A series in search of a setting

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

Bushman hunter

Two weeks ago Sujata wrote about how setting makes a series and how she chose her settings. It made me think about how setting drives our Botswana mysteries in almost every way. Deserts are fascinating in their own right and most of the country is the arid Kalahari, but in the north Botswana borders on the Chobe and Zimbabwe rivers and suddenly becomes lush with riverine vegetation and abundant animal and bird life. The people, too, are varied. The largest group is the various Setswana speaking peoples, but there are other cultures as well including the San or Bushman peoples of the Kalahari. The constitution of Botswana guarantees equal rights to all citizens, but that doesn’t mean that there is no discrimination or that people don’t sometimes have to fight for those rights. The Bushman feature in several of our stories, and their struggle is the pivot of Death of the Mantis.

Ever since independence, the country has been a democracy that holds regular elections. It’s true that Seretse Khama’s Botswana Democratic Party has never lost an election, but there have been no serious challenges to the validity of the elections. Probably it’s fair to say that most people are fairly satisfied with the arc of their lives in the sixty-five-year-old nation. Part of that is due to the fact that the local kgosi (chief) and kgotla (assembly) run most aspects of local life as they have done for generations. So while much changed at the time of the British Protectorate and subsequently with the creation of the nation of Botswana, much also stayed the same. The continuity of those aspects of life smoothed the rougher transitions. So did the diamond wealth of the new nation. Both of those are threads in our stories.

Large meeting at the kgotla

Since Stanley and I both know Botswana well from many visits and work experiences, and we both love and respect the country, it doesn't seem unreasonable that we would choose to set our mystery series there even though we are South Africans. But, in fact, it wasn’t like that at all. In the first place, it was never our intention to write a series. We had an idea for what we thought would be an intriguing premise for a mystery and played with that idea for a long time before we set fingers to keyboards, only to discover that writing requires a lot of hard work and a lot of craft (that we had to learn largely from scratch).

Those hyenas again...
Yes, they'll chase off lions if they have the numbers

Many readers of Murder Is Everywhere will know that our premise was that a pack of hyenas would completely consume a body, including the bones, leaving nothing that a detective could track or identify. (We know this is true because we saw a pack of hyenas do exactly that to an adult Wildebeest they’d killed.) Our book would open with a game ranger and an ecologist discovering a hyena eating a human body and the story would flow from there. (Of course, we discovered rather quickly that that is the premise for a chapter not for a novel. I said we were beginners. We soon came to the more interesting question of why the murderer was so keen that the body would disappear without trace. That was the premise for a novel.)

Our intention was to set the book in a wedge of South Africa that forms part of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, a large area jointly managed by South Africa and Botswana. We needed an open wildlife area where it would not be unlikely to find helpful hyenas to get on with eliminating the body. However, we soon started to worry about the difficulty of taking a body into a national park with its control gates and personnel checking vehicles. We decided to move our venue to a much less controlled game reserve in Botswana.

Oddly, one of the most important features of Botswana as a setting for us turned out to be that it is not South Africa. That frees us to explore a variety of backstories that are relevant to southern Africa in general but not nailed down by the legacy of apartheid and the internal dynamics of South Africa. The Bushman stories are one example. Murders for witchcraft, the growing Chinese influence in the region, and biopiracy are others that have featured in our books.

By the way, when we chose Botswana, it was by no means virgin territory for mystery writers. Apart from Unity Dow’s horrifying Screaming of the Innocents, there was Alexander McCall Smith with his wildly popular Mma Ramotswe’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. When the start of our first book, A Carrion Death, was shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger award, and we hopefully attended the awards dinner (we didn’t win), one of the judges kindly congratulated us on our work, but then asked why we’d dared to set the book in Botswana. “McCall Smith owns Botswana,” she informed us. It’s one of the minor regrets of my life that I only thought of the obvious riposte much later. I should have said, “Well, probably half the writers here set their books in London. Doesn’t Conan Doyle own London?” Botswana is a country the size of France albeit with only a few million people, but it’s big enough and diverse enough to have many stories and host many writers.

So Kubu found his home in Botswana, and almost everything about him reflects the culture of his people and the nature of his country. That it was the home for a series happened a bit later when our agent brought us a contract from Harper Collins for A Carrion Death. We were stunned and delighted.

“You are writing a series, aren’t you?” she asked. “They want a series. It’s a two book contract.”

Still in shock, we assured her that we would write a series, even suggesting that we were already planning the sequel.

“Good,” she responded. “They want a synopsis for the second book by next week.”

We had a busy weekend, but we had our series and it had its setting.