Time of the Writer Diary: Monday 9 March
It was hot in the kombi. That dripping Durban heat that sticks to your clothes. We’d just had lunch in some place on the beach and the mayor had welcomed us with a short speech. Now we were heading back to the hotel for three hours of nothing before the opening session of the 12th Time of the Writer festival in the evening. Angela Makholwa was jammed against the window on the one side, Kole Omotoso was jammed against the window on the other side and Max du Preez was in front.
Angela was saying that maybe we krimi writers should start a consultancy for criminals because so many of them did such stupid things – the criminals that is. Like we could sell off-the-shelve perfect heists, for instance. Which seemed a good idea and would probably be more profitable than writing crime fiction.
Then Kole picked up a story out of the UK where the crims had photographed themselves stealing clothes from a department store before taking the file to be processed into photographs at a kiosk in the same store. The kiosk guys had taken one look at the pix and called the cops. It seemed our agency could have branches throughout the world.
We laughed at that and Max said he was going to give up writing his highly entertaining history series about the weird characters that get left out of the official versions of history because he thought we made more money writing crime.
Angela quickly put him right on that one.
The heat intensified and the air conditioner in the kombi couldn’t cope. It was a dripping Durban afternoon after lunch and the Time of the Writer festival hadn’t started yet.
It would start that evening and the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre would be filled with people come to listen to the opening speeches and afterwards in the press and burble someone would come up to me and say, ‘Give me one good reason why I should read South African crime fiction?’
I said I could give him a whole lot of reasons and dished him out a Crime Beat card and suggested that if, after he’d heard the crime sessions at the festival, he still wanted an answer I’d have one ready.
