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.

Thinking Murder at a Wake

Ovidia--evey other Tuesday

I didn’t plan a post for this week because most of last week was spent sitting in on a family funeral wake in that bizarre state where you're both 'on duty' and not doing anything.

I considered writing about local funeral customs (which I may do another time when I've had a chance to research) but for now, I’m going to talk some of the mystery novels I found myself thinking about.

One book that came immediately to mind was After the Funeral by Agatha Christie.

The book has extended family, old neighbours, relatives and family friends reconnecting at a funeral. You meet people you knew as a child but don’t quite remember, realising you're now older than they were when you first thought of them as “old.”

No, I didn't spot any imposters at our wake, though that might be because the astute first clue finder usually ends up dead...

But it made me realise how much the domestic helpers many depend on now have become part of the family, taking on the 'lady companion' roles that occur in Christie's world. And these everyday companions are often both closer to and more easily overlooked than relatives who rarely connect.

Also, I realised much of what we accepted as children as 'facts'about family members came from stories someone told someone who then slightly embellished and told someone else!

As we listened to memories of neighbours in Ipoh, the move down to Singapore after the racial riots, his years of teaching in NUS and SMU, all against the background of a changing Singapore and his love of mathematics and playing the mandolin I thought of Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed.

In The Borrowed, Inspector Kwan Chun-dok’s cases are followed in reverse over 6 novellas, starting with his most recent case (set in 2013) and moving back in time to his first case in the 60’s, at the beginning of his career.
Though each case is complete in itself, they are linked by recurring characters and themes and the evolving background of Hong Kong.

Inspector Kwan is in a coma at the start of the first book, and the reader is made very aware there are probably a good many more stories that didn't get told.
(another reminder to put down all we can while we still can!)

A small detail--the mandolin--made me think of the koto in Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders.

Here the characters are immersed in the rituals, hierarchies and formal gatherings that follow a death where everyone is expected to behave correctly in the correct space.

It felt like a connection though it was set in 1930s Japan where feudal attitudes were (reluctantly) adjusting to modernisation, because it was where our own departed’s life started: moving from the 1930s and coming to see the digital age after passing through World War 2 and Covid.

The different stories told also made me think of Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine.

Where it's only after the murder of Guan Hongying that her two very different lives are revealed--the publicly celebrated role model had a hidden side.

Our different sides weren't so drastically or dramatically different--but the familiar grandfather and father figure had also been a loyal son and brother who loved sports cars and survival training...

But of all of these, the one I thought about most (maybe because it's also a longtime personal favourite) was Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill.

Perveen Mistry negotiates rigid rules and expectations with intelligence and tactful restraint as she works within the system to do what she can for the three widows of Omar Farid.
Her focus (and the focus of the novel) on how death affects the living.

Maybe that's another reason I like murder mysteries so much. They provide a chance to explore our proximity to death and our relationship to others. And (in traditional mysteries at least) they provide a tidy resolution that we seldom get in real life.

May you all be happy, healthy and reading and writing lots!

Chagall in Ferrara

Annamaria on Monday

Exactly a week ago from the time this blog launches, I was on my way to meet up with some friends for a few days in the city of Ferrara, a place I have not been to for a few decades.  I have a lot to report on what turned out to be a wonderful experience, but for today I will begin by sharing the first stop on our tour, a massive exhibition of the work of Marc Chagall.

I am beginning with a poem about the artist, because it is very dear to my heart.  You see, shortly after I first met my dear departed husband David, the first time he and I were together when someone mentioned Chagall. The two of us, simultaneously, began to recite Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem. Here it is in all its delightful glory, thanks to The Poetry Foundation: 

 Don’t Let That Horse . . .

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Don’t let that horse

                              eat that violin

    cried Chagall’s mother

                                     But he   

                      kept right on

                                     painting

And became famous

And kept on painting

                              The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it

he jumped up upon the horse

                                        and rode away   

          waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it

to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings   

                                     attached

The exhibition was massive.  Impossible to cover thoroughly.  I chose to show you the following, which I selected in my own usual, wacky way. Included are Pictures that have a horse and a violin, or maybe one or the other. Images that I particularly liked. And one only because it has an angel. I hope you like them.

I am beginning with a portrait of the young artist, mostly because he was quite beautiful.

The rest are presented in the only way allowed by Blogger:random.

I always choose a picture I would take home.

This was th one for me.  

   

The Angel

The Horse and the Violin, etc.

Apologies for the crooked pix.  They were taken by a short person in crowded galleries.

Last Week was Groundhog Day, So Let Me Repeat Myself...Again.

Jeff—Saturday

Today being Groundhog Day in the US (a tradition brought to Pennsylvania in the 1700s from Europe), if Punxsatawney Phil sees his shadow we’re in for six more weeks of winter, something none of us in the throes of the Polar Vortex wishes to imagine. That led me to search through my old blog posts for what I was certain was a piece I’d done before about that cute little critter.

But I didn’t find it. Or rather I stopped looking when I came across a parody I’d written six years ago to the day based upon Robert Frost’s most famous poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  I couldn’t believe how on point what I wrote is for today’s troubles, even though it long preceded what we’re now experiencing.

Does that mean we’re always in troubling times of one form or another?  Or does it mean something else? I don’t know, I just wrote it. You’ll have to tell me what it means.

So, in the hope that Robert Frost forgives me, here we go—

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Whose words these are I think I know.

My mind is on to pillage though;

To find something for blogging clear

Some thoughts that matter, not for show. 

My blogmates all must think it queer

To see a poem this time here

With so much news of fraud and fake,

And daily tales of more to fear.

 

But now I think it’s time to wake

And trust there might be some mistake.

To hope somewhere beyond the sweep

There will be peace for all God’s sake.

 

We know what’s out there’s dark and deep.

And if we choose we all could weep,

But I prefer to pause to reap,

The promises men swore to keep.

*****

As a footnote, permit me to offer this additional little ditty.

Of all the words Frost did compose.

The ones that hit it on the nose,

For how to live amid the whirl,

Are those his tombstone did unfurl:

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Not a bad philosophy for all that’s about us these days.

—Jeff

****

Here's Jeff’s current tour schedule for A STUDY IN SECRET, (now out from Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books):

 

 2026

All Live Events

Saturday, February 7, 3:00 p.m. CT
Murder By The Book
Author Speaking and Signing
Houston, TX

 

Wednesday, February 11, 6:00 p.m. ET
Mysterious Bookshop
Author Speaking and Signing
New York, NY

 

Thursday, March 26, 7:00 p.m. MT
The Poisoned Pen Bookstore
Author Speaking and Signing
Scottsdale, AZ

 

Friday, April 10, 6:30 p.m.

Mystery Lovers Bookshop
Author Speaking and Signing
Pittsburgh, PA