Trawling round the net recently I came across this fascinating article by Barbara Fister called ‘Copycat Crimes: Crime Fiction and the Marketplace of Anxieties’. Fister’s an American academic librarian turned crime novelist with some trenchant things to say about our beloved genre. Here are the opening paras and a link to the full article.
Fear sells books, as anyone who scans fiction bestseller lists knows. Fear also sells claims about social problems. Appeals to anxiety are both persuasive and attention-getting. “The idea,” according to critic James Kincaid, “is not to erase the anxiety but to excite it, since it’s the anxiety itself that’s doing so much for us”. Stories that unsettle us are compelling, whether in the form of fiction or on the front page. As the old newsroom slogan goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” – often leading us to conclusions we’d never entertain without appeals to fear.
Crime fiction, a genre that deliberately exploits anxiety in the reader, taps into topical social concerns using familiar formulas to produce suspenseful narratives. Our fascination with crime has deep cultural roots. It seemed fitting that Anthony Hopkins, an actor famous for his role in Silence of the Lambs, would a few years later be cast in a film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a tragedy that features violent rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. The Elizabethan stage often drew on historical and classical sources for its blood-drenched narratives, but pamphlets recounting grisly crimes were also popular at the time and sometimes became the basis for “murder plays.” A homicide recounted in Sundry Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, Lately Committed (1591), for example, appears to have been a source for Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson’s 1599 tragedy, Page of Plymouth.
Early novels such as Moll Flanders and the biographical sketches of rogues in The Newgate Calendar fed an eighteenth century appetite for criminal adventure. Today, crime fiction employs procedural, forensic, and social detail to imitate reality, while the true crime genre borrows narrative techniques from fiction to give its stories a satisfyingly dramatic shape.
According to Stephen Knight, crime fiction’s popularity is drawn in part from its ability to reuse and reinvent familiar, even “compulsive” patters. Another attraction is the genre’s “rapid responses to changing sociocultural concerns” . The interplay between crime fiction and other social texts can illuminate the ways claims-makers influence the formation of social issues. This analysis will examine the construction of four contemporary anxieties—urban violence, threats to the environment, child abuse, and serial homicide—through the lens of crime fiction. Novels by Richard Price, James W. Hall, Dennis Lehane, and Jess Walter make creative use of these fears, offering their readers new ways to read the news.
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‘If you have to spend a weekend alone, with only one book for company, you’d want one that reads as slickly and as compellingly as Killer Country‘.
Leon de Kock :Sunday Independent
‘Thrillers set in Cape Town, in the hands of consummate writers like Nicol, mean you never see the city in in quite the same way again.’
Vivien Horler:Cape Argus
Crime Beat gives readers a taste of the action in Killer Country, the second in Mike Nicol’s Revenge trilogy, publlshed locally by Umuzi.
Sheemina February told Spitz to meet her at Rhodes Memorial. At the bottom of the steps. That way she could watch him approach for no reason other than she wanted the drop on him. For the hell of it. Wanted to clip down the steps towards him saying, ‘Bang, bang, Spitz boyo, you’re dead.’
She got there fifteen minutes early. Banked on being five minutes ahead of him. Knowing he’d case the area first as a matter of habit. She left her car in the upper parking lot near the restaurant, took the path to the memorial, waited in the shadow behind the columns. Gazed across the suburbs and the industrial belt towards the Durbanville hills, beyond that to the Hottentots Holland and the winelands. Thought about money. That of all human inventions money had the measure of each person’s heart. Hers was expensive.
She watched Spitz drive up in his white hire, park beneath the stone pines in the main lot. He got out looked around for her black Beemer. Only seven cars there, none of them a BM. At this hour of the morning no one hanging around either. Too early for tourists. Probably the car owners were walkers, strolling the contour paths, enjoying themselves.
Spitz walked quickly to the lower entrance that led onto the flagstones below the steps. A viewpoint with a wider aspect than the memorial. Almost a bay to bay sweep: west coast to Hangklip. He took this in, pivoted to look at the memorial, Devil’s Peak rising behind it. Sheemina February wondering what he’d make of a classical folly with columns, steps leading up flanked by walls, eight lions at rest on them. In front, on a plinth, a horse and rider, the rider shading his eyes, squinting at the hinterland. Spitz turned back to the view.
Sheemina February watched him. An elegant man, the crease on his trousers exact. Black polished shoes. The bandage on his little finger encased in a leather sheath. A slender man, and graceful.
She waited until his back was to her before she came out of the shadows and down the steps, her heels clicking on the granite. Spitz spun round almost immediately.
‘Do you know, Spitz,’ she called out, ‘there are forty-nine steps. One for each year of his life.’
‘Who is this?’ said Spitz.
‘Cecil Rhodes. Used to come up here to contemplate, according to the tourist guides. Stare out at the dark continent and think of money.’ She came level with the hitman. ‘Worked for him.’
‘But he did not make even fifty years.’
‘Neither did Obed Chocho.’
Spitz looked away. ‘I was not able to…’
‘Oh, I’m not blaming you Spitz.’ Sheemina February touched his sleeve with a gloved hand. ‘Things have worked out better than I planned. And for this I have you to thank all along the way. Last night especially. Without you the judge would not have been so … accommodating. Men are much more inclined to listen to other men I find. Particularly to one who’s pointing a gun.’
She paused. The dull growl of the city filled her silence, and closer birdsong, insistent sunbirds.
‘Up here,’ she said, ‘you can understand his point. Old Cape to Cairo Cecil. The birds make it peaceful.’
‘What do you want to tell me?’ said Spitz.
She sat down on the low parapet, faced the memorial. Patted the stone alongside her. Spitz sat.
‘Obed had a contract with you on Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso, how much was that for?’
‘There was no money.’
‘You were doing it for free? You?’
‘Because I had spoken his name to them.’
She crossed her legs. ‘Obed getting his payback. Fair enough. And now, are you going to honour it?’
‘There is no point.’
‘I suppose not. But there would be a point if I offered you money.’
‘Of course.’
‘So, I will offer you one hundred and fifty thousand, not to kill them, but to kill the wife of Mace Bishop.’
‘That is more than my fee.’
‘I know. There is a catch.’
‘What is this catch?’
‘I don’t want you to use a gun.’
‘My weapon is a pistol.’
‘I know, Spitz. But think about it. You kill her with a .22 or any other calibre and Mace Bishop will not even stop to think who did it. He will think Spitz-the-Trigger. What’s more he knows exactly where to find you. Before you got home he’d be waiting inside your apartment.’
Spitz stroked his bandaged finger to ease the throbbing. ‘Which is the weapon you want me to use?’
‘A knife.’
‘I do not use a knife. It is too dangerous.’
‘That is why I’m paying you a lot of money.’ She smiled at him. ‘Let me be generous. How about two hundred thousand? I can afford it.’
She watched Spitz think about this. Not a twitch on his face. No frown. No tightening of the lips. She liked that, the calm contemplation.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘you used a knife.’ She drew a finger across her throat. ‘Your trademark. No noise. Spitz the silent steps out of the shadows and ssssh the blade slits open the jugular. I know about that Spitz.’ She reached out, lightly squeezed his forearm with her gloved hand. ‘I might, too, Spitz, have a position for you. In my organisation. A career change. The comfort of a salary. Medical aid. Shares. A pension. The full rootee tootee of the late bourgeois world.’
Smiled at Spitz staring at her, his lips glistening.
‘Eventually he said, ‘Alright for that much I will use a knife.’
‘There is another condition,’ said Sheemina February. ‘It must be in her pottery studio.’
‘It has to be in some place.’
‘The pottery studio is underneath their house.’
‘I do not like that.’
‘Can’t be helped. I’m willing to pay a lot of money for this, Spitz. Offering you a future. There have to be some risks.’
She waited. When Spitz made no comment, held out a photograph: Mace, Oumou, Christa eating breakfast beside a swimming pool.
‘Happy family. They live on the mountainside. The studio has an access onto the lower garden. The only other access is a spiral staircase inside the house. A man with your resources shouldn’t have any problems getting in.’ She dangled some keys from her gloved hand. ‘But these may be a help.’ Spitz reached out, she dropped them into his hand. From a coat pocket took out a barber’s razor. ‘As might this.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not a knife.’
Sheemina let it lie bone-white against the black leather of her gloved palm. ‘You thought differently once, I am given to understand.’ She closed her fist, used the fingers of her good hand to open the blade. ‘This is a special razor. It is not something I picked up in a junk store. It has provenance, Spitz. A history. A memento you should leave at the scene.’ She held it towards him.
‘When I used knives I was a younger person.’
She laid it against his hand, the blade’s edge lightly on his skin. ‘Take it. This is how I want it.’
‘You are a demanding woman.’
‘Not demanding, Spitz. Insistent. But generous too. I pay for that over the odds.’
Spitz closed the blade into the handle. Lifted it from her fingers.
Sheemina stroked his arm. ‘I’m impressed. Now listen.’ She gave him more details: access, the Bishop routine, the best time to do it. ‘I must go now, Spitz.’ Stood looking down at him. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get to have a drink on the town but under the circumstances this would no longer be a good idea.’ She held out her hand. ‘I must say you have been an easy person to work with. My offer remains open for the future.’
‘Please,’ said Spitz, keeping a grip on her hand even as she gently pulled away.
‘No, Spitz,’ she said, using her gloved hand to free herself. ‘Some things are not to be.’ She headed for the steps. ‘When the job is done, you’ll get the money in cash at JB’s. Special courier. While you’re drinking a latte. After that I’ll be in touch.’ She pointed at Devil’s Peak. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to get up the mountain this time. It’s a wonderful view from the top.’
Stray doppies
Good to know that there is some krimi representation at the London Book Fair in the personages of the Blue Cocktail (aka Deon Meyer) and Longnight Angela (aka Angela Makholwa) but what about those krimi khicks Jassy Mackenzie and Sarah Lotz, not to mention the Dame herself?
Here’s a thought from that stern critic Leon de Kock: Is this kind of narrative representation [he means our krimis], implying a severely foreshortened range of inferiority and perceptual/experiential variation, what our literature has come to? Jislaaik!
It always pays to give time to the masters now and again so here is a rule of thumb from Raymond Chandler: ‘When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’
And finally Herr M (a cop) talking to the narrator about crime fiction in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Pledge: ‘…to be honest I have never thought very highly of mystery stories … Sheer waste of time. What you had to say in your lecture [on the art of writing detective stories] yesterday was worth hearing, no doubt; since the politicians fail us in so reprehensible a fashion … well, since the politicians are such failures, people hope that at least the police will know how to keep order in the world. I must admit that I myself can conceive of no rottener hope than that. The trouble is that in all these mystery stories an altogether different kind of fraud is perpetrated. I am not even referring to the fact that the criminal has his punishment meted out to him. Such pretty fairytales are morally necessary too, I suppose. They are in the same class with the other lies that help preserve the State, like that pious phrase that crime does not pay, whereas anyone has only to look at human society to find out just how much truth there is in that. But I would let all that ride, if only out of strict commercial principles – for every audience and every taxpayer has a right to his heroes and his happy endings, and we of the police and you of the writing profession are equally obliged to supply these.’
Here’s a clue to the direction Jassy Mackenzie’s next thriller’s gonna take. Shhh, she ordered, on the internet, nogal, a book on guarding. Or maybe she’s opening up an agency? Either way it’s a peek into the dark and mysterious corners of a writer’s mind. 
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First up, there’ve been some changes at Crime Beat as the super sleuths will have noticed. For starters co-founder and opening blogger 
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