|
“Critter Crusaders”: Wildlife Mystery
Thriller Series
Marion W. Copeland 1
Wildlife mystery thriller series, a new category, brings
animals in the wild into the foreground of the by-now venerable
mystery genre . As Jessica Speart, credited with creating the
category , points out,
The endangered species trade actually does include the very
elements required of any good mystery—intrigue, murder,
suspense, back-stabbing, and greed....U. S. Fish and Wildlife
special agents are trained detectives, only instead of
investigating the murder of humans, they unravel crimes
perpetrated against wildlife [like Hook the alligator, a murder
victim in Speart’s first mystery Gator Aide (1987)]. (Mehl,
2000, np )
Although wildlife mystery thrillers share many attributes of
traditional mysteries, there also are differences. Traditional
mysteries seldom feature investigators dedicated to protecting
wild animals and their habitats from criminals, seldom give
prominence to wild animal characters, and seldom focus on
wildlife issues.
Although Judith van Gieson’s Neil Hammer series, launched in
1988, should be credited with popularizing the investigation of
wildlife issues in the mystery, I hesitate to give it full
status as a wildlife mystery thriller series because it fails in
ways to conform to the emerging requirements of the genre. An
American innovation, all wildlife mystery thrillers focus on
endangered or threatened wildlife indigenous to the Americas and
on wildlife issues and law critical to their survival through
protagonists uniquely suited to involve and activate the reader
in the welfare of creatures in the wild. This distinctive
feature of the genre--investigators employed in the service of
wildlife and charismatic wildlife characters--is fully developed
in the 1990s by authors like Nevada Barr, Jessica Speart, C. J.
Box, Skye Kathleen Moody, Ken Goddard, and Christine Goff.
Because of the newness of the series and of their thematic
focus, little critical commentary--with the exception of that
contained in reviews and interviews--is yet available. The
purpose of this essay is to define and introduce readers to the
genre as well as to suggest critical criteria through which it
may be most fruitfully read.
Barr, perhaps the best known of the group today, began her Anna
Pigeon, park ranger, series in 1994 with Track of the Cat. The
New York Times Book Review immediately recognized that in Track
Barr “has a naturalist’s eye for detail and an
environmentalist’s fury at the destruction of the wilderness and
its creatures” (Stasio, 1993).That description serves as a
critical definition not only of Barr’s technique and purpose but
also of the techniques and purposes of all the writers
considered under the rubric wildlife mystery thriller. Each
lends a naturalist’s eye through which readers view the
wilderness and its nonhuman inhabitants, and each hopes to imbue
the reader with Barr’s environmentalist’s fury when that eye is
witness to the destruction of either. Critics refer to Speart’s
Rachel Porter as a “critter crusader extraordinaire” (McClellan,
nd, np)
The most obvious, if not the most significant, choice authors of
wildlife mystery thrillers make is the genre itself. The choice
is an important one, given these novelists’ goal. Everyone loves
mystery novels and reads them for pleasure and diversion.
Readers confront issues raised with a comfortable openness,
because, as Speart commented in a recent interview, they are
reading “something fun and interesting” (Hayden, 1999). In some
ways, readers get just what they expect--an investigator
involved in solving a crime.
It may even be an enticement that the investigators introduce
readers to agencies of law enforcement not traditionally tapped
by mystery novels, men and women employed in the service of
wildlife and environment:
1. park rangers like Barr’s Anna;
2. Fish and Wildlife agents and investigators like Speart’s
Rachel Porter, Moody’s Venus Diamond, and Goddard’s Henry
Lightstone;
3. wildlife biologists like White’s Doc Ford;
4. game wardens like Box’s Joe Pickett;
5. conservation officers like Joseph Haywood’s Grady Service;
6. investigators for wildlife organizations like Elizabeth
Quinn’s Lauren Maxwell; and even
7. a wildlife artist like Jacqueline Fiedler’s Caroline Canfield
(“Wildlife and
Environment”).
The Authors
To create such protagonists, all writers of wildlife mystery
thrillers must have knowledge about, and insight into, these
areas of law enforcement. Because the crimes have been committed
against nonhumans (or the habitats essential to their welfare),
it is important that the writers’ backgrounds also provide them
with knowledge about the lives of wildlife species, the issues
that affect those lives, and how humans and wildlife interact.
Goddard’s Prey (1992), the oldest of the novels discussed,
features Henry Lightstone, a Fish and Game Department undercover
cop who infiltrates a gang of illegal big-game hunters. He comes
face-to-face with a terrorist group of international financiers,
industrialists, and paid assassins who pursue him with deadly
intentions through America’s wilderness from Yellowstone to the
Everglades to Alaska’s arctic wastes.
All Lightstone’s wildlife adventures are based on cases Goddard
encountered in his position as director of the Clark R. Bavin
Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory in Ashland,
Oregon. The Laboratory’s goal, like that of both Lightstone and
Goddard is to help endangered species survive the human
infringements of the law that threaten them and their habitats.
Partly because of his frustrations, Goddard began churning out
crime novels, full of the kind of grisly violence and police
procedure he had been exposed to during his days with the
sheriff’s department. His first novel, Balefire, was a
best-seller in 1983. In more recent books, like Double Blind,
the heroes and villains are wildlife agents, poachers, and
radical environmentalists…. (Luoma, 2000).
Barr’s themes and portraits are similar in many ways to
Goddard’s, and the pages of her Anna Pigeon series are spiced
with nearly as much conflict and violence as are Goddard’s
Lightstone series. Barr began her series in 1993 when she
herself was a Park Ranger at Mesa Verde National Park with 8
years of experience on the job. Barr certainly can claim credit
for establishing National Parks as settings for crime and park
rangers as both naturalists and investigators in the 12 novels
that comprise the series to date . Each of Barr’s Anna Pigeon
mysteries is set in a different National Park, and each focuses
on species and problems particular to that setting. Blood Lure,
not only “wonderfully paced,” is also, according to Winks (2001,
p. H7) “marvelously informative about bear research in Glacier
National Park.” Hunting Season (2002) looks at deer poaching in
the Natchez Trace.
Before “the National Parks stole my heart,” Barr was, like
Speart, an actress, perhaps explaining the centrality of
character, setting, and audience involvement in the novels that
followed (Rancourt, p. 30). Speart, like Christine Goff, came to
the genre from a career as an investigative reporter in wildlife
journalism.
Speart’s travels to Kenya and Tanzania ushered in a decade spent
writing magazine articles about the plight of wildlife
endangered by poachers, smugglers, and corporate polluters.
Speart was outraged to learn that wildlife crime, including the
traditional Chinese medicine black market in everything from
rhino horns to bear gall bladders, is a $12-$15 billion a year
industry, second only to illegal drug and arms smuggling.
Through field research, she met and earned the trust of special
agents of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She found them as
fascinating and imperiled as the endangered species they try to
protect. (MacDonald, 2003)
Those articles, most of which are available on her web site (www.jessicaspeart.com/author.html),
have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Omni,
Audubon, National Wildlife, Wildlife Conservation, Earth
Journal, and Animals. She published “War Within” about the
efforts of the Fish and Wildlife Division of Law Enforcement
Service to put a halt to the illegal wildlife trade (Speart,
1993).
The article reflects her field research, emphasizing the
obstacles that politics within the Fish and Wildlife Service and
the federal government put in the way of enforcement. This
theme, also basic to Goddard’s Harry Lighthouse series, becomes
a constant in Speart’s Rachel Porter series. Speart gives voice
in both the article on Goddard’s lab and in her own series to
many of the frustrations that sparked Goddard’s decision to turn
to the novel to reach a public that, unlike the public in the
1970s, seemed immured to the plight of the country’s wildlife .
At the end of “War Within,” Speart comments, her own frustration
clear, “If the resources [the endangered animals themselves]
could scream, maybe those in power would finally hear” (Speart,
1993, p. 85). Soon thereafter, connecting wildlife and
environmental issues to the mystery novel came to seem as
“natural” to Speart as it had to Goddard. It would bring
awareness to uninformed readers who would never read
investigative articles, especially ones focused on wildlife
instead of issues that more obviously involved them.
Goff left investigative reporting after a shorter career than
Speart’s, but by 1997 also came to see that fiction,
specifically crime thrillers, might bring both wildlife and
issues crucial to their well being to more readers more
effectively than traditional reporting seemed to be doing. Goff,
a bird-watcher since childhood, had not thought of mixing birds
and crime until her “agent, who knew an editor who was looking
for a ‘birdwatching mystery,’” suggested what has become for her
and her readers a fortuitous combination . That, Goff recalls,
was November 1997 and the proposal for the book was due by the
first of the year. In her struggle to find a focus, plot, and
theme, Goff realized that
Most “bird” issues have global themes—conservation, preservation
of habitat, humanitarianism, wildlife management,
environment—driven by global issues—money, land, love, pride,
power—and those issues impact all of us….speak to our basic way
of life. They are what binds humans with creatures the world
over. (Goff, nd, np).
Thus, 1998’s A Rant of Ravens began a series featuring National
Park ranger Eric Linenger that by 2003 already consisted of four
novels, each reflecting the themes and aims of all wildlife
mystery thriller series. Box, unlike Barr, Speart, or Goff, is
an executive. As the CEO of Rocky Mountain International
Corporation he is concerned with promoting tourism in Montana,
Wyoming, Idaho, and South Dakota and understands how basically
wilderness and wild animals are related to the appeal of this
region.
The Investigators
Goddard’s three Lightstone novels, Prey (1992), Wildfire (1995),
and Double Bind (1997), involve the reader in the work of
wildlife law enforcement as Lightstone becomes more and more
deeply involved. In the first, Lightstone, a San Diego police
homicide investigator, goes undercover in Anchorage, Alaska and
finds his case intersecting that of a team of covert federal
wildlife agents working against the same gang he is tracking for
very different reasons. Observation suggests that he would be a
valuable addition to the team, and he finds himself recruited
into the Service. In the process, they hunt down dangerous
international terrorists out to destroy the environmental
movement.
That emphasis led reviewers to label the novel an eco-thriller,
a label that stuck when, in Wildfire, another threat to the
environmental movement--this time from an industrial
conspiracy--emerges and leads to retaliation by a group of
radical environmental activists whose methods, if not goals,
make them the target of Lightstone’s team of agents. This time,
the setting is largely in the Bahamas where, “it’s definitely
not safe to be in or on the water”
(members.aol.com/kengoddard/descriptions/html).
. Double Bind, set in Oregon, touches on the illegal trade in
exotic species (specifically the warehouse filled with
crocodiles, deadly Australian snakes, and 750 giant red-kneed
tarantulas that serve as the cover for Lighthouse’s team);
illicit, guided hunts and the poaching of protected species like
bear and cougar for use in decorative items such as the
bear-claw and cougar-claw necklaces that are featured in the
novel’s plot; and the protection of as-yet undiscovered species
(here, Bigfoot herself). The actual frame for the novel involves
illegal hunting of canvasbacks by the kind of influential
government figure who considers himself above the law, which
opens with the attempted murder of game warden Wilbur Boggs who,
rather like Speart’s Rachel Porter, “has pissed off [one too
many] duckpoaching congressmen.”
Speart, more like Barr than Goff, deals with multiple species,
and her investigator is not a park ranger but a Fish and
Wildlife agent like Barr’s Anna Pigeon, Goddard’s Henry
Lighthouse, and Moody’s Venus Diamond. Like Barr’s Anna,
Speart’s Rachel Porter, in her job as special investigator, gets
moved from location to location, each with a unique wildlife
issue. Moody’s Diamond, Heywood’s Grady Service, and Box’s
Pickett, each a game warden, are, in contrast, settled in a
given area: Diamond, in Washington State; Service, in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula; and Pickett, in Montana. To date, Speart’s
Porter has dealt with alligator poaching in southern Florida
(Gator Aide), endangered tortoises in the Mohave Desert
(Tortoise Soup), exotic animal and bird smuggling (Bird
Brained), illegal primate trade in the Chuchuahua Desert in El
Paso (Border Patrol), and fish poaching in Mississippi River
Delta (Black Delta Night). She tackles both bear poaching in A
Killing Season and land development and the abuses of marine
mammals in Coastal Disturbance.
C. J. Box’s “detective,” game warden Joe Pickett, comes at
wildlife issues from still another perspective. He is equally as
compelling a character as--but is designed to appeal to--an
audience perhaps not drawn to either Rachel Porter or Anna
Pigeon. Pickett is, of course, male. He is a young family man as
new to his job as is Speart’s Rachel in the first of her
adventures. True to the genre format, his Joe Pickett is the
Game Warden for Twelve Sleep County in Montana’s Bighorn
Mountains, where one of his first arrests (Open Season) for
fishing without a license bags the Governor of Wyoming.
Similarly, Speart’s Rachel Porter, newly arrived in Georgia from
Montana (the setting for A Killing Season), makes a
letter-of-the-law-but-not-politically-astute arrest in Coastal
Disturbance. Rachel’s catch is Clark Williams who turns out to
be, as well as a former Undersecretary of Interior for Fish,
Wildlife, and Parks, the villainous developer behind the forces
that are in the process of ruining both the delicate environment
of Georgia’s coastal swampland and the area’s wildlife
population though industrial pollution and development. Manatee,
threatened by the pollution, are equally threatened by being
exploited in the sleazy Manatee Park, where supposedly
rehabilitated animals are kept to swim with tourists who treat
them like senseless robots.
The Animals
Making the reader care as much as do the investigators about the
victims of the crime requires more than a charismatic
investigator. What distinguishes wildlife mystery thrillers from
all other mystery genres is the success their authors achieve in
making their readers hear what, in “War Within,” Speart refers
to as “silent screams,” the voices of nonhuman victims of
illegal and illicit action. Perhaps the most obvious way to
create empathy for wild animals would be the devices employed by
writers of animal fantasy, handing over the story completely to
a nonhuman protagonist or narrator caught in any one of the
situations that Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement try to save
them from every day.
In Wildcrafters (1999), Kathleen Skye Moody does just that. To
expose her readers to the illegal hunting of endangered
Roosevelt Elk, who are poached for their hooves, of value in the
profitable Asian black market, she opens the novel with a hunted
young elk narrating his own, tragically brief story, a story
interrupted by a poacher’s bullet. Pope (nd), a reviewer who
praises the way “Moody’s discriminating imagery and realistic
narrative” reveal “both the beauties of the Bogachiel’s fragile
ecosystem and the repulsive crimes that take place there,”
obviously finds Moody’s approach effective.
Goddard’s in-depth portrait of animals like the blind leopard
Sasha, who has been rehabilitated by a mysterious “witch”
intricately involved in the plot of Double Bind, suggests
Goddard’s Lightstone series belongs more firmly in the camp of
wildlife mystery thrillers than ecothrillers. However, it is the
zeal of his investigator that most convinces readers of the
importance of wildlife protection. Investigators in Wildlife
Mystery Thrillers must model ethics and action in defense of
wildlife that will encourage a positive change in the reader’s
own ethics. Commenting on Barr’s Anna Pigeon, a reviewer in the
American Library Association’s Booklist points to Anna’s loyalty
to her companion animals and her respect and love for the Parks
and their wild creatures (Track, jacket blurb). Such attitudes
become a device used to heighten the reader’s respect and love
for all animals. In Track of the Cat and in the 11 subsequent
Anna Pigeon Mysteries, Anna provides the reader with a point of
view designed to be sympathetic to whatever wildlife is
foregrounded (in Track, the accused mountain lion). Set in
Guadelupe Mountains National Park in Southwest Texas, the novel
focuses on mountain lions, one of whom has been falsely accused
of killing a Park Ranger.
Because of Anna’s sympathies and training, the reader gains, as
the mystery unfolds, an accurate portrait of the mountain lion,
the lion’s habitat, and the problems faced by both. When the
lion, despite Anna’s efforts, is tracked and killed by ranchers,
she determines to prove the injustice of their actions and to
see that they are held responsible for the death. When, in
seeking the real killer, she discovers that a fellow ranger is
supplementing his salary with the proceeds of an illegal “canned
hunt,” Anna sets out to expose him, at the same time exposing
the reader to the horrors involved in that all too prevalent
practice.
Barr never hesitates to criticize Park policy, and--in her Anna
Pigeon guise--often takes swipes at the agency on issues like
the second-rate status of naturalists, interpreters, and
historians, who now are called “park aides” rather than rangers.
“Little boys and girls didn’t dream of growing up to be aides,”
mutters Anna in Hunting Season. “They dreamed of growing up to
be rangers” (Line, 2003).
Because of her own experience as a ranger, Barr also knows how
many of our National Park employees are dedicated to the welfare
of both the environment and the wild creatures sharing it.
Consequently, as in most wildlife mysteries, she tends to
balance the bad guy Ranger with one Anna (though not his bosses)
finds particularly laudatory: In Track, it is a fellow Park
employee who, acting against policy, has a secret sanctuary for
injured and endangered animals in the remote mountains of the
park.
A visit to that sanctuary brings the animals it protects,
including the kittens of the mountain lion murdered by the
ranchers early in the novel, vividly to life for Anna and the
reader. This leads Anna to choose to protect the secret
sanctuary, seeing it--rather than Federal policy, as being in
the best interests of the animals because, presumably, it will
convince the reader to approach the animals as individuals and
value their welfare even above the law.
Often, Barr’s wildlife issue is less prominent than it is in
Blood Lure or Track of the Cat. In High Country, (2004) the 12th
in the Anna Pigeon series, Barr backgrounds the vicious poachers
Anna encounters in Yosemite, emphasizing Anna’s heroic efforts
to save four young park employees lost in a fierce winter storm
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The novel becomes, as the
reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly (jacket) suggests in the process
of praising Barr’s “true gift for outdoor writing,” illustrative
of the violence of humans that seems equaled by the violence of
nature. There is a clear indication, however, that where
nature’s violence must simply be endured, human violence against
nature must be countered with as much determination as Anna
shows in her rescue efforts in High Country. Part of the value
of a series is that rather than oppress the reader with a theme,
the author can count on accumulated impression. Often, as in
Flashback (2003), set in the Dry Tortugas, wildlife is less
central to the plot but is highlighted through unforgettable
vignettes.
Here, when the 100 square miles of dying coral in the Gulf of
Mexico is introduced, it is in a compellingly tense scene where
Anna’s own life is threatened as, caught under a wreck, she
flounders undersea. She instinctively empathizes with the
coral’s inhabitants, seeing the tiny creatures in terms of the
dwellers in Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. This personification leads the
reader not otherwise concerned with the degradation of the coral
to understand that the environmental problem affects lives not
unlike their own. This empathy is enhanced as Anna turns to
their plight from her own, imagining the “dying cries of the
helpless Who of Whoville as they thrash about in panic, ‘their
fairy cities in ruins’” (Stasio, 2003, p. 33).
Like Barr, Speart makes use of literary devices from
anthropomophism to sentiment to bring the facts about, and
issues involving, “critters” and their abuse to life for her
readers. Primary among her devices is the foregrounding of a
single individual like Hook, the alligator belonging to a murder
victim in Gator Aide, who examines illegal trade in alligator
hides and parts. Hook, although named and of great concern to
Agent Porter, is dead when the mystery begins. Most of Spearts’
other named wildlife characters are alive and purposely made
appealing to readers to make the reader care not only about them
but also about their entire species.
In Open Season, Box (2001) opens with game warden Pickett
confronted by “three large mule deer…dead, lying on their sides,
on the bottom of the saddle slope. Their throats had been cut to
bleed them, but they hadn’t been opened up to field dress” them.
Their killer straddles them, his T-shirt proclaiming “HAPPINESS
IS A WARM GUT PILE” (p. 4).
The threatened species in Open Season is not the poached deer
but the far more endangered--indeed, believed extinct--and less
familiar Miller’s Weasels, observed only by Pickett’s 7-year-old
daughter, Sheridan, in the family’s woodpile. Further
information on Miller’s Weasels, the fruits of Pickett’s
research much later in the novel, provides the reader with the
natural history of the species, including their extermination
when a myth about their taste for human flesh developed during
the Lewis and Clark expedition . However, it is less this
information than seeing the weasels through Sheridan’s eyes that
develops reader’s empathy for them.
Intrigued by their small light-brown bodies, slim snout, pink
nose, and “large black shiny eyes,” she determines to accustom
the timid creatures to her presence. Cleverly, Sheridan drops
some of her Cheerios almost within the reach of the hungry
weasel and then, instinctively, backs off, speaking to the
creature briefly and quietly while the weasel “looked from the
Cheerio to Sheridan and back to the Cheerio,” suddenly shooting
out to claim the food before vanishing back into the woodpile
(p. 67). Soon she learns the creature is not alone and, in
secret, continues to acclimatize them to her presence and
observe them.
She and her younger sister name their guests and are
privileged—along with Box’s (2001) reader—to hear their voices:
“Lucky, Hippity-Hop, and Elway….could chirp and chatter and make
a trilling sound like a muted baby’s rattle when they were
annoyed or playful” (p. 112). Consecutively, the reader follows
her father’s investigation of illegal hunting of pronghorn
antelope and learns that some of his neighbors are concerned
that were a severely endangered species be discovered in the
region, all use of the area for hunting or any other uses would
become illegal. The discovery of the weasels would occasion
exactly such controversy
Box actually uses sections of the Endangered Species Act 1982
Amendments, referred to in many of the wildlife mystery thriller
series, as prefaces to its chapters, so its reader knows the
validity of these claims in evaluating Sheridan’s secret and,
satisfyingly, shares in the joy she and her father share when,
at the end of the novel, the bad guys defeated, it is revealed
that Sheridan’s weasels have successfully bred: “Elway had
produced 10 babies” in “the roomy cavern beneath the garage,”
and eight kits had survived.
Box’s (2001) novel ends with Sheridan and her father
conspiratorially feeding and watching their guests: “As far as
anyone knew, the Miller’s weasels that Ote Keeley had brought
down the mountain…had died in the woodpile fire, just as Wacey
said they did.” Joe admits to his daughter that hiding them
“isn’t legally the right thing.” In fact,
Joe was well aware…that by keeping the Miller’s weasels and not
reporting their existence, he was breaking more regulations and
laws than he could count. And he knew that what he planned to do
with the creatures could probably land him in a federal prison.
(p. 278)
as he tells Sheridan about the place he had found—“a small
protected valley high in the Bighorns miles away from roads or
trails….in a natural elk migration route, and filled with mule
deer” (p. 278).
Readers of Barr’s Track of the Cat perhaps will remember the
hidden sanctuary in the rugged mountains of Gaudelupe Mountains
National Park in Southwest Texas where Anna Pigeon discovers a
fellow Park employee breaking similar laws for similar reasons
and makes a value judgment not unlike those made at the end of
Open Season by both Warden Pickett and his daughter, Box,
and--undoubtedly--by readers as well. What they all have learned
to see in the Miller’s weasels through Sheridan Pickett’s young,
clear eyes is the weasels themselves, untarnished by politics or
economics or conflicting interests or law, all of which often
unwittingly anthropocentric, exploit the nonhuman animal through
what critics like Malamud (2003) refer to as “cultural
marginalization.” The wildlife mystery thriller resists that
marginalization by advancing, as Malamud does, what he calls an
“ecocritical aesthetic ethic” which “advances an advocacy
methodology” (p. 43).
Like Sheridan and Joe Pickett, Box’s (2003) reader is left
thinking not about the fate of a species but about the welfare
of Lucky, Hippity-Hop, Elway and their eight surviving babies
who,
a quarter the size of their parents…[would] sometimes come out
into the sun and try to stand on their hind legs like their
parents, and Joe and Sheridan would laugh as the kits would lose
their balance, fall over, and scramble upright again until they
could hold the famous pose. (p. 176)
Devices that bring the endangered animal to life for the reader
in a way that causes readers to empathize with the animal’s
plight also ensure that the reader will care not only about the
outcome of the investigations in the novels but also reach
beyond the fiction into fact, keeping the relationship between
person and animal established in the novel open after the novel
ends. This, in turn, “initiate[s] and inspire[s] the beginning
of an imaginative consideration and reformulation of who these
animals are and how we share their world” (Malamud, 2003, p.
34). If that happens, the literary devices that define wildlife
mystery thrillers (and the reader’s response to them) have
served as “springboard[s] for ethical replenishment: a platform
for real-world improvements of our modes of engaging nature” (Malamud,
p. 43).
Wildlife Mystery Thriller Series
Barr, Nevada. Anna Pigeon mysteries. Putnam: New York.
Track of the cat. (1993).
A superior death. (1994)
Ill wind. (1995).
Firestorm. (1996).
Endangered species. (1997).
Blind descent. (1998).
Liberty Falls. (1999).
Deep South. (2000).
Blood lure (2001).
Hunting season. (2002).
Flashback. (2003).
High Country. (2004).
Box, C. J. Putnam: New York.
Open season. (2001).
Savage run. (2002).
Winterkill. (2003).
Fiedler, Jacqueline. Caroline Canfield mysteries. Pocket Books:
New
York.
Tiger’s palette. (1998).
Sketches with wolves. (2001).
Goddard, Ken.
Prey. (1992). New York: Tor.
Wildfire (1995). New York: Tor.
Double bind. (1997). New York: Forge.
Goff, Christine. Berkley Prime Crime: New York.
A rant of ravens. (1998).
Death of a songbird. (2001).
A nest in the ashes. (2002).
Death takes a gander. (2003).
Heywood, Joseph. A woods cop mystery. Lyons: New York.
Ice hunter. (2001).
Blue wolf in green fire. (2002).
Chasing a blond moon. (2003).
Moody, Skye Kathleen. A Venus Diamond mystery. St. Martin’s: New
York.
Rain dance. (1996).
Blue poppy. (1997).
Wildcrafters. (1998).
Habitat. (1999).
K Falls. (2001).
Medusa. (2003).
Quinn, Elizabeth. Lauren Maxwell mysteries. Pocket Books: New
York.
Murder most grizzly. (1993).
A wolf in death’s clothing. (1995).
Lamb to the slaughter. (1996).
Killer Whale. (1997).
Dead by a whisker. (1998).
Skurzynski, Gloria, & Ferguson, Alane. National Parks mysteries.
National Geographic Society: Washington, DC.
Wolf stalker. (1997).
Rage of fire. (1998).
Cliff hanger. (1999).
Deadly waters. (1999).
The hunted. (2000).
Ghost horses. (2000).
Over the edge. (2002).
Valley of death. (2002).
Escape from fear. (2002).
Out of the deep. (2002).
Running scared. (2003).
Buried alive. (2003).
Speart, Jessica. Rachel Porter mysteries. Avon Books: New York.
Gator aide. (1997).
Bird brained. (1999).
Border prey. (2000).
Black delta night. (2001).
A killing season. (2002).
Costal disturbance. (2003).
White, Randy Wayne. Berkley Prime Crime: New York.
Sanibel flats. (1990).
The heat islands. (1992).
The man who invented Florida. (1994).
Captiva. (1996).
North of Havana. (1997).
The Mangrove coast. (1998).
Ten thousand islands. (2000).
.Shark river. (2001).
12 mile limit. (2002).
Everglade. (2003).
Notes
[1]
Correspondence should be addressed to Marion W. Copeland, 128
Amherst Road, Pelham, MA 01002. E-mail:
mwcopeland@comcast.net.
2 A closely related new genre, first brought to my attention by
Susan Lumpkin, in her annual round-up of “beach books” for
readers of the Smithsonian/National Zoo’s July-August 1997 issue
of the Friends of the National Zoo’s Newsletter, is ”the
environmental-political thriller.” Perhaps the ultimate example
is Michael Tobias’s 1998 Rage and Reason, a no holds
barred expose of animal abuses told as an eco-guerilla takes
action against those he holds responsible. Written immediately
after Tobias, a well-known defender of animals, published
Nature’s Keepers: On the Front Lines of the Fights to Save
Wildlife in America (John Wiley, 1998), Rage and
Reason mirrors Tobias’ own rage at the abuses and inequities
his experience and research revealed. Nature’s Keepers
assures readers that the efforts of agents of the Fish and
Wildlife Services revealed in wildlife mystery thrillers are
accurate.
It is to the point that the first of Jessica Speart’s Rachel
Porter mysteries, Gator Aide was also published in 1997.
As will become apparent in the discussion of “wildlife mystery
thriller” series, there is considerable cross-over. Lumpkin, for
instance, includes Nevada Barr’s Endangered Species
(1997) in her round-up, commenting in particular about the
“authority” of Barr’s portrayal of “the insular world of the
Park Service” as well as her beautiful descriptions of the
natural world. So vivid are the portrayals of leopards and
forest elephants in Steven Voien’s Black Leopard (1997),
another novel Lumpkin includes, that I would, had Voien decided
to create a series based on adventures of his human protagonists
(wildlife biologists who exhibit admirable attitudes toward and
relationships with their subjects) like the one in Black
Leopard, have included it here as I do Barr’s own Anna
Pigeon series.
Mystery writers other than Tobias and Voien also raise wildlife
issues without going on to produce Wildlife Mystery Thriller
series: Dana Stabnow’s Alaskan mysteries; Clive Cussler and Paul
Kempke’s White Death: A Novel from the NUMA Files;
Carl Hiassen’s Hoot (2000) as well as his adult novels
that feature ex-governor, now hermit and swamp-rat, Skink
(introduced in Double Whammy [1987]); Sparkle Hayter and
Karin McQuillan’s African mysteries; James Hall’s Gone Wild
(1995); Blanche D’Alpuget’s White Eye (1994);
Maxine Kumin’s Quit Monk or Die! (1999); and
Elliott Light’s Chain Thinking: A Shep Harrington SmallTown
Mystery (2003)
[1]
I first became aware of the category in an article in a local
paper announcing a workshop on writing mystery novels. Tucked
into the information offered about author Jessica Speart were
the facts that she was credited with creating a new genre, “the
Wildlife Mystery Thriller,” and that the 6th novel in
the series,
A Killing Season,
was to be released in the summer of 2003 (Lehrer 2003). I
immediately bought a novel already available (A
Killing Season
is actually the 5th novel in the Rachel Porter
series) and have since read all six of the Rachel Porter
mysteries as well as most of the other series in the genre
published to date.
[1]
In their fictional biography of Sue Grafton’s serial sleuth
Kinsey Millhone, “G” is for Grafton: The World of Kinsey
Millhone, Natalie Hevener Kauffman and Carol McGinnes credit
Gieson, Karen McQuillan, Dana Stabenow, and Nevada Barr with
enhancing the reader’s fear that the environment has been
“vandalized” beyond repair. Of the four, only Barr produces
novels that consistently meet the requirement for the Wildlife
Mystery Thriller outlined in this essay. Van Gieson comes closer
than either Stabenow or McQuillan and readers of such series
would find her Neil Hammond mysteries rewarding: 1988. North
of the Border: A Neil Hammel Mystery; 1990. Raptor: A
Neil Hammel Mystery; 1991. The Other Side of Death: A
Neil Hammel Mystery; 1992. The Wolf Path: A Neil Hammel
Mystery; 1993. The Lies that Bind: A Neil Hammel Mystery;
1995. Parrot Blues: A Neil Hammel Mystery; 1996. Hot
Shots: A Neil Hammel Mystery; 1998. Ditch Rider: A Neil
Hammel Mystery.
[1]
Goddard’s series began after van Gieson’s, whose lawyer Neil
Hammel, situated in Albuquerque, NM, began dealing with wildlife
related cases in 1988’s North of the Border and Randy
Wayne White’s, whose ex-CIA agent, ex-marine biologist Doc Ford
began his investigations on Florida’s Sanibel Island in 1990’s
Sanibel Flats. Van Gieson left her male attorney behind
after 1998’s Ditch Rider, launching the Claire Reynier,
librarian at the University of New Mexico, non wildlife mystery
thriller mystery series in 2000. White’s series continues,
2003’s Everglades bringing the number of Doc Ford novels
to 10.
[1]
Starting in 1997 with Wolf Stalker, mother-and-daughter
team Gloria Skurzynski and Alane Ferguson began a series of
mysteries for young readers each set in a different National
Park, featuring a different threatened or endangered species,
and published by National Geographic Society. To date there have
been 12 novels carrying the Landons (Steven, a wildlife
photographer and Olivia, a wildlife veterinarian stationed at
the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, their two teen age
children, Jack and Ashley, and frequently a foster child) from
Yellowstone in the first novel to Carlsbad Caverns in the 12th
(Running Scared, 2003). The mother’s expertise in
wildlife medicine is usually the reason the family is called on
although the father’s photographer’s eye helps both his children
and the reader focus on the issue at hand. In Yellowstone, the
problem is false accusations aimed at the recently reintroduced
wolves by ranchers and hunters eager to kill them. The 2nd
novel in the series is set in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park;
the 3rd in Mesa Verde and, like Barr’s first, focuses
on cougar-human encounters; the 4th, on the
Everglades and manatees and sharks; the 5th on
Glacier National Park and grizzlies; the 6th on Zion
National Park and its white mustangs; the 7th on the
Grand Canyon’s condors; the 8th on Death Valley and
its bighorn sheep; the 9th on the Virgin Islands, sea
turtles and, like Barr’s 10th, coral reefs; the 10th
on Maine’s Acadia and the humpbacked whale; the 11th
on Carlsbad Caverns and bats; and the 12th on
Alaska’s Denali National Park and the wolverine.
Like the writers for the adult series, Skurzynski, a
winner of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing
Award for her Almost the Real Thing, and Ferguson, an
award-winning mystery writer, are well-qualified for their task
and each volume of the series has maps and photographs a as well
an afterword by a professional stationed at the National Park
used as a setting.
[1]
Bear poaching and the Asian black market, if not the bear itself
and bear research, has become a popular issue in mysteries and
mystery series in general. Also featured in the Montana of
Jessica Speart’s A Killing Season (2003), it figures in
the North Carolina of Kathy Reichs forensics mystery Bare
Bones as well as in the Columbia River of Richard Hoyt’s
The Weatherman’s Daughter (2003), and is “a big issue with
[other] Pacific Northwest writers” (Stasio July 2003).
[1]
As Speart points out in “War Within,” the 1970s was an era of
heightened public awareness that pushed for the passage of both
the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) and the Endangered
Species Act (1973). Clark Bavin, the newly appointed Chief of
the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Division of Law Enforcement
“began to turn old-time wardens into professional special
agents” like Speart’s own Rachel Porter and Ken Goddard’s Henry
Lighthouse. Then in the 1990s, as the caseloads of special
agents swelled “tenfold,’ their ranks “dropped 9 percent.” Each
of the country’s five wildlife regions were soon understaffed
and overcased in exactly the ways illustrated in Goddard’s and
Speart’s novels. Pleas for increased budget and staff, based on
study after study, fell on deaf ears because the Secretaries of
the Interior have been neither knowledgeable about nor
interested in FWLS’s Law Enforcement division. Although Speart
seemed optimistic that change might occur as Mollie Beattie
became Director in June, 1991. Her later novels suggest the hope
was premature and that the problems and frustrations that led
first Goddard and then Speart herself to bring them to the
public in the wildlife mystery thriller remain. In fact, this
article seems almost a primer for Speart’s wildlife mystery
thriller plots and themes (Speart 1993). In her essay “Up Close
and Dangerous,” she tells about experiences with wild life as
she researched her articles and thrillers, experiences which
often become those Rachel Porter encounters as she goes about
the business of a Federal Fish and Wildlife agent.
[1]
Andy Straka is another author whose Frank Pavlicek mystery
series focuses on birds, in particular those species used in
falconry. “North American falconry,” Straka notes on his web
site, “has evolved into an eclectic mix of environmental
awareness and husbandry of a wild creature whose welfare, in an
age of proliferating development, has grown increasingly
intertwined with our own” (www.andystraka.com/bio.htm).
These concerns suggest A Killing Sky and Cold Quarry
may, indeed, qualify as a new and emerging wildlife mystery
thriller series.
[1]
“Because of the legend, Miller’s weasels were exterminated in
every possible way….But what really led Miller’s weasels down
the path to extinction was the virtual elimination of the great
herds of buffalo on the Great Plains because the Miller’s
weasels were dependent on the buffalo” to scavenge a living.
But, as it turns out, a remnant had survived “in the Bighorns,
probably by becoming similarly dependent on elk, moose, and
deer.” The three men who had found and trapped them had been
murdered and now someone was looking for where they had secreted
the weasels lest news of their survival leak out and “sock the
already fading town of Saddlestring, Wyoming, with a punch Joe
wasn’t sure it would recover from” (174-178). When Joe Pickett
realizes the implications of this, he “was enraged” at the
people, his neighbors: “In all of his studies…, this was the
first instance he knew of in which there had been a purposeful
and determined effort to exterminate a species” (209).
* Marion W. Copeland, Tufts School of Veterinary Science
References
Box, C. J. (2001). Open season. Putnam: New York
Burke, K. (2002, December). Smithsonian notable books for
children, 2002. Smithsonian, 122-131.
Goff, Christine. N. d. “Birdwatcher’s Mystery Series” (www.christinegoff.com/newbooks.html).
Hayden, G. M. (1999). The lion’s roar: Jessica Speart’s
mysteries raise wildlife awareness. Murderous Intent Mystery
Magazine (www.jessicaspeart.com/intent.html).
Lehrer, P. (2003, January 17). Sisters in crime to share craft.
Amherst Bulletin, 2.
Line, L. (2003). Guadalupe gumshoe. Audubon (September) 22-24.
Lumpkin, S. (1997). Books naturally. Zoogoer (July/August). (natzoo.si.edu/Publications/ZooGoer/1997/4/books.cfm).
Luoma, J. R. (2000). The wild world’s Scotland Yard. Audubon
(November-December), 72-80.
MacDonald, J. L. (2001). Carl Hiaasen takes a bite out of the
crimes against the environment. BookPage ProMotion (www.bookpage.com/0001bp/carl_hiaasen.html).
MacDonald, J. L. (2003, March). Actress Jessica Speart takes new
role as mystery writer. BookPage ProMotion,. (www.bookpage.com/0303bp/jessica_speart.html).
McClellan, Kay. (nd). Meet the author Jessica Speart: Our kind
of kick-ass gal. Tart City. (www.tartcity.com/JSpeart.html).
Malamud, R. (2003). Poetic animals and animal souls. Maxmillan
Palgrave: New York.
Mehl, N. (2000). Interview with Jessica Speart. The Charlotte
Austin Review (www.jessicaspeart.com/html).
Pope, M. (nd). The mystery reader reviews (www.themysteryreader.com/moody-wildcrafters.html).
Rancourt, Linda. 1995. “Murder She Writes.” National Parks
Magazine 69 (Sept/Oct): 30-35.
Speart, J. (1993, July-August). War within. Buzzworm: The
Environmental Journal (4), 36-85.
Stasio, 18 April 1993. “Crime.” The New York Times Book Review:
24.
M. (2003, May18). Crime. The New York Times Book Review, 33.
Stasio, M. 2003 March 9). Crime. The New York Times Book Review,
21.
Stasio, M. (2003, July 20). Crime. The New York Times Book
Review, 15.
Wildlife and environment: series characters, alpha by last name
(www.stopyourekillingme.com/CC/cj-wildlife.html).
Winks, R. W. (2001). Few Nations Enshrine the Objects of this
Affection: Post-Mortem. The Boston Sunday Globe 25 March: H7.
For Abstracts of all issues, including the most current, click
Article
Abstracts
To order Society &
Animals Journal, go to our secure online
ordering page
You
can Search the online issues of Society & Animals, as well
as the entire Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA)
website,
for topics and keywords of your interest:
|
