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!

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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

Guest blogger - Margie Orford

I am delighted to have one of the best-known of South Africa’s writers as our guest this week. Margie Orford is remarkable, not only for her writing, but also for her community involvement.  The following is taken from her website.

Biography

Crime novelist, who is already an award winning journalist and film director, and author of children's fiction, non-fiction and school textbooks. Born in London, she grew up in Namibia and South Africa. While at the University of Cape Town she wrote for Varsity and was detained during the State of Emergency in 1985. She wrote her final exams in prison. After traveling widely, she studied under J M Coetzee, and worked in publishing in the newly-independent Namibia, where she became involved in training through the African Publishers Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and while in New York worked on a groundbreaking archival retrieval project, WOMEN WRITING AFRICA: The Southern Volume.  Her latest non-fiction project was Fabulously 40 and Beyond: Women Coming Into their Own (Spearhead/NAB, 2006).  She lives in Cape Town.

At present she is also deeply involved in an exciting collaborative project called The Quarry with artist Kathryn Smith.  For more information go to http://www.margieorford.com/sophiebrown.html.

As a writer, she is best known for her investigative journalist turned profiler Clare Hart series set in Cape Town – Daddy’s Girl, Like Clockwork, and Blood Rose.  I recommend her books highly. 

 Please welcome Margie Orford.

Stan - Thursday

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Police Fictions 

(This first appeared on the International Crime Authors website (http://www.internationalcrimeauthors.com) on March 7, 2011.)

You have trouble on your hands when one of the lead characters in the book you are writing tries to resign. This week, in the middle of a deadline from hell, my lovely fictional detective, Captain Riedwaan Faizal, told me he had had enough of the South African Police.

I need him!

He has seen me through four books and has helped my heroine, Clare Hart, out of some pretty tight fictional corners. He has shot his way out of gang-riddled corners. He has punched a rapist hard enough to make him feel a little bit of the pain he inflicted on his victims. He has bust enough gangsters selling drugs to children to make a wing or two of South Africa’s over-crowded prisons overflow. He has turned in a corrupt police officer or two.

But the most recent antics of the South African Police’s top brass got to him, like they got to many of us and by Thursday last week, I had an insurrection on my hands. He would not drive his car, he would not shoot, he would not arrest anybody. He use an untranslatable Afrikaans phrase, gatvol. All he wanted to do was throw in the towel, hand in his resignation and go and start a security company like so many other ex-cops have done over the last few years.

Writing about the police, like working for the police, in South Africa is not straightforward. I had managed to persuade him (and me) to stick it out when our last police chief, Jackie Selebi was given a fifteen-year sentence for corruption. In that long-running case a great deal of court time was devoted to proving that the plump and sharp-suited head of a large criminal empire with tentacles throughout South Africa, had given Selebi with cash and gifts in exchange for lost dockets and information.

One gift in particular caught my attention, a very expensive pair of shoes. Sharp and shiny, a pimp’s shoes, a gangster’s shoes, a bought and paid for policeman’s shoes. It was a revealing and diminishing bribe. Shoes are so intimate, so personal. Buying a man shoes is the equivalent of buying a woman saucy underwear. It is not a purchase that bears scrutiny if the relationship is a clandestine one. But I persuaded my Captain Faizal to stay on in the police force by persuading that his boss had been a weak and venal man and that now he was gone. The rot had been stopped.

A new police chief was duly appointed. Bheki Cele is a tough looking man with a taste for flashy suits and white hats, and a demeanour that suggests that he shoots from the hip. The developments around him have been far more sinister. Cele tweaked government tender and procurement procedures and signed a 500 million rand rental agreement for new police headquarters with an old friend.

A stitch up job quickly unravelled by the Public Protector who ruled that the deal the police chief personally approved was improper and should be cancelled at once and investigated.

Her judgement, in a political environment increasingly ruled by fear and toadying, was delivered in the most refreshingly unequivocal terms. Thuli Madonsela is surely the most heroic woman in South Africa.

Within days senior officers visited her offices from Crime Intelligence. Nothing official, they said, just an unannounced visit. They wanted a document pertaining to her report. They wanted to find, it would appear, who had leaked the story to the press. These are the actions of a police chief who considers himself a law unto himself, of a police force that considers itself a law unto itself.

This is far more sinister than a foolish and venal man willing to exchange his integrity and the country he is meant to protect for a pair of shoes and what looks like small change.

Before the democratic elections of 1994 the police force, headed in those days by thick-necked bullyboys, were used to enforce Apartheid, a criminal social fiction if ever there was one. It was also one in which unannounced visits by the police were a common and frightening occurrence. It was not a period of our history admired for the rule of law.

It would seem that the police force is being bent to enforce the wishes of the kleptocracy that is settling into the very marrow of our hard won democracy.

Riedwaan Faizal is, like many of the heroes of crime fiction, an Everyman with an edge. He has an instinctive feel for justice and even though he has not always done what is legal (according to the letter of fuzzily written laws) he has always done what’s right. Captain Faizal is, like all of us, a man who understands compromise. He has worked since 1994 for the South African Police, a complex and imperfect institution that mirrors our rainbow nation in all its tarnished imperfection.

I am not sure how I will persuade my Captain Faizal to hang in there. I am not sure how we, as a society, will persuade the ordinary cops on whom I have based him, to hang in there too. It seems vital that we find a way to do so.

Margie Orford