A couple of weeks ago Margie Orford ran a straw poll asking why people read crime fiction. She got a lively exchange going but the one observation that struck home for me was from Louis Greenberg. He had some fascinating comments to make about the nature of our crime fiction seeing it as ‘idealistic and feel-good’, the relationships of the protagonists depicting ‘idealized friendships’ – what he called ‘a picture of a rainbow future’. There is much truth in this and so it’s worth repeating his views on Crime Beat.
Here’s Louis’ take: When I was still working for A Major Book Retailer, Mike Nicol approached me with similar questions about local crime sales and merchandising trends. I’m afraid I was a bit dismissive saying, “I don’t read crime, I’d rather spend two hours on the movie adaptation.”
That was then, when I still had literary pretentions and was a little green. Now I am browner and have read a lot more local fiction, including fab crime books by Sarah Lotz, Jassy Mackenzie and Mike himself and I am coming round.
Most of my life, reading was about escaping – escaping from the local details of South African life, and especially from the details of crime and violence – to an anywhere-but-here. Perhaps because of the medication or the fact that I no longer have to drive 30 highway kilometres to work every day and get myself in real life-threatening and protohomicidal situations, I am starting to enjoy the kick of reading pacy, entertaining books set in recognisable places.
In my experience, I can stomach crime novels only when I’m not currently feeling traumatised by my life. I also find that the SA crime I’ve read thus far is actually rather idealistic and feel-good, no matter how violent or troubling. The relationships they depict are sort of affirmative-action, idealised friendships – a picture of a rainbow future in which blacks and whites actually drink and braai together, speak a compromising in-between language, and in which goodies are good no matter how scarred, and baddies are bad, and we know the difference.
He’s got a point. Think James McClure’s Tromp and Zondi – the founding duo of our crime fiction who were clearly fond of one another despite Tromp’s usually racially determined views. And then consider the loose but mutually beneficial arrangement between Deon Meyer’s Bennie Griessel and Thobela Mpayipheli, or the respect shared by Richard Kunzmann’s two detectives Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala or the love affair between Margie Orford’s Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizal or the frisson between Jassy Mackenzie’s PI Jade de Jong and cop David Patel and you begin to get the picture.
Of course, the duo is a well-tried convention in crime fiction which, in more fanciful moments, I like to think owes much to Shakespeare’s Rozencrantz and Guildenstern and more latterly Beckett’s Vladimer and Estragon. A convention honoured from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Stieg Larsson’s odd couple Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. So the local adaptation is probably grounded as much in the dictates of the genre as our longing for a better society.
But perhaps Louis’s right, perhaps some of us fall head first into the fascinating possibilities of the black and white duo because we’re writing fantasy, trying to imagine a society where we’d all like to live, even if it’s currently grounded in the hard realities of systemic violence and institutional corruption. Like those writers I’ve mentioned, I too was seduced by the McClure template although I have to say I went into it without any premeditation. It just seemed a way of venturing into otherwise inaccessible corners of our society, past and present. Interestingly, neither Diale Tlholwe nor Angela Makholwa provided their protagonists – Tichere Maje and Lucy Khambule respectively – with white or coloured or Indian sidekicks which might add another dimension to Louis’s observation.
It’s a fascinating topic and worth pursuing. Certainly I’d like to read other crime writers’ opinions and maybe we’ll take it up as a Crime Beat discussion in the new year. Finally, what a delightful paradox that people won’t read SA crime fiction because they consider it too violent whereas actually what’s being presented is the clean-up on the way to utopia!
In our dreams.
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by Barbara Erasmus
by Mike Nicol
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November 11th, 2009 @08:22 #
For me having a pair - a man and a woman - was about the trickiness of having started off with a female lead - Clare Hart. The reality of South Africa is that there are many things that a woman cannot do and places she cannot go to in fiction - because the reader would know that it would be too dangerous or that she would be too conspicuous. So I gave her a man - Riedwaan - to do those things. Also there was the problem of a non-police investigator - how to get into the labs? the morgue? places like that - the only way you can do that is if you work with the police or for a university. Also there is a fundamental rift (in my view) between men and women in South Africa - to me the violence perpetrated against women and children reads like a sublimated civil war - the public conflict of apartheid and struggle subsumed into the domestic and private space of the family and of the body. So having a man and a woman work together to investigate the nature of this criminality is a way of countering that brutality. So partly genre but partly also the need for versimilitude in the construction of a fictional reality and of fear. I dont remember reading McClure, but the crime novel often remains very intimate in how human relations are portrayed - so you have the (often failed) intimacy between main characters as a foil to the horror of murder. My fantasy ran much more along the lines of how a man and a woman could work together in such a violently misogynistic society, rather than some simple fantasy about racial harmony. What is particularly interesting about the (real) police is how these are the men (and a few women) who have to implement the rainbow nation on our behalf. Implement it and then police it to sure that a very unruly society abides by the rules. That makes for fascinating stuff - particularly if you consider the history of the SAPS - with its roots as a an apartheid police force, and prior to that as a colonial force. So I think there is more to this than meets the eye - also my experience is that it is hard to solve things on one's own - for me the duo (and the broader cast of characters I have created around Clare and Riedwaan) provide an alternative view to the (very masculine) fantasy of the lone ranger who rides into town and solves all...
November 11th, 2009 @08:24 #
PS Clare and Riedwaan are, for me, an anti-biblical creation story in which Riedwaan was created out of Clare's rib, so to speak. So for me she sets the norm, and he is the foil to her intellect and isolation. I have written him - unintentionally perhaps - as far more in need of intimacy and proximity and family.
November 11th, 2009 @09:01 #
Mike, great article and interesting observations about the rainbow duo.
When I was younger, my parents always used to say in a very openminded way that they would never mind who I dated - black, white or coloured, as long as I was happy. Ahem. Until I came home with a 6-foot Indian with hair down to his waist, who was a strip-dancer in nightclubs and a part time criminal. You should have heard them complain then... and they didn't even know about his criminal tendencies! I was disowned, and we were banned from the house.
For this reason I've always been interested in the implications of cross-cultural relationships - in a relationship that may already have its difficulties and problems, the difference in cultures definitely does make for even more difficulties, even in the new South Africa.
A friendship or relationship between the two main protagonists in a thriller is so common that it can almost be regarded as an archetype - think Alex Delaware and his gay cop friend Milo, think ex-criminals Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. I believe that making the relationship cross-cultural - whether it is a physical relationship or even a friendship such as that between Nick and Laki in My Brother's Keeper, is South Africa's "take" on this archetype.
November 11th, 2009 @09:34 #
There is certainly a strong tradition in the genre of the odd couple. I can think of a few more - Scarpetta and Marino, Georgie and Patrick (in Exhibit A), Batman and Robin, Noddy and Big Ears ;-) The odd couple has also been done to death on cop shows for the last twenty five years. Think Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Homicide.
Maybe it's natural that, in the South African context, that oddness would translate itself into a rainbow match-up. It's also interesting to analyse who is the protagonist and who the sidekick and how this falls along racial lines.
(PS - Jassy, you read Modesty and Willie? I adore Modesty and Willie. Thought I was the only one, apart from old men in mustard-coloured, large-lapelled jackets left over from the seventies.)
November 11th, 2009 @10:38 #
I rather naively tried to keep race out of Exhibit A – only using it as a character description if it was vital for the plot. I have had several readers ask me if George Allen (the protagonist) is coloured, and I always answer ‘up to you’, which I think annoys people. They like to know. I have a picture of him in my head when I’m writing him, but my picture could be and should be different to someone else’s. But the point Louis makes is an excellent one. I think it is about idealism in a sense, and wish-fulfilment. I certainly want to live in a society where race, sexual orientation and gender are irrelevant when it comes to judging someone’s character. Good luck with that though, right?
November 11th, 2009 @12:44 #
This is sooooo interesting! Fascinated by Margie's take on the gender dynamics, which are as fraught (if not more) as racial dynamics in this country. I also talk about our unacknowledged "gender civil war" in my writing, and I believe it shapes everything.
There's a precedent for all this in international krimis (as far as I can tell from my limited experience). I read an interview with Elizabeth George where she said she picked an aristo cop (Thomas Lynley) and gave him a working-class sidekick (Barbara Havers) because of the (largely uncritical) American fascination with the British class system. But she, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell have all introduced "colour" into their krimis in the last 15 years, with rainbow duos (every permutation of racial and cultural origin) popping up all over the place. Or the originally racially homogeneous duos (who are "odd couples" in other ways) branch out, as when Havers falls in love with a Muslim man etc. Dame James had a new police protagonist grappling with his Jewish identity in one of her more recent Dagleish books, etc. Rendell is explicit, referring to her later books as "the political Wexfords". It certainly makes for far more interesting reading.