The cop who cops the cops - Guest Post by Mike Nicol

 

Mike with his home mountain as background
Picture: Estee de Villiers  

When I received a review copy of Mike Nicol's new book, Falls the Shadow, late last year, I was excited. I've enjoyed all Mike's books and this was the first in a long-awaited new series set in Cape Town. I wasn't disappointed. It turned out to be my favourite mystery novel of the year. Falls the Shadow has just been released by Catalyst Press in North America, adding one of South Africa's most talented thriller writers to their impressive stable of African authors.

Mike is also a writing educator, and many of his masterclass students have had their work published. He has a regular substack with lots of interesting stuff about writing. And he's a good friend. So it's a pleasure to welcome him to Murder Is Everywhere to talk about his new series. Over to you, Mike.

Like most writers I’ve been on the wrong end of some really nasty reviews, so, years ago, I decided to stop reading them. And since then, life has been minus one huge stress. Although I have to admit that a quip dismissing an early novel - way before the crime novels - was funny. Clearly fed-up with my story, the reviewer wrote: “Time to put another nickel in”. As you can tell, I’ve not forgotten that one!

Just recently, one of my writing friends - Paige Nick - reviewed my latest crime novel, Falls the Shadow, for her podcast. She told me she had only good things to say, but I said, no offence, but I won’t be listening. However, in a Facebook promo for her podcast I did read her blurb: “All I can say is that I hope author, Mike Nicol, doesn’t get pulled over by the cops in Cape Town this year. Because some really bad cops out there may not like the truths he’s dishing out about them in his new novel, Falls the Shadow.”

Yes, well.

      Coming to a cop novel has been a bit of a thing for me. When I started writing crime fiction back in 2008, I decided the way in was via the security industry - a huge industry in SA with more security guards than there are officers in the South African Police Service. The entry point was two characters who had been gun-runners for the now ruling African National Congress during what is known as The Struggle (to stop apartheid). Four books made up what became the Mace Bishop series.

After that, I thought why not get on the Private Investigator gig. Lots of writers, starting with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, have put their gumshoes on the mean streets and that always makes for good stories. So I came up with a surfer dude called Fish Pescado and his lawyer-spy-lover Vicki Kahn and sent them forth. Five books later I thought it was time for another change.

Zara in South Africa

In fact, I thought it was time to face the cops. Okay, I have a thing about cops. If you came of age in South Africa during the apartheid decades of the 1970s and 1980s, the cops were an invading army. The residue of that was a serious prejudice which I had to overcome. But then the cops that prowl the streets of what is called Democratic South Africa, came to my aid. Pretty soon they were the front-end of a mafia state.

Which led to the question, what if my cop, copped the cops? For which there is a Latin phrase from Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - who watches the watchmen. And I must fess up: I didn’t read it in the original but in that wonderful graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

And believe me, the SAPS does supply a ready source of storylines. One of those is about guns. South Africa is awash with guns. There are the guns people buy to protect themselves. There are the guns the gangsters “acquire” to enforce their trades be it drugs, trafficking, extortion, or that ever present freelance activity, being a hitman. And then, there are the guns, many of them AK47s, left over from The Struggle. Guns handed in to the police or discovered during regular policing activities are supposed to be destroyed by sending them to the steel mills for crushing. However, there are devious cops who sell them on to the underworld. This became a useful storyline for Falls the Shadow. All I needed was a gutsy cop to start tracking down the bad guys.

And in Germany...

      Fortunately, in the last of my Fish and Vicki novels, a cop had presented herself: one Captain Zara Dewane. She was in your face, she could handle the cop gun (a Vektor Z88); she drank Malbec, she was a single mom to a teenage son, she’d divorced her sociopathic husband, and she had no qualms about going after the bad guys even though the bad guys were fellow SAPS members. I stationed her in an out of the way office block on some waste ground near Cape Town’s famous V&A Waterfront. It’s in the weeds but close to the glamour.

Some things about Zara: yes, her first name owes a lot to the clothing brand, Zara. I happened to be in Paris at about the same time as she made her appearance in my fiction and the brand was everywhere and Zara just seemed such a strong name. Also, the Z matched with the Z88.

Her surname I can track back to a non-fiction book I wrote on the murder in Cape Town of a young woman called Anni Dewani. She was on honeymoon in the city from the UK when she was shot and killed during a car hijacking. There was lots of talk at the time that her husband, Shrien, had contracted a hit on her. He went home to England before he could be arrested but, eventually, he was extradited to stand trial. To everyone’s surprise he was found not-guilty. Her name resonated for me and eventually, in a slightly different form, I attached it to Zara.

One of the other aids I had in establishing Zara’s character was music. I don’t listen to music while I write but I do use it to “colour” a character. By that I mean it gives emotional substance to the character. In this instance, I had the “assistance” of a group called 4 Non Blondes. They had their time in the early 1990s but I have no recollection of listening to them then. Indeed, I have no idea how I came across the foursome. But whatever the lucky happenstance that led me to their songs, they were exactly what I needed, especially the three hits, “What's Up”, “Spaceman”, and “Dear Mr President”. Linda Perry, the lead singer, left the group and started a solo career in the mid-1990s and her album In Flight went to help my second book in the Zara Dewane series - Firing Line.

So Zara will be back in February 2027, always assuming I don’t get pulled over by some pissed-off Cape Town cops. But let’s not tempt fate.