My first solo

 Stanley - Thursday

If my flying logbook were with me in Minneapolis, and not in my flat in South Africa, I would know the exact date that I first flew solo. That I don’t remember it is not surprising because it is irrelevant. It was probably in December 1968 or January 1969.

On the other hand, there are many things about that flight that are forever etched in my memory. 

The airport was Rand Airport in Johannesburg. The plane was a brown and white Cessna 150 with call sign ZS-EDH. The flight was scheduled in the morning in order to avoid the normal summer-afternoon turbulence. 

ZS-EDH with its original paint job

 

After completing all the necessary preflight checks, my instructor and I took off and I completed several take-offs and landings. When he was satisfied that I wasn't going to kill myself, we taxied to the apron, he climbed out, and I was on my own. I don't remember exactly how many hours I had under my belt at the time, but my hazy recollection is that it was around ten. Only ten!!

 

Even though I had previously done everything required to complete a take-off, a circuit, and a landing, including all the necessary radio communications with the tower, my adrenaline was flowing because I couldn't just throw up my hands and yell 'you've got it!'. For the first time there wouldn't be anyone to rescue me.

'Rand Ground. Cessna ZS-EDH request taxi, remaining in the pattern.' I suspect my voice was at least one octave higher than normal.

It was a good thing that we'd already completed a few circuits that day, because I didn't have to decipher the ground controller's instructions to get to the end of the active runway.

When I reached the end of the taxiway and had checked the various instrument readings, the magnetos, and so on, I switched to tower frequency and requested clearance for a take-off and landing.

In my head, I was running through rotation speed, climb speed, circuit altitude, radio procedures on each leg of the pattern, and, scarily, what to do if the engine quit.

'ZS-EDH cleared for take-off.' There was a pause, then 'Good luck.' It was my instructor who had gone to the tower so he could calm me down if I panicked or remind me of procedures if I suffered a brainfart.

I taxied onto the runway, advanced the throttle, applying some rudder pressure to counter the torque, and headed down the runway, trying to keep right on the centreline, Ahead of me were several of the ubiquitous mine dumps containing the tailings of the crushed ore from the gold mines. 

I lifted the nose and adjusted the pitch angle to settle on climb speed. At one thousand feet above the ground, I made a left ninety-degree turn onto crosswind leg. When an appropriate distance away from the runway, another left ninety-degree turn onto downwind leg. I remember extending the downwind leg further than recommended so that I wouldn't be rushed. Another left ninety-degree turn onto base leg, the another one onto final.

Reduce power, I thought. Now for the tricky part - maintain landing speed while keeping the runway in front, which is sometime easier said than done when there is a crosswind. Then establish a glide path that ends on the runway and not a hundred metres short. It is truly a three-dimensional problem with the added issue of not getting too slow or too fast. If too slow, the plane may fall out of the sky; if too fast, a hoped-for smooth landing may result in multiple bounces on the runway.

Speed, heading, glide-path.

Speed, heading, glide-path.

'Looking good, Stan. Cleared to land.' It was my instructor in the tower.

Just above the runway, I pulled the power off and let the plane settle. No bounces! I had made it. Every sense in my body was in acute mode. I was elated. MY FIRST SOLO!

This week I experienced my second solo, with many of the same emotions, exhilaration, and nervousness.

Why?

Because White Sun Books published my first solo book, titled Wolfman. It is essentially a prequel to the rhino-poaching thriller Michael and I wrote - Shoot the Bastards in North America, Dead of Night elsewhere. 

Crystal Nguyễn, an investigative reporter in Duluth, Minnesota, creates her own news by sabotaging the snowmobiles and other possessions of people poaching gray wolves, then reporting on the incidents. After several of these, she speculates on the news that someone whom she nicknames Wolfman may be responsible. Needless to say, someone latches onto the idea, and starts attacking the poachers themselves. Crystal now has to reverse course and try to persuade whoever the live Wolfman is to back down. Of course, he doesn't.

Most of the other writers on this blog know all too well what it's like to publish a book written only by themselves. It is new for me. I'm excited to see it out there and am experiencing all the uncertainties of that first solo. Will I make a smooth landing, or will I land short or go bouncing down the runway? Only time will tell.

Since Mette can't be with me due to COVID restrictions, I'll just have to finish that bottle of bubbly by myself.

Clink!

Bad news from Botswana

Michael - Thursday

Okavango delta in flood

Botswana is one of our favorite countries, so it’s sad to see all the issues they're grappling with at the moment. The tourist industry is devastated by the measures put in place to try to control the Covid 19 outbreak. Almost all tourism income (and associated jobs) comes from foreign tourists who can afford the upmarket prices. Quick, firm, action seemed to have nipped the virus in the bud, and the country was slowly opening up, when a sudden outbreak of cases last month forced the capital, Gaborone, back into strict lockdown. Botswana's confirmed cases are only in the hundreds with just a handful of deaths and they want to keep it that way, so they're jumping on any outbreak hard. Meanwhile, the economy is battling on almost all fronts.

Sad looking but safe

Unfortunately, rhino poachers don’t worry about laws or Covid. They’ve been driven towards Botswana by the dramatic changes that have taken place in South Africa over the last twelve months. 

Here, the national parks and private game reserves fought with everything they had to stop the poaching and illegal rhino horn trade. Although they managed to at least contain the poaching, it became clear that the anti-poaching teams were winning some battles but would eventually lose the war. It’s a complex issue that we explored through the eyes of investigative journalist Crystal Nguyen in Shoot the Bastards (Dead of Night outside north America) and she came to the conclusion that no wild rhino would be safe as long as it had a horn. That’s become pretty widely accepted now, and the game reserves have embarked on a massive program to dehorn rhinos. It’s expensive and has to be repeated every few years, but it’s working. So the poachers go further afield.

Illustration for Shoot to Kill,
our Kubu story on poaching in Botswana
Included in Detective Kubu Investigates 2
Artwork by Dylan Coleman

Okavango black rhino
Photo courtesy of Save the Rhino

The new target is Botswana’s wilderness gem – the Okavango Delta. The irony is that rare black rhinos were reintroduced there from more vulnerable parts of southern Africa to try to protect them. The area is remote, patrolled by game guides for the tourist camps as well as the national park wardens, and Botswana’s shoot-to-kill policy scared off even the most hardened poachers. At least as long as easier targets were available elsewhere. But now things have changed. South Africa has slender pickings with all the dehorning, and Covid has driven the tourists out of the Okavango and much of the patrolling with them. Also, the area – after a drought year – has been flooded making it impossible to traverse. There have been fifty poaching deaths already. The wildlife authorities are scrambling to find the black rhinos before the poachers do and move them to safety. Who knows where that is?

Then there are the elephants. There has been a sudden die off of elephants in northern Botswana - their major strong hold left in Africa. Four hundred have been found, many collapsed forward as if they were struck down by a sudden mortal blow. But it isn't that. They are not poached - poachers have been known to poison waterholes to subsequently chop off the tusks at leisure, but these have their tusks intact, and there is no sign of dead scavengers which usually indicate such an attack. Anthrax is the fear, but the authorities think not. Then again it may be something else, maybe something new and deadly. I hope they are handling the samples with extreme care.

As though all this wasn't enough, Botswana is engaged in a spat with South Africa that has crashed relations to the lowest level since South African freedom in 1994. The close relationship between President Mokgweetsi Masisi and his predecessor President Ian Khama unraveled almost immediately Masisi took over and started doing things his way. Eventually Khama left the ruling party and led the opposition in a failed attempt to unseat Masisi at the last election.

Bridgett Motsepe protests

Now Masisi has claimed that a coup was planned with billions of dollars of laundered money hidden in two South African banks. His target is Bridgette Motsepe who is supposedly a cosignatory on the accounts. The banks say the accounts don’t exist, and she denies everything. She also happens to be the South African president’s sister-in-law. A meeting between the two presidents has just been cancelled, and the South African government is outraged that the Botswana government has chosen Gerrie Nel (“The Pitbull”) to pursue the lady in question. 

The Pitbull

The Pitbull has a big reputation from his successful prosecution and successful appeal against the initial lenient sentence of Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp. Since then he's left the public service and now heads up the private prosecutions unit of Afriforum, a right wing group that represents the (mainly white) farmers who claim they're being systematically targeted by black terrorists who aim to drive them from their land – a conspiracy that the SA authorities says doesn't exist. Ominously, the South African minister of State Security has been dispatched to protest to President Masisi. Botswana claims that it did submit a request for official assistance from the SA authorities, but “this request has subsequently conveniently vanished.” 

There may be a book in this…

Meanwhile, Stan and I are keen to get to Botswana for research on the book we’re currently writing. At this rate, by the time the Covid tide recedes, South Africans won’t be welcome there anymore!

Shoot the Bastards now out in North America!

Michael - Thursday 

We're very excited that Shoot the Bastards was released by Poison Pen Press this week. Almost a year after it came out as Dead of Night in the UK, it's now available in North America. We were also delighted to get this great quote on the book from C.J. Box!

'Shoot the Bastards is an extraordinary tale of the extreme measures taken to combat international poaching and smuggling' - C J Box

As with all our books, the official launch will be at Once Upon a Crime in Minneapolis. Stanley will be in conversation with Kent Krueger, author of the wonderful Cork O'Connor mysteries set in the north woods. It should be a super evening.

If you are in the Twin Cities, please join Stanley and Kent:

JUNE 18: 18:30 for 19:00

Once Upon a Crime bookstore

604 W. 26th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55405

We had two main reasons for writing a stand-alone thriller. The major one was the slaughter of rhinos in southern Africa that was taking place as a result of the spiralling poaching pressure, which in turn was motivated by the rocketing price of horn in the streets of Vietnam and China. More and more money was being poured into protecting the rhinos with sophisticated sensing technologies, armed anti-poaching teams, and covert information gathering on the poachers. And despite all the hard work and commitment of the men and women involved, what had developed into a shooting war was being lost. The issues were often trivialised in South Africa with angry calls to "Just shoot the bastards!" Internationally, the issues were even less well understood.

Our second motivation was to stretch ourselves, to get out of our comfort zone with our beloved Detective Kubu, and to invent a new protagonist - someone quite different who could build a gripping story against the backdrop of rhino poaching and horn smuggling.

We immediately decided that we wanted an outsider for the role, someone knowledgeable on environmental issues, but not an expert on the rhino question. We wanted her - we decided on a strong female character for the role - to discover the situation for herself and be naïve about the whole scenario. She would be digging around for information about people who wanted to stay out of sight, so she needed a motivation to do that, and we made her an environmental reporter. We started writing and initially things went along really well. But then we started to hit problems. We knew what we wanted her to do, but we weren't really sure what her motivation was for doing them. Characters fight back when you force them. Their believability fades, and they become two-dimensional. We realised we had a problem. We had to rethink her.

Stanley had the great idea of making her a Minnesotan of Vietnamese descent, someone already somewhat between two worlds, and someone who could speak Vietnamese and had some insight into the culture. So Crystal Nguyen was born, and we made her a reporter for a newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota. Of course, we'd now traded one big issue for another. After all, what could be easier than two South African men writing about a female American who has a Vietnamese background? It took a lot of work, and Stanley wrote what was meant to be a few chapters about Crys's earlier life and ended up as a short novel. Later, we realised that she was motivated by more than her reporter's love of a big break-through story, that in fact she had a very strong personal interest in what had happened to a colleague in South Africa. At that point, she became much more real to us, and the book started to flow well.

However, we had wanted to be out of our comfort zone, and we certainly were! For the first time, we had real push-back from our editors, and they did a great job of helping us improve the book. We liked our first draft, but the final version is streets better. We're very grateful to them. Never underestimate a good editor!

In fact, the US version of the book has some changes from the UK version, and we now feel Shoot the Bastards is the book we wanted to write. Crys grew and developed through the story. What started as a thriller set around the rhino poaching has become Crys's story. We're not sure yet if there will be more Crystal Nguyen novels, but we now know how she would handle new and different challenges.

After six successful Kubu books, we'd become a bit casual about reviews. But this book was so different and had put us under so much pressure that we were biting our finger nails when Dead of Night was released in the UK. We're always delighted by strong reader approval, but the reaction to Dead of Night was very special. We could let our finger nails grow again!

“… an enthralling immersive read that won’t disappoint.”- Lizzie Hays, Promoting Crime Fiction

“This story is brutal, brilliant and utterly breath-taking, my favourite of this writing duo so far … Totally stunning in every sense of the word.” - Books from Dusk Till Dawn blog

“I don’t think I caught my breath properly the whole time I was reading it. It is the best thriller that I have read in a long while.” - A Little Book Problem blog

“Dead of Night may belong with the darkest of Noir writing, but it is also utterly thrilling, multi-layered, skilfully executed, educational, thought-provoking, and ultimately a really satisfying read.” - TripFiction blog

We hope you'll join Crys on her adventure. If you do, you can

WIN A RHINO! Well, not a real one. We're trying to keep those alive and well in Africa. But you can win a beautiful, carved rhino from South Africa. Be one of four people to win a prize. First prize is the rhino, second prize is a secret, and third prizes and fourth prizes are a signed, first-edition hardcover of our first Detective Kubu mystery, A Carrion Death. Email or mail us a copy of your receipt for buying Shoot the Bastards (or hand it to Stanley at the launch) together with your mailing and email addresses. You will go into a draw for a rhino, the secret, and one of these rare books. Entries must be received by midnight, July 31, 2019. Mailing address: Michael Stanley Books, 111 Marquette Ave, Apt 1702, Minneapolis, MN 55401.

Finally, what of Kubu? Well, he's alive and well and still cheating on his diet. We've just had final acceptance of the new book - a prequel to the series titled Facets of Death - from Poison Pen Press and it will be out in the winter.

Something had to change

Something had to change. About a year ago, the last Northern White Rhino died. By then it was clear that all the South African rhinos were going to follow him in the medium term.

On the way out?

In our stand-alone thriller Shoot the Bastards – out in the US in a couple of months – American reporter Crystal Nguyen tries to get to grips with the rhino poaching and horn smuggling scourge in South Africa. The reason we made her an American was so that she could look at the issues with new eyes albeit initially very naïve ones. As a committed conservationist, she deplores any interference with the rhinos in the wild and focuses on how to stop the poaching – “Shoot the bastards,” she’s told – and how to break the horn-smuggling mafia. She's happy to dismiss alternate strategies such as selling horn commercially to break the illegal market – “Legalizing a banned substance never reduces demand for it,” she’s told. I guess my views would have been about the same as hers ten years ago. We were all pretty naïve in those days.

The last Northern White. Dehorned for security.

One strategy is farming rhinos and harvesting the horn for sale. About seven years ago I was part of a group that looked at mathematical models to try to predict the effect of doing so. Rhino horn is basically keratin, like hair or finger nail. (All the scientific evidence indicates that its medicinal properties are about the same as biting your finger nails.) The horns can be removed without pain. The rhinos have to be darted with a knockout drug, and the horn carefully sawed off. There's now a wealth of experience with the use of these drugs, and although there are occasional injuries (from falling badly, for example), in the vast majority of instances the animal shows no ill effects. But the horns grow back so the process has to be repeated about every eighteen months to prevent the rhino carrying any significant amount of a material now worth more than gold.

Part of a confiscated cache of 150 horns.

Conservationists in general abhor interference with a species in the wild and rightly so. South African Nature Conservation has been agonizing over the issues for at least five years. Who will fit the hefty bill? What will be the long term effects of dehorning wild rhinos? Might we not be altering their social behaviour and so, in a sense, destroying the very structure of wild rhino dynamics that we want to preserve? As Crys put it, “Everything cried out that there must be a way – a way to leave the rhinos in peace, undisturbed, completely wild.”

But there isn’t. Followers of Murder is Everywhere know that Stan and I each have shares in private game reserves bordering the Kruger National Park. Stan’s place is quite far east from the main north-south road and so far has been spared the rhino poaching horror. Mine is closer to the getaway routes, and we’ve been losing rhinos for several years. Since 2012 the population has declined by 70%! We have a heavily armed anti-poaching patrol camped on the property, complete with tracker dogs. The poachers encroach as often as once a week. Most times they're driven off by the team and the dogs with helicopter support, but occasionally they get a rhino. Yes, we have tried high-tech tools – infrared cameras, drones. Some men in the anti-poaching team are incredibly dedicated, others not so much. Rumours persist that it’s sometimes the members of the anti-poaching team themselves who tip off the poachers about where to look. Crys encounters that too…

The war on poaching is a real war with people as well as rhinos being shot. And while most of the time we win, there aren’t enough rhinos left to support the times we don’t. And the emotional impact of finding a dead rhino with the horns hacked off is enormous. It weighs down the people trying to protect them. It demoralises them. It drives them into other lines of work.

Not pretty. But alive.

So in the end Nature Conservation has come down on the side of horn removal. What's planned is a massive project covering all rhinos in the national park as well as the surrounding private game reserves. I received a newsflash last week that all the rhinos in our area are now dehorned. My reaction was a huge sense of relief.

We’ve been asked to call in any information and particularly to report any rhinos still sporting horns.

We will still need the team for security. We will still need to carefully watch each rhino to ensure that it never carries enough horn to tempt the poachers, and the rhinos will have to be dehorned on a regular basis. There will be a huge cost. We’ll need to study them for longer term ill effects and societal changes.

But now there will be a longer term for the African rhinos.

_______________________________

Upcoming Events

A lot of familiar names in the panels below. Very lekker!

Crimefest, Bristol, England

FRIDAY, 10 MAY
17:10 – 18:00
Sunshine Noir
* Paul Hardisty
* Barbara Nadel
* Jeffrey Siger
* Robert Wilson
Participating Moderator: Stan Trollip

SATURDAY, 11 MAY
11:20 – 12:10
10 Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Anthology
* Peter Guttridge
* Caro Ramsay
* Zoë Sharp
* Michael Stanley (aka Stanley Trollip)
Participating Moderator: Kate Ellis


Once Upon a Crime, Minneapolis

Launch of SHOOT THE BASTARDS (This is the US title for DEAD OF NIGHT)

TUESDAY, 18 JUNE
18:30 - 22:00 
Stanley will be in conversation with Kent Krueger. 
Refreshments