South Africa Scene

 Michael - Thursday

Most followers of Murder Is Everywhere probably know that I do a monthly piece for the International Thriller Writers’ e-magazine (which rejoices in the name of The Big Thrill) called Africa Scene. Each article features an author with a new mystery/thriller novel set largely somewhere in Africa, and the idea is to display the rich variety of work that is coming out of a range of African countries. Sometimes the books are written by authors not living in Africa, but engaged with Africa in a deep way.

Having just set up the November piece, I suddenly realized two things about 2022 so far  – one good and one not so good. The good one is that it’s been a bumper year for South Africa (actually southern Africa, including Botswana). We’ve had a remarkable suite of new novels from new and established South African authors and they’ve picked up almost all the slots this year. The bad thing, of course, is the other side of that coin - where are all the mystery/thrillers set further north? We’ve had some stunners over the last few years, but suddenly there’s a dearth. I’m always on the lookout for them, but either I’m doing a bad job or this has been a rather dry year.

So let’s get back to the good news. I’ll just focus on the themes because the spread suggests that SA crime fiction is spreading out from its focus on the Apartheid past. However, I’ve included the Africa Scene link if you’d like to find out more about the author and the book.

February:  Outside the Lines by Ameera Patel

Ameera's debut novel explores how class is replacing race as the boundaries in South Africa, although there’s still racial stereotyping going on, especially from older people. The novel has as diverse a collection of characters as one could hope: a white father and daughter who live in a modest suburban house, their domestic, Flora, who also lives in the house. A Zimbabwean, Runyararo, who is in the country illegally and whose situation forces him “outside the lines”, and Farhana who comes from a strict Muslim family, but whose boyfriend (Flora's son) is a black drug dealer. This heady mixture meshes to a tense, literary thriller.

April: The Dark Flood by Deon Meyer

The backstory for this book is based loosely on a true story of a company collapse in prosperous Stellenbosch in the Cape wine country and the resulting impact on the local property market. The modern corruption and people sailing far too close to the wind, makes a great story.

May: Serpent Crescent by Vivian de Klerk

For something completely different, Vivian gives us a protagonist who is a sociopath – now an elderly woman living alone in a house in Serpent Crescent in a town based on a university city in the Eastern Cape - who tells us the story of her life. Part of the attraction of the book is the in-depth look at how such a personality develops, and learns to protect itself, but there are many twists and turns along the way.

 June: Hammerman by Mike Nicol

One evening in February 1986, a man assassinated the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, shooting him outside a cinema. No one has ever been convicted of the crime, and at the time there were rumours that South Africa was involved because of Palme’s outspoken opposition to apartheid and his pro-sanctions stance. Mike has taken that idea, and explored how the ripples from that event might spread to the present day. This one is solidly rooted in the legacy of Apartheid.

July: The Milk Tart Murders by Sally Andrew

The Milk Tart Murders is Sally’s fourth mystery featuring the delightful Tannie Maria. Set in Ladismith in the Klein Karoo, Maria works for the Klein Karoo Gazette writing a love advice and recipe column. She lives outside town with her hens and her flowers, and is a superb cook. As usual, the book is dotted with delicious recipes, a selection of which are given in detail at the end of the book. If you haven’t met Tannie Maria before, you should do so, and you should try out some of those recipes. The first book is now a prime time TV series. I just can’t work out why Tannie Maria becomes Scottish for the role...

September: A Deadly Covenant by Michael Stanley

In the new Kubu novel we return to the Bushman theme of Death of the Mantis. In this second Kubu prequel, a long-past Bushman massacre is discovered, and Kubu has to discover why that event is generating murders in the present. Kwei very kindly not only read and gave us a quote for the book, but also took the interviewer’s seat for Africa Scene, and threw some great questions our way.

The book is now out as an ebook worldwide.

October: The Heist Men by Andrew Brown

The Heist Men is a thriller around a gang that attacks and robs cash-in-transit vehicles—a modern-day scourge in South Africa. The tension comes from two directions—on the one hand we follow Captain Eberard Februarie of the SA Police Service in his efforts to track down the gang, but on the other we follow Andile Xaba, the leader of a crew of heist men who sees his activities with the gang as a career. He leads a double life with a suburban girlfriend and township mother.  Despite his role in the gang, he grabs our interest and wins our sympathy.

November: The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Next month.)

Margie has been working on other interests since leaving South Africa so it's been a while since her last novel. Her new book revolves around the lives of three women, and is set partly in Canada, partly in South Africa, partly in London, and partly in Scotland. The theme is not particularly South African although the toxic masculinity that generates the sort of abuses these women face is endemic in South Africa. Their ways of trying to cope with it form the canvass on which these women are painted.

 Returning to the bad side of the coin, please let me know if you come across any suitable African mysteries from elsewhere on the continent that I’ve missed. I’d love to feature them!

 __________________________________

This weekend you can catch up with Stan for the last three A Deadly Covenant launch events in the Twin Cities:

Friday 14, 10 am

Lake Country Booksellers event

4766 Washington Ave, White Bear Lake, MN 55110 Phone:651-426-0918

 

Saturday 15, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm 

Twin Cities Book Festival

Join Stan to chat about books, Botswana and Bushmen at this great annual event!

Minnesota State Fairgrounds, Saint Paul, Minnesota

@RainTaxiReview #TCBF

 

Sunday 16, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Barnes and Noble, 

3230 Galleria, Edina, MN 55435 Phone:952-920-2124

Murder in Africa

Michael - Thursday

As the year crawls to a close through the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I thought back over some of the mysteries I’d read in 2017.  Most of them are African, and that’s partly because every month I write a piece called Africa Scene for the International Thriller Writers e-magazine The BigThrill.  The idea is to feature books (and their authors) set in Africa.  Most of the authors do live on the continent, but there are several who live elsewhere, but choose Africa as their setting for a variety of reasons.  I’ve discovered some really good authors, and have an excuse to fire questions at them. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve met many of them and enjoyed that a lot as well.

Hopefully, readers of the magazine are intrigued enough to try some of the books, and experience a bit of sunshine noir.  African thrillers and mysteries have a lot to offer, and they are different!

So here’s a rundown of this year’s articles to give you a flavor. If any catch your fancy, click on the month for the author interview and more details about the book.

January.

Lagos island

Our own Leye Adenle talked about Easy Motion Tourist, his debut thriller set in Lagos. Prostitutes are being murdered. It seems to be for muti—witch doctors’ potions.  But there’s a lot more to it than that as Amaka, whose mission is to keep prostitutes safe, and Guy, from the UK and the easy motion tourist, discover. Nigeria provides a fascinating backdrop for an original plot with a twisty ending.

February.

Antipoaching team

February featured Paul Mendelson’s The History of Blood.  Paul has such a deep grasp of South Africa’s history and culture, to say nothing of Cape Town itself where his thrillers are largely based, that you’d have to believe he’s lived here all his life. No. He’s from England, but this is South African crime fiction at its best.

The body of a girl is discovered at a seedy motel with slit wrists. Suicide is assumed, but the autopsy reveals she has swallowed masses of cocaine wrapped in condoms. The hunt for the mule runners leads to other smuggling and the remains of an elite military group from the apartheid days. Paul’s detective has to unravel this nasty mixture, with lots of surprises along the way.

March.

Kibera, Kenya

Michael Niemann was born in Germany and now lives in Oregon, but along the way he’s spent a lot of time in Africa. His protagonist Vermeulen investigates fraud for the UN, and pretty soon it leads him into very hot water. Legitimate Business was set in the refugee camps of Darfur; Illicit Trade, the second in the series, concerns human trafficking from Africa.

April.

Uranium ingots

April brought us back to South Africa with Jassy Mackenzie’s heart stopping thriller Bad Seeds. During the apartheid era South Africa developed nuclear weapons, I guess for the same paranoid reasons that North Korea does today. After the government changed, the weapons were dismantled, but the nuclear material is still around. This story is as believable and scary as tomorrow morning’s headlines.

May.

Any time Mike Nicol comes out with a new book, it’s an event. Agents of the State is very close to home, and its honey-loving president-for-life (of South Africa) is very close to someone else we know around here. Mike explores how this sort of state operates, and how the agents of the state get away with what they do. We’re not sure who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and real life is like that. If you like sunshine noir and haven’t read Mike Nicol, you’re missing out.

June.

Sally with friend

For a complete change of pace, take Sally Andrew’s second Tanie Maria mystery, The Satanic Mechanic. Everyone loves Tanie Maria and her luscious recipes from the Karoo. But she has real issues too, and the crimes she needs to solve are anything but cozy. Alexander McCall Smith called her first book “a triumph.” 'Nuff said.

July.

One of Hayden Stone's problems

Arthur Kerns started his career in the US Navy, spent many years with the FBI, and then consulted with the intelligence agencies. He doesn’t like to say which ones, but there are no prizes for guessing the answer.  If anyone knows how this stuff works he does. His freelance agent, Hayden Stone, gets into all sorts of trouble with his unconventional methods of sorting out the bad guys. He’s all over Africa in The African Contract.

August.

Weather map by Alex Latimer

Something completely different. Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer, both South Africans who usually write in other genres, team up as Frank Owen to write South, a dystopian and scary alternative history thriller set in the US. Okay, I said all the books are set in Africa, but I lied. Yet the book has very African roots. You’ll recognize apartheid in the South, walled off and isolated from the North as deadly viruses are blown in by the wind. And the wall across the country precedes Donald Trump.

September.

Kwei Quartey lives in Los Angeles, but spends time in Ghana researching his novels and visiting friends there. Death by His Grace is the next in his police procedural series featuring Darko Dawson. We’ve been amazed at how his themes and ours often overlap although Ghana and Botswana are so far apart. Great sense of place when you join Kwei and Darko to visit Ghana.

October.

Meeting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Paul Hardisty is a Canadian who lives in Australia, but he shares with Paul Mendelson a deep knowledge and grasp of South Africa. Reconciliation for the Dead, based on the real story of “Dr. Death” from the apartheid era, exposes a gruesome plan from that time. Paul’s novels are passion driven; this one may be his best so far.

November.

Martin Steyn is a young South African Afrikaans writer and Dark Traces is his first book in English. It’s a dark serial killer novel—he admits they fascinate him—but it’s the struggles of his detective with his past and the death of his wife who was the center of his life, and his problems fitting into the new police system, that make this book memorable.

(By the way, Michael Stanley's Dying to Live was also featured in another section of The Big Thrill in November.)

December.

Dam at Amanzi

The year finished with the remarkable book Fever by Deon Meyer, South Africa’s best known crime writer. It’s a standalone set in a small town in South Africa in the near future when most of the population has been wiped out by a virus. I’m betting it’s his breakout book. This is what the London Times said about it:

‘It’s a crime thriller, but it’s far more. The first sentence is: "I want to tell you about my father's murder." The actual crime takes place more than 400 absorbing, emotional and atmospheric pages later; the solution comes even later than that. The narrator, who is aged 47, tells of his teenage years when his father founded a small settlement, safe from a virus that has killed most of the world's population. But as the community grew, so did their problems, their jealousies and the moving relationship between father and son. There are shades of Cormac McCarthy's superb The Road, but Fever grips even more.’

What can I say? If you don’t like African mysteries and thrillers, you haven’t been reading them!

Happy new year everyone, and happy reading!

Murder Out of Africa

Michael - Thursday

Paul deciding on the menu

We’re between events in the UK.  It started last Friday with the UK launch of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, hard on the heels of DEADLY HARVEST, which came out in May.  Then on Tuesday evening we had a great session with Paul Mendelson, who sets his crime fiction in Cape Town, at Waterstones, Piccadilly, discussing South Africa and Sunshine Noir.  We followed the event with a scrumptious Chinese dinner where Paul chose a spectacular spread.

Yesterday evening we had fun at Heffers in Cambridge, meeting a delightful group at their crime book club.  Richard Reynolds hosted the evening and had interesting stories of his own to tell also.

Now on to the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate for a panel on Murder Out of Africa with Deon Meyer, Paul Mendelson and Leye Adenle.

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind trip, but a lot of fun.  It’s also made me think about African mysteries and the developing interest in them.  On one occasion we were told, “Americans aren’t interested in Africa or South America.”  It seems to me that’s changing.  Think about the wildly successful No. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY series by Alexander McCall Smith.  Long before that, James McClure kicked off the interest in South African crime fiction with his Kramer and Zondi novels that won the Silver and Gold Crime Writers Association dagger awards.  (The McClure books are still well worth reading and are currently being reissued by Soho.)

In post-apartheid South Africa, Deon Meyer has emerged as a major talent and his books have gained recognition and a serious following around the world.  He's won a number of prizes and is currently short listed for the Crime Writers Association International Dagger for ICARUS, based on the shenanigans in the wine industry during sanctions days.  So plenty of interest there.  Deon is by no means alone.  Mike Nicol, Jassy McKenzie, Paul Mendelson, Malla Nunn, Roger Smith, and many others delve into modern South Africa using crime fiction as a vehicle. Then there is South African author Lauren Beukes whose breakout thriller THE SHINING GIRLS combined the thriller and speculative fiction genres.

Elsewhere on the continent, Leye Adenle has a searing  debut novel of Lagos, EASY MOTION TOURIST, Kwei Quartey’s Detective Darko Dawson tries to set Ghana to rights, Richard Crompton has a Masai detective trapped in the modern day problems of Kenya, while Annamaria Alfieri looks back into Kenya’s colonial history with her Justin Tolliver series.  There are many more, and I’m sure there are a lot that I’m simply ignorant about.  Murder is coming out of Africa, and the backstories are often intriguingly different from those of Europe and America.

I mentioned Mike Nicol before and he deserves a lot of credit for putting South African crime fiction on the map.  Not only does he have a number of powerful books to his name, but he set up a website, Crimebeat, in the early days that showcased the development of the genre in South Africa.  With the inauguration of the International Thriller Writers Association in 2005, he volunteered to write a monthly newsletter from South Africa, once again helping his fellow authors gain exposure.  After five years, he needed a break and passed it on to me.  With Joanne Hichens I tried to expand it from South Africa (look, it had to include at least Botswana, right?) and we changed the title to Africa Scene.  Each piece introduces a new author or a new book, and features a synopsis, interview with the author, and a few pictures illustrating his or her African location.  Last month, I discussed NOWHERE with Roger Smith.  In the next few months I’m interviewing  Annamaria about her second book in the Kenya series, THE IDOL OF MOMBASA, and Sally Andrews, whose debut, RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER, leaves you drooling both for Tannie Maria's Karoo food and for more books.  Next month Michele Rowe, who won the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger for her debut, will be talking about the second book in her trilogy, THE HOUR OF DARKNESS.  It has an intriguing premise. While we're doing our bit for the environment by turning off the lights for Earth Hour, that gives the perfect opportunity for criminals to act unseen. Then Paul Mendelson has agreed to discuss his new book THE HISTORY OF BLOOD.

Africa Scene is one of the articles each month in ITW’s The Big Thrill e-magazine and you can sign up for it (and ITW for that matter) for free.  I’ll also post the pieces on Facebook.  And if you follow any of the links here to the authors mentioned, you'll see the pieces about them and their recent books.

Any published authors interested in participating are invited to contact me. The only requirement is that you set a substantial part of your book in Africa.

So, thinking about Caro’s piece last Friday, I’ve been asking myself why I undertook this and have stuck with it for almost five years.  Well, I get the opportunity to discover and read a lot of authors who are new to me.  ITW has quite a big circulation for The Big Thrill so I hope that it helps some new authors get exposure and broaden their readership outside Africa, and beyond that, I hope that it may attract a few readers to try out African mysteries.  There are a lot of really good ones out there.  And, yes, of course, I hope it raises the Michael Stanley profile a bit too. But most of all it’s fun!