom without responsibility rather than with the culture of the father. In this novel, as with the entire series to date, Straley addresses environmental issues and nature/culture conflicts fundamentally from a philosophical perspective more so than from an activist or political one.
In The Curious Eat Themselves, however, Straley does bring the philosophical together with the political and the activist in a plot that involves the murder of a woman named Lou seeking to expose environmental violations at a gold mining camp. Within the unfolding of the murder plot, Straley observes how Alaskan business and government interests treated the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a public relations problem rather than an environmental disaster that they did not want to deter other potentially polluting resource extraction, such as using cyanide recovery for gold mining (1993, 45). While the woman worked as a cook at such a gold mining operation run by a corporation called “Global” for short, she was secretly investigating its pollution output, in conspiracy with another environmental activist named Steven. Initially, we learn, she is raped at the camp in an effort to scare her off and then is murdered after going to Ketchikan. When Global employees seek to buy off Younger while he is investigating the murder, suspicion naturally falls on the company as the instigator of her murder, but, of course, the situation proves more complicated than that.
Instead, suspicion begins to fall on the environmental activist that Lou was writing, Steven Mathews. Straley uses this character to criticize outsiders who show up on Monday and imagine they are inhabitants by Friday, especially in relation to the culture of Native peoples (1993, 108–9, 115). One of the Tlingits, for instance, remarks that “When white people argue about the land, it’s always about money. . . . In the end they don’t care what happens to the workers or to the land as long as they see the money coming in. There isn’t anything money can’t fix, but everything stays broke” (Straley 1993, 110). As Straley observes about Mathews in relation to the issue of inhabitation and culture: “The elders of Angoon were skeptical of development and placed a higher value on their cultural identity—that was perhaps what had attracted Mathews to the village. But they never sought his help” (1993, 117).
While Mathews may be untrustworthy in several departments, he seems to know what happened at the gold mine in terms of environmental problems: a failure to build the polluted water retention pits up to specs (Straley 1993, 124). In addition to that, however, Cecil learns that Global has illegally been using oil tankers to haul the toxic water from Alaska to Long Beach to process it (Straley 1993, 160). The motive for Mathews’ murdering Louise Root is revealed some eighty pages prior to the end of the novel, suggesting that Straley’s main concern does not lie with exposing the vicissitudes of outsider environmentalist do-gooders, but rather with the larger issues of corruption, environment, and culture in Alaska. A Tlingit informant, for example, reveals to Cecil that Global has played a shell game with toxic waste, dumping oily ballast where the diluted cyanide was removed and then dumping most of that out at sea rather than taking it in for reprocessing (Straley 1993, 218).
At novel’s end, Straley does return to Mathews, but only to show that egotism, the most extreme form of anthropocentrism, can be easily found on both sides of that environmental class war and that it leads to destruction regardless of an individual’s motives and intentions. As with The Woman Who Married a Bear, The Curious Eat Themselves sets up a contrast between ennatured cultures and denatured cultures and suggest that any environmental ethic or program needs to start with attention to the inhabitants and the particularities of place rather than with grand designs and idealist visions.
After these two novels, Straley devotes less attention to environmental issues, but continues his contrasts of cultural values and ways of living, including the search for, and rejection of, inhabitation. For example, in The Music of What Happens, Straley repeatedly has Cecil Younger meditating upon and appreciating the beauty of the Alaskan landscape and the cities that have come to terms with that landscape and its weather. Yet, in a story ostensibly about a custody battle, Straley educates readers about another reality of that landscape and the development that has populated it with immigrants from the Lower 48: frontier litter. But while the word “litter” in the Lower 48 may conjure images of fast-food wrappers blowing along sidewalks and plastic six-pack holders wrapped around a duck’s head, in Alaska frontier litter includes abandoned weapons, dynamite, and old blasting caps left in a rusty can that a boy could pick up and accidentally explode. Straley points out through this novel that destruction occurs not only at the initial, active clearing phase of environmental exploitation but continues as an accumulated residue of unbalanced human daily life.
FURTHER DIRECTIONS
All of the authors treated in this chapter have worked in the mode of traditional or consensual realism. But it is important to realize that traditional realism need not constitute the only mode for detective fiction. Certainly, any dedicated reader of SF can name a dozen novels in that genre built on a mystery plot and even entire series that might be said to be so constructed. In like manner, detective fiction abounds in postmodern writing, although little of the detective variant seems to have much interest in nature.
Carl Hiaasen, although heavily indebted to his Florida predecessor John D. MacDonald, departs from MacDonald’s traditional realist hard-boiled mode by combining the kind of verisimilitude required by the mystery genre with a postmodern sensibility that includes improbable and fantastic characters and events that, nevertheless, are revealed by the daily newspaper as having been based on actual people and events. Even in his children’s novels, he shows a penchant for bizarre characters and outlandish actions. In another departure from the preceding authors, his mysteries comprise a loosely linked series based on the continuity of their Florida setting, the frequent appearance of specific secondary characters, such as the hermit ex-governor, a state trooper loyal to him, and various newspaper reporters or ex-reporters. Finally, he never presents a protagonist as hard-boiled as Travis McGee or Nevada Barr, but ones more like the recovering alcoholic detective of Straley’s novels.
In addition to authors such as Hiaasen, who build on this popular genre but inject a postmodern sensibility and style, critics also need to look at the examples of nature-oriented mystery novels—with or without detectives, and perhaps even without murders—in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction in the instances of the single or infrequent nature-oriented novel by a mystery series novelist. And then, someone also needs to take a look at the ever-popular science mystery thrillers, which often garner a larger audience as a movie than they do as a novel, that tend toward the threat of an apocalypse, either global or local, averted at the last possible moment. While some of these are based entirely on junk science, others provide solid, although limited, natural science education and should be considered worthy of critical scrutiny.