For writers and readers alike, climate change has created the ultimate eco-mystery
The environment plays a role in every novel. When clouds darken the sky, they darken the mood of the story. Extreme temperatures drive people to act in ways they’d never imagine on a normal day. And a flash flood can turn an ordinary afternoon hike into a desperate race for survival.
Yet sometimes the environment is no mere bit player, invited for a chapter or two to advance the plot or introduce a perilous detour. Sometimes the environment is as much a major character as the protagonists and antagonists, often playing the role of both.
In the novel Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy, the environment has not yet turned fully dystopian. In fact, this slightly future world appears largely as it does today. On a boat in the north Atlantic, Franny Stone is in search of Arctic terns, and it is then we become aware of their absence and their plight. The fishing trawler she has hitched a ride on is in search, illegally, of fish also in short supply. Above and below the waterline, animals are slipping away, leaving behind an acute feeling of emptiness in Franny and the novel.
It’s not easy to be left behind, to mourn those lost to changing ecosystems, particularly those that could not adapt quickly enough. As Franny says: “How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.”
Eco-anxiety. Climate grief. Whatever one calls it, we are all adapting in our own ways, through denial, escapism, action or all of the above. And these struggles are finding their ways into the books we write and read.
In The Dry, by Jane Harper, an Australian drought forms the backdrop of a murder mystery. As Federal Agent Aaron Falk revisits his past in the parched town of his youth, he must come to terms with a present that sees a way of life coming to an end, where “The dryness sagged in every crevice, like a hungry ghost.” The absence of water, a substance that a human cannot survive without for more than three days, can make violence feel almost inevitable.
Climate change has given writers a wealth of new (and more acute) motives that readers feel in their bones and has given birth to the emerging genre of eco-mystery. The eco-mystery encompasses the traditional mystery genre as it weaves in the environment in ways both unique and entirely familiar.
The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a murder mystery in which finding the killer is but subtext in the eyes of our protagonist, a reclusive “crank” named Janina. She has gone to war with the hunters who scour her stretch of land along the Czech/Polish border. One body leads to another, and all the while we follow Janina through a world she is both trying to protect and mourn. “For people of my age,” she thinks, “the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there.”
In most eco-mysteries, there is still plenty left to fight for. In my mystery Devils Island, co-written with Midge Raymond, six hikers find themselves on a remote Australian island surrounded by dangerous snakes, Tasmanian devils and one nasty poacher. The Tasmanian devil – a marsupial struggling to survive habitat loss and a fatal disease that drove naturalists to relocate a number of them to this very island – plays both sentinel and savior, reminding our protagonist that all is not yet lost, so long as she does not give up.
While readers might turn to mysteries for a brief respite from reality, eco-mysteries take readers in a slightly different direction. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for satisfying or even hopeful endings. In fact, a good eco-mystery can provide readers with a sense of control in a world where so much feels beyond our control. We can’t control the weather so we rely on our many weather apps to give us an awareness of what is to come, which is in itself a form of control. And like a weather app, a good eco-mystery lives both in the present and in the future, meeting readers where they are and preparing them for the future.
Devils Island is known as a closed-circle mystery, a sub-genre in which killer, victim and potential victims find themselves trapped together, in a room, on a ship, or, in this case, on an island. In a larger sense, this is the ideal genre for our moment in time, as we are all trapped together in this closed circle known as earth. While a handful of billionaires plan their escape to planets beyond, the rest of us must endure, perhaps with a book in hand, imagining a brighter future into being, reminding ourselves and one another that we are not alone, that we are all in this together.
John Yunker is co-author of the mystery Devils Island (Oceanview Publishing, 2024) and editor of EcoLit Books (ecolitbooks.com). Learn more at JohnYunker.com and MidgeandJohn.com.
