1 Crimate Fiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place STEWART KING (Monash University, Australia) [Pre-print draft of an article to appear in a special issue of Journal of Popular Culture (53.6 2021) on “Place, Space and the Detective Narrative”, edited by Malcah Effron and Nicole Kenley] The theme of environmental destruction and human-induced climate change has become a staple of fiction and visual culture in the first decades of the twenty-first century. 1 Indeed, the seeming ubiquity of environmental and climate fiction – or cli-fi for short – has led Mads Rosendahl Thomsen to identify it as one of four prominent themes in contemporary world literature (98, 102-103). 2 To date, critical attention to this phenomenon has centered primarily on “‘literary’ and middle-brow” fiction (Trexler 7) as well as science fiction (Milner and Burgmann). Nevertheless, there is also a substantial corpus of crime novels from around the world that investigate and interrogate issues of environmental damage and ecological (in)justice. These novels have been identified variously as environmental crime fiction, “nature-oriented mystery novels” (Murphy 143), “eco-thrillers” (McKie), “econoir” (Bishop “‘When ‘tis’” 9), “ecologically conscious detective fiction” (Bandyopadhyay 70) and “ecological crime fiction” (Walton 115). These works of environmental, etc. crime fiction have not gone unnoticed by ecocritical scholars or by crime fiction scholars who employ ecocritical approaches to these novels. At its most basic, ecocriticism combines literary, film, and art analysis with environmental studies in order to better comprehend the ways in which the imaginative arts facilitate or, indeed, hinder inter-species connections (Buell et al. 418). Ecocritical approaches range from the study of