Crime Beat: We now have the first three books in your planned seven-book series and one of the issues that’s been raised is how you intend to handle the passage of time. The first two books (Like Clockwork and Blood Rose seemed to hover in a present which wasn’t pinned to a particular year. Daddy’s Girl appears to be set in 2009 – at least according to some of the references such as the disbanding of the Scorpions and the imminence of the 2010 World Cup. Why this decision to specify a year?
Margie Orford: Time is treacherous, indeed. I did not actually specify a year, although there are some topical things. I was mainly concerned with the internal time of the plot – three days, just over 72 hours, from start to finish. I have absolutely no interest in the World Cup but I am very interested in surveillance. And one of the gifts that the World Cup has brought – apart from massive refrigeration facilities at the morgue in case of a stampede or a bomb in the Green Point Stadium – is increased surveillance to monitor whether people sneak a non-FIFA-authorised knick-knack past the stadium gates. The Scorpions will be topical to South African readers, of course, but the unit’s demise is also emblematic of increased political and ideological control of the cops – something I see bugs people and writers from LA to Tokyo. So, my interest in the mixed urban blessings the World Cup might or might not bring us, and the shifts in the police force are less to do with fixing my story into a particular year than they are to do with how this city – Cape Town – is being made to work.
Crime Beat: Sure, I understand – and share – your sentiments about the World Cup. All the same, mention of it does kind of located the book in 2009. That said, you clearly fictionalised the month by mismatching days and dates. Was this to add to the general sense of unease?
Margie Orford: That sounds reasonable.
Crime Beat: We now know that the books play out in two consecutive months, August (Daddy’s Girl and Like Clockwork and September (Blood Rose). Does this mean that you’ve taken the Lee Child/Jack Reacher option as far as aging (or rather not aging) Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizel is concerned? Or will the series play over a longer period?
Margie Orford: Lee Child sounds like he’s onto something. But no, if you have a female lead I am afraid you don’t have the option of not aging her unless you want to go down all sorts of botoxed cul-de-sacs. Men are allowed to freeze gracefully into an ageless middle age but women don’t have that option. So, Clare’s going to have to get older. And wiser and sexier. And handle it. Riedwaan on the other hand, well, I don’t see him doing the Clinique for men route. So, he’s going to have to get older too. And there’s a child involved too. And child-time ages everybody.
Crime Beat: Enough with the business of time. It strikes me that another one of the issues you face with a prequel and which you must have faced with Daddy’s Girl was that you’d already revealed the ending in Like Clockwork. How much of a concern was this for you in matching the ending of Daddy’s Girl to the one you’d already given? In fact, do you think you might ‘adjust’ future editions of Like Clockwork to up the ante with Daddy’s Girl?
Margie Orford: I won’t adjust Like Clockwork – unless a publisher insists and then, like most writers, all my principles will be worthless.
Crime Beat: I’m not quite sure I understand you. Why would adjusting the text render your principles worthless? Surely, a book isn’t cast in stone just because it’s published?
Margie Orford: No, it is not. But I’ve finished that book. It has moved into the past – for me at any rate – and there is a kind of integrity to it that demands that it be allowed to live out its natural life. I have moved onto other things. And I don’t think it needs tweaking. The books are a series, yes, in that they feature the same characters and their world views, but each novel is a stand alone. They are associates, so to speak, and they are closely linked. But they are not separate chapters of one mega-book.
Crime Beat: Sorry, I interrupted you there. I was wondering how much of a concern it was for you wrapping up the ending of Daddy’s Girl?
Margie Orford: The ending. I can’t reveal the ending, but it would have been impossible to write Daddy’s Girl with another ending in mind. I needed to know what the ending was. It was a hard book to write – the subject matter is bleak. Knowing the ending pulled me through it.
Crime Beat: Of course the mystery in Daddy’s Girl is not about the kidnapped Yasmin, but about who kidnapped her. And here you string out a number of options throughout the text, beginning with Riedwaan Faizel himself. It means that Clare Hart’s work is cut out for her but then there are lots of clues, many of them red herrings. One of the distinguishing characteristics of your procedurals is the role of science. Here it is particularly important.
Margie Orford: Funny you say that about science. I thought I had eliminated it in this book because I set it over three days and on a weekend so no one would be cooking things in patria dishes! I do love science – the idea of it, the drive that our culture has to dismantle all the bits that make up that whole as if those will explain what happened. That said, I do use ballistics and there is quite a bit of surveillance technology. It fascinates me how people (the scientists) sublimate their horror (or indifference) to suffering and turn it into a puzzle, how they look for and find patterns. I find patterns very curious – the invisible marks, the traces left behind. We all know that every contact leaves a trace. But how to see it? How to interpret it? What to do with it? Where to look? What to do with what you’ve seen? Science too is a world well-suited for a female lead. Much of the wall to wall fighting possible if you have a male lead is tricky with a tiny little tough-chick like Clare. She has to use her brain to solve things – and science is a way of borrowing other people’s brains from them so you can figure something out.
Crime Beat: Daddy’s Girl is firmly rooted in Cape Town. In fact, it seems to interrogate the city. I think here particularly of the witnesses near the ballet school where the abduction of Yasmin takes place. They saw something even if they didn’t know what they were looking at. This seems to suggest that the citizens of the city all bear witness to the evil of the city.
Margie Orford: We are certainly all witness to the evil of this Mother City. Most of us choose to look away much of the time. A police director did tell me once though that how you find out what happened is finding out things that looked different, the sounded different, that smelled different. People might not be aware of something until they think through what they did not see or hear at a particular time. A disruption of the familiar – that leaves a trace too.
Crime Beat: Similarly if the city is at war with itself, there are battle lines. If there are devils, there are also angels even if the angels come with baggage. Foremost among the angels are Clare and Riedwaan but your book is at pains to present the role of the foot soldiers – those who suffer and are deeply wounded but who persevere in helping to right the wrongs. The two champions here are Pearl and Calvaleen. So despite the prevailing mood of darkness there is too the ‘whipped pink as the sky lighten[s] in the east’.
Margie Orford: What’s this whipped pink business? Did I write that?
Crime Beat: Yes. It’s one of those moments when the darkness is pushed back and I liked the visual picture it painted.
Margie Orford: Okay, I must have had a brief adjectival outbreak. Now back to those angels. … I did not think of angels. But in the Cape Town I know it strikes me again and again how damaged people try to save other people from themselves – how women who have been brutalised will try to break the cycle of abuse by not passing it on, by doing things differently, by speaking out. Those people who picket the gangsters’ houses on the Flats are very brave – and some have paid for their bravery with their lives. But I have been struck by how many people choose to behave morally and who recover. Resilience in the face of trauma is fascinating. And I do think that there is an innate goodness – or perhaps an innate sense that things can be different – in most people. It is possible to take things on – and women do this often – and resist the brutality that has become so normalised that many people have stopped being outraged.
Crime Beat: At the base of Daddy’s Girl is a darkness – an evil – that targets children and by doing that destroys families. In this darkness swirl gangsters and murderers, rapists and paedophiles – all the horrors of the modern demonology. It is your pervading theme. In this instance how much of it was influenced by your work with prisoners at Victor Verster prison?
Margie Orford: That sense of darkness – a kind of moral contagion – is not so much the theme as the context against which one writes. I think of my theme as a resistance to that, a refusal of the brutishness of might is right. My prison work – the year long writing workshop – revealed some unexpected things to me. I had and still have no idea what crimes the men I worked with had committed. What I did realise was the unrelenting horror of the worlds that most of those men came from – no fathers, little education, a brutal urban landscape, gangs as family substitute. And for the most part an unrelenting and humiliating entrapment in poverty and unemployment. The imprint of the social and psychic effects of apartheid is the DNA of so much of the violence that surrounds us. You don’t need to be that smart to figure that out. These men – and once I knew fifteen I could imagine all the thousands of other men in prison are not monsters (although some have done monstrous things). They are part of us – us on the outside, us filled with fear – and we need to find a way to live together.
Crime Beat: Some reviewers have suggested that Daddy’s Girl does nothing for Cape Town as a tourist destination. I am not sure this is at all an accurate comment on the book or about the relationship of books to their cities. Leaving aside that we’re talking about fiction to start with, if this were true then Ian Rankin would have wiped Edinburgh off the Scottish tourist map. Instead the opposite has happened. These days you can go on tours of Rebus’ favourite drinking holes, and the same might one day be said of Clare Hart’s coffee spots. Actually the Cape Town of Daddy’s Girl seemed to be a caring city. The cops might have their internal wrangles but they were still more or less getting the job done. The ballistics department was functioning well. The CCTV monitoring is presented as top notch. The IT nerds are a useful backup. And the ordinary citizens do their bit. Cape Town may have a frightening gang culture, but in your novel, it is far from all bad news.
Margie Orford: Clare Hart Tours: there’s a niche for sure. I love Cape Town – and I love doing stuff in the city – walking, eating out, exploring. It is a layered city, filled with remnants of all its different pasts and peoples. And much of it works. And I have made myself at home here – it is, like most ports, a city of immigrants, opportunists and foreigners adapt and blend. And I think the ordinary citizens of Cape Town do arm wrestle enough space for themselves to hang out in. I always tell people to visit and to relax. South Africans, unless they’re trying to kill you, are the nicest people.
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by Barbara Erasmus
by Mike Nicol
Blood Rose
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Devil's Peak
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Death in the New Republic
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The Fence
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Tromp's Last Stand
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Out to Score
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Coldsleep Lullaby
