Reading Africa Week

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

This is Reading Africa Week, an initiative started by Catalyst Press in 2017. The idea is to promote good books of all genres from Africa. There are online interviews, panels, and discussions and lots of great book recommendations. Catalyst has focused on novels from Africa, and has published some excellent African crime novels internationally.

So what does Africa have to offer in the crime fiction/thriller genres? Basically, the answer is everything – great plots, fascinating settings, memorable characters. I’m going to try to justify that by going through some of my favorites here today. There are many, many, more, and I’d be delighted if you add your own as comments. 

I write a piece for the ITW The Big Thrill e-magazine most months titled Africa Scene in which I interview an author about her or his latest book. Almost all of the books mentioned below have been featured on Africa Scene and I’ve attached the link to the title in case you’d like to find out more about the story and its author.

So, for Reading Africa Week, why not choose something that appeals to your taste from this list and give it a go? You won’t be sorry.

Nail-biting Thrillers

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer

Deon Meyer is probably the best known South African crime fiction writer, and there’s good reason for that. My pick here is Thirteen Hours. This book kept me up until 3am because I had to know how it was all going to work out. 

A young American tourist is running for her life on Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town. She's being hunted by killers. She doesn’t know why, and neither do we, but she does know that she has to keep running and hiding if she wants to stay alive. The police know she’s missing but have no clues. It’s a hectic race to the finish.

Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle

Leye Adenle's series features Amaka – a most unusual lady in Lagos, Nigeria. She’s made it her business to help protect prostitutes from the violence that leads to multiple female deaths, mostly from their clients, and most of which are ignored by the police. But there are other things going on, and Amaka and her boyfriend from London have a rough road ahead.

PI Thrillers

Sleeper by Mike Nicol

Mike Nicol uses sharp, short sentences for his PI thrillers. It helps set the mood and drive the tension. The private investigator in Sleeper is Fish Pescado. He’s a surfer boy in Cape Town, and his partner, Vicki, is an ex-spy with a South African spy authority, the State Security Agency. They make an unlikely but very intriguing combination. This is one of his best, balancing the PI and the spy aspects in a scary page turner.

The Missing American by Kwei Quartey

Readers of MIE know our blog-mate Kwei well, but if you haven’t read his Emma Djan series you're missing out. Start with The Missing American. It’s a twisty page-turner, delving into the dark domain of the Ghanaian internet fraudsters – the “sakawa boys”. They play their victims like game fish, but they're only part of a vicious web of corruption and witchcraft that reaches all the way to the top echelons of society. Emma has her work cut out for her in this excellent first outing.

Lightseekers by Femi Kayode

Philip Taiwo is an unusual private investigator. A psychologist with a thesis on behavior in crowds, he's tasked with finding out what happened when three students were attacked and set alight by a mob near a university in Nigeria. Lightseekers could be called a psychological thriller, but it’s really impossible to pigeonhole.

Character Mysteries

Okay, some people call them cozies. These are super, series characters linked to a good mystery that will keep you guessing.

Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew

 Tannie Maria is a delightful character, fixated on cooking, who has to give up her recipe column to become the local newspaper’s agony aunt.  She finds she has a talent for that too, but it leads her into a nasty series of murders. As a bonus, the book includes some of Tannie Maria’s most mouth-watering recipes.

Sibanda and the Rainbird by CM Elliot

Head north to Zimbabwe to meet Detective Inspector Sibanda and the team at the police station in Gubu, a fictional town near the Hwange National Park. Great characters (including Miss Daisy, their unreliable Land Rover) and a wonderful setting draw us in even before the intriguing plot does so.

Police Procedurals

Apostle Lodge by Paul Mendelson

In Apostle Lodge a group of boys discover the body of a woman who seems to have been abused and then starved to death in an empty house.  Because of the circumstances, police detective Vaughn de Vries immediately suspects that it’s not a single crime but part of a series.  He finds it hard to attract the focus the crime deserves because a terrorist bomb blast has recently shaken Cape Town and the police are hunting for the perpetrators. As the cases progress, Vaughn finds himself sucked personally into both of them.

All Come to Dust by Bryony Rheam

All Come to Dust is a highly unusual police procedural. A woman is discovered dead in her home with a letter opener sticking out of her chest. Chief Inspector Edmund Dube goes to the scene. He immediately realizes that the victim was dead before she was stabbed as there's not enough blood. Nevertheless, the question of why she was stabbed remains. The crime is laid at the door of the recently dismissed gardener, but Edmund believes there's a lot more to it than that. However, the senior officers at the police station seem intent on thwarting his efforts to get to the bottom of the case.

Superficially, the novel seems to follow the usual tropes of the detective story genre, but as the author delves into Edmund's past, the book is rich with characterizations and subtle surprises. Nothing is as it seems.

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!