Crime Beat

In her final column of the year, Joanne Hichens gets into some of the stuff that goes on in the backrooms where stories are edited and authors are interviewed. Her next column will appear in the heavily freighted year of the vuvuzela.

Between the lines

It’s hard to believe we’re heading for another break from Crime Beat, which means the year is nearly over. Looking back on a couple of interesting projects, it’s been rewarding working with some of SA’s crime writers to produce Bad Company, I’ve enjoyed doing reviews and interviews, and generally immersing myself in crime fiction.

What I like most about working with writers, apart from enjoying their product of stories and novels, is learning a little more about what makes them tick, work, write. I suppose insatiable curiosity is a hangover from my ‘psychology’ days (or am I sommer just nosy?) so the how and why of the writing is, for me, a process which intrigues. On occasion in my interactions I’ve been presented with, on a platter, a tasty morsel of truth.

Editor and poet Helen Moffett, for one, revealed her true colours a few weeks ago when she submitted a short story for the December issue – devoted to all things crime and krimi – of literary magazine WORDSetc, which I’ve helped edit. The prefacing email, attached to her story, goes more or less like this: ‘Jo, here’s a little something that brewed in my head while visiting my mom’s garden. I decided the only way to get over my gingerishness re krimis was to write one. Although this is more of a horror story…’ ‘Poppies’ is a menacing and malicious scenario of a scorned woman extracting revenge. Who would have thought that Helen Moffett, highly respected, civilised, academically formidable, would stoop so low?

Sometimes ‘the truth’ is more subtly revealed. Before he’d said a word in the interview featured on Crime Beat, Oz krimi author Michael Robotham ‘showed’ the kind of work ethic he lives by. New Age he may be – polite, super-in-tune, wide-white smile, but I saw the real-man side of him, too. At the start of the conversation, I could not get my tape recorder to work. I didn’t want to miss a word! I wouldn’t be able to keep up, I knew, with paper and pen! Michael spent ten minutes turning the finicky machine every which way, scrutinizing buttons, batteries, arrows, at last figuring out how to get it going. It was the intense focus to this effort that really spoke to the kind of writer he is – determined, dedicated, completely taken with the task at hand. (Or does he just like fixing things?)

And sometimes, I blatantly ask for the truth. When I read Andrew Brown’s Refuge, although a compelling human drama as opposed to a krimi, who should appear but Riedwaan Faizal skulking about outside the courthouse.

‘So what’s all this about, then?’ I asked, for a Cape Times review to appear later in December.

‘Margie and I have played with picking on each other’s characters in our books for a while now,’ he replied. ‘My Inspector Februarie makes an appearance in Margie’s Blood Rose; I then picked on Riedwaan Faizal in Refuge in retaliation. Unfortunately, I let Margie read the manuscript before it was published and she saw what I was up to. So she then put me (as Constable Brown) into her latest book, Daddy’s Girl. Now that it has become personal, I plan to work Margie herself into anything else I might write, and then treat her mercilessly!’ – so watch out, Margie! And astute SA crime-thriller fans will delight in stumbling apon other examples of this sort of cross-pollination.

And one truth leads to another. When I read Angela Makholwa’s fascinating interview, also for WORDSetc, with profiler Micki Pistorius, author of such non-fiction titles as Catch me a Killer and Fatal Females, I had a question of my own for Pistorius: ‘Why do you no longer work on serial killer cases?

She replied: ‘Serial killers were very dark work and now I live in the Light! I am surrounded by joy, peace and harmony, and angels!’

So on that note, and at this time of year, may we all live in the light!

And if your desire is to cross to the dark side, let it be with a South African krimi from your list of must-buy festive season reading.

Joanne Hichens is the editor of the crime fiction anthology, Bad Company.