The true crime behind the fiction
Recently Roger Smith had a chat with Joanne Hichens and she published their talk and her thoughts on Smith’s Mixed Blood in the Cape Times. Here’s what he had to say and her response to the book, used with permission and thanks.
‘I was tired of Johannesburg and its hard edges and grit,’ said screen-play writer and author Roger Smith, as we chatted in a recent interview, about how Mixed Blood had come about, ‘so I moved down to Cape Town which people say looks like the south of France, or California, just more seductive and beautiful. But a few years ago I fell in love with a woman who grew up on the Cape Flats and the world she introduced me to changed my view of Cape Town forever.’
Smith explained that he finds particularly Capetonians can be defensive about the city. ‘Privileged Cape Town quite often has a blinkered view of the city and often doesn’t look beyond its own suntanned navel,’ he said, ‘and the geography of the layout insulates the wealthy who aren’t forced to see what’s happening on the windswept Flats. The privileged are shielded in many ways from the hellish sort of life that happens there. I wanted to portray this as clearly as I could.’
‘Then a while ago,’ he added, ‘I saw a TV news report about a good-looking American couple who lived in a smart part of Cape Town, just minutes away from my apartment. They ran a restaurant and everybody said how friendly and nice they were. But they’d robbed a couple of banks in the US and were hiding out in Cape Town. After they were captured they were sent back home to do serious prison time.’
And so, with all these ideas playing havoc in his head, when Smith hit a slow patch as a screenplay writer, he lunged right in and wrote what he’d always wanted to – a crime novel. In Mixed Blood the true stories Smith has been exposed to and the people in them – all products of South African violence – have come together as the sharp and fast crime-thriller that had me on edge till I turned the last page.
It’s the story of Jack Burn, an American national, who erroneously chooses ‘picture-postcard’ Cape Town as his safe haven when he flees America after his involvement in a botched bank job. As Burn attempts to run from his past, he’s drawn into a world of corruption and killing when his home is randomly ‘invaded’ by a couple of tik-crazed Cape Flats gangsters. The pace is fast, the body count high, as Burn tries to safeguard his wife and small son against the violence unleashed.
As the novel progresses, murders are a dime a dozen, carried out by the damaged, the disenfranchised, and the psychopaths of society – such as corrupt cop Rudi Barnard, aka Gatsby after his love of the Cape Town ‘sandwich’. He’s basically a licensed psychopath modeled on the corrupt killing-machines of the apartheid era.
‘I wanted the book to reflect pervading corruption,’ Smith said, and indeed every character is flawed, including gangsters Faried Adams and Rikki Fortune, their addict girl-friends Bonita and Carmen, ex-Pollsmoor prisoner Benny Mongrel, Jack Burn and even his pregnant, WASP-wife Susan, are all tainted. From whichever walk of life they come, the characters who kill have in common an ability to shoot between the eyes or slash at the throat with an emotional coldness which undeniably echoes the callousness with which so many victims are murdered in real life.
Smith made it clear he’s not interested in squeaky-clean middle-class characters. ‘I make a conscious choice to take inspiration from people existing not only on the fringes of society, but at the extremes of society.’
And with Smith’s screenplay background it’s no wonder he chose the multi point-of-view structure to express the story from the perspective of a number of his characters. ‘The reader knows it all,’ Smith explained, ‘the reader is ahead of the bad guy, and the intrigue is really about how the complications will unravel and afford satisfaction.’ He cites the great Elmore Leonard as an influence and of course doffs his cap to James McClure, creator of the cop-duo Kramer and Zondi, whose novels Roger Smith read as a teenager.
‘But,’ Smith says, ‘as I’ve always read American authors, I wanted to see how my book would stand up in an American market, against American writers. The response so far is that people are fascinated by our world.’
And the world of Roger Smith is created with no superfluous fluff in the crisp, dialogue-rich style. To-the-point description masterfully provides the essence of a sense of place, and at every turn Smith shows us the hopelessness, the desolation that hangs like cement over the Cape Flats of Mixed Blood.
‘Yes,’ Smith agreed, when questioned about the cynicism pervading the novel, ‘there is a certain amount of anger. Anger at the city’s artifice, the gloss of the city, and at broader frustrations of how we accept crime and corruption as a way of life. There’s a also a personal anger,’ Smith admits, ‘to having lived under the weight of a Calvinist society for so long during the Apartheid years.’
Heavily influenced by hard-hitting American noir, the toughness, the amorality, the edginess that comes through, Mixed Blood is by far the most unsettling crime novel I’ve read in the last couple of years, certainly to come out of South Africa. The unrelenting action, the edginess, will mesmerize readers of dark, stylized crime-fiction currently enjoying a resurgence in the US. As for standing up, Roger Smith’s book not only stands up, it surpasses in content and style, a lot of the international bestseller reads imported here.
On a last note, Mixed Blood will make one helluva block-buster movie and an option has been bought, as well as the commitment secured of Samuel L. Jackson to play detective Disaster Zondi. I can already see the scenes in my head – fast and violent and unrelenting and I know it’ll be a flick I’ll come out of a bit shell-shocked, just as I did the book – crime-thriller fans, this is one hectic ride you don’t want to miss.
Joanne Hichens is the editor of the crime fiction anthology, Bad Company.
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