Cosy Crime Fiction, Australian Regions and Climate Crisis: Reading Sue Williams’s Rusty Bore Series in the Victorian Mallee
Abstract
Australian crime fiction engaged with regional and rural places, communities and histories is flourishing. The most prominent face of this is “rural noir”, but the “cosy crime” genre has also made a mark in Australian rural crime fiction. These subgenres are often positioned at different ends of the crime spectrum, with cosy crime commonly positioned as a “lighter”, domestically oriented alternative to the hard-boiled nature of rural noir. As a result, cosy crime is not credited with the same critical power as its rural noir bedfellow. This article argues that the Australian cosy crime novel deserves consideration as a subgenre entirely capable of engagement with social critique which, in an Australian context, tend to focus on settler colonial and environmental crimes. The article explores this through a discussion of the Rusty Bore Mysteries series of cosy crime novels by Melbourne-based author Sue Williams and set largely in the Victorian Mallee region, in the tiny fictional town of Rusty Bore. We argue that these four novels exemplify the critical capacities of Australian cosy crime fiction, in particular its attention to what has been termed “eco-crime”, alongside a commentary on the economic and social impacts of global capitalism on local communities. Drawing on our conversations about Williams’s novels with Mallee-based book groups, we further consider the role of genre fiction in this regional reading community, especially genre fiction’s capacity to generate discussion around colonial violence and climate crisis in rural Australia, topics that can often otherwise be avoided or actively denied.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution in educational and other non-commercial sectors.Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.1/au/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.