Crime Beat

Here’s the last of the lectures given at the Schlock Horror series during UCT’s Summer School last week. I entitled this ‘The Naked City – exposed on the pavements of fear’ and it’s a look at the elements that went into building the krimi city we recognise in our crime fiction today. On Friday, Barbara Erasmus will post a report on the final panel discussion and on Monday next week we’ll list some hot shot krimi reads and links to a number of websites that deal in the controversial business of listing their top crime novels.

‘…beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside.’ – Tony Black on Edinburgh in his novel, Gutted. A description of the krimi city.

What I have tried to do is trace a history of the building of the krimi city through the UK and US versions of the genre and finally to look at how we are using this inheritance in South Africa – particularly Cape Town – and how our own social situation might be influencing the shape of our fictional dark city. Along the way I hope to give you quick takes on the type of laconic prose that characterises crime fiction.

If, following Joe Muller’s lead, we take Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, as the beginning of crime fiction then the genre starts with the city as its setting of choice. Poe’s story unfolds in Paris although the city does not feature prominently. We learn that the narrator has moved to Paris recently and is not well-off so he rents an apartment that is ‘time-eaten and grotesque’ on a ‘long dirty street’ in a ‘desolate’ quarter. But this apparently suits his gloomy temperament. The Rue Morgue itself on which the murders occur is described as ‘a miserable thoroughfare’. But that is Paris’ sole appearance in the story – a briefly referred to dark setting. But it seems to have been enough as it established a tone and a zone for the crime fiction that was to follow.

Some 27 years later another cornerstone of the genre appeared, this time in England – Wilkie Collin’s novel The Moonstone. Unlike the Poe, Collin’s story opens in the country at a manor house and stays there for the first part of the novel. In fact you might say that it starts a rural tradition which will later be picked up in the cosies. However, London is the setting for the second part of the book but you will have to look long and hard to get any sense of the city. There are references to a house in Montague Square and a banking-house in Lombard Street, and another house in Northumberland Street and yet another house in Alfred Place, but beyond these names London doesn’t really exist as a place.

This might seem strange given that The Moonstone was published in 1868 some 15 years after Bleak House. If ever a novel wrote out a manifesto for the krimi city then it was Dickens’ book. (I’ve appropriated Bleak House to the genre of crime fiction for the purposes of this lecture. After all it is about a crime and a mystery and at the end the criminals are caught and the mystery solved.) Dickens’ London is as a muddy, foggy, gas-lit city of streetkids and pickpockets and ne’er-do-wells. The very template that we’ve all adopted ever since. To be fair to Collins, his concerns were not with the underworld. If anything, as I’ve said, he prepares the ground for the cosies of the English Golden Age of crime fiction in the 1920s and 30s where the setting of choice for the dastardly deed was in the library of a manor house.

Of course in between The Moonstone and the cosies came Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes who was very much of the city, in this case London, and with Conan Doyle/Holmes the city started to play an often malevolent role in the story. Many of the Holmes stories open on dark wintry nights as Holmes and Watson sit beside a roaring fire. Outside the lamps have been lit and loafers and toughs are gathering on the street corners. We begin to sense a city that is rough and deadly.

Indeed in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Watson seeks out Holmes in a drug den – ‘a low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship.’ Through the gloom he sees bodies lying in ‘strange fantastic poses’. Here he finds Holmes in deep disguise as he says he’s in ‘the midst of a very remarkable inquiry’. They leave by a trap door at the back of the building, a building Holmes describes as ‘the vilest murder-trap on the whole river-side.’ Outside Holmes shuffles along dragging his ‘uncertain foot’ until they are some streets away before he drops his disguise. Had he been recognised, he tells Watson, he would have been dead within the hour or as he puts it ‘my life would not have been worth an hour’s purchase’.

Here then are the foundations of the krimi city, a place of fear and danger. An underworld of malicious types. Types who think nothing of killing and who would get rid of anyone tracking them down without any compunction. Merely by being in this underworld city, Holmes is at risk. In her talk Margie Orford referred to the flaneur – the interpreter of the city – the streetwalker, and just as the krimi city must have its dangerous corners, so it must have this streetwalker – this pavement philosopher – who can take us by the hand and reveal the hidden clues. This is the role Holmes plays for us, his readers.

In the Holmes stories we also begin to sense the emergence of the divided city. For instance, in ‘The Red-Headed League’ we move with Holmes and Watson along streets of dingy two-storied brick houses in a smoke-laden atmosphere where the lawns are weedy and the laurel bushes are faded. A picture of decrepitude and decay. Then a couple of streets Holmes and Watson step into thriving London where everything is quite different and prosperous. Watson is greatly relieved.

‘The roadway was blocked with the immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inwards and outwards while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was difficult to realise as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square which we had just quitted.’

To summarise: four things that are important in contemporary crime fiction happen in Holmes’ London. Firstly there is Holmes the pavement philosopher, a detective who can read the city – both the city we see and the city that lurks below. But although he is streetwise he is also at risk and far from an observer he gets embroiled in the terror. Secondly we are told that the underworld city is a dangerous place, a place of torment, murder, and banished souls and because of this it becomes, for those who live outside t, a place of paranoia and conflict and anxiety. Thirdly, Holmes’ endeavours to emphasise the divided city: a place of commerce but also a place of crime. The fourth element is that Holmes’ city is a large place and negotiating it requires modern technology: he can reach many quarters on foot, but he also has to use Hansom cabs and he descends below the streets to take the Underground. His city is one connected by transport. This is a city we can understand decades later, an urban agglomeration, a pattern of light and dark, good and evil.

This particular idea of the krimi city we meet again across the Atlantic in the pulp fiction that flourishes in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. The depression has hit, life is tough and the city becomes tougher. We are now on Raymond Chandler’s mean streets. There are dingy bars and sleazy pool rooms where suspect activities occur, but when Marlowe goes calling on four million dollars in The Big Sleep he goes to a posh double storey house on a hill outside the city of Los Angeles. If Marlowe knows the labyrinthine underworld, he also has to find his way through the labyrinth of the rich, which is just as entangled and dangerous. As a pavement philosopher he is able to handle both cities – just. At the end of The Big Sleep we find him moving away from the rich city where he is decidedly uncomfortable back to his down-at-heel quarter:

‘I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall. I didn’t see anybody when I left. I found my hat alone this time. Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.’

He drives to a downtown bar where he has a couple of double Scotches. Unfortunately, he admits, they ‘didn’t do me any good.’

But something significant has happened when you compare Holmes’ city with Marlowe’s. Where Holmes got about on foot and public transport, Marlowe now has a car. The divided city has expanded yet again, it is now vastly bigger, and is sown together by highways or to use a more evocative word, freeways. Places where people are on the move and private and have the illusion of being free.

These freeways are important because the city has imprisoned its citizens. They lock their doors, they put up burglar bars, they are aware of living in what W H Auden called the Great Wrong Place. And so a person who can protect the citizens and bring them justice despite incurring the wrath of the evil ones in the performance of this duty can become a hero in the Great Wrong Place. And the worse the Great Wrong Place is, the more the PI or the cop is admired. He/she walks the mean streets and survives. And in that survival comes a sense of hope, if not triumph.

This type of city has been the backdrop to most crime fiction ever since and in the process the divided city has been thrown into greater and greater relief. The krimi city now is the Great Wrong Place that contrasts the lives of the wealthy with those of disaffected people living in terrible conditions. In many cases the divided city also breaks down racially. In the Easy Rawlins PI novels of Walter Mosley, Easy is the pavement philosopher who has learnt to navigate between the deprived black community of which he is a part and the white community who run the city. He has languages for both sectors and to a large extent he is mistrusted by both sectors. He is certainly threatened and often beaten up by both sectors. Like Marlowe, Easy can be found in places such as Ricardo’s Pool Room which he describes as ‘a serious kind of place peopled with jaundice-eyed bad men who smoked and drank heavily while they waited for a crime they could commit.’ It’s a place where you might also find Sherlock Holmes.

Mosley, following on a version of the city first rendered by Chester Himes, adds a dimension to the krimi city which has also been taken up by such writers as George P Pelecanos and Richard Price and was well expressed in the television series, The Wire – where both these authors where scriptwriters. Indeed, the series is founded on Price’s novel, Clockers.

But at this point we need to go back over the Atlantic to the United Kingdom were yet another layer has been added to the Great Wrong Place – namely the historic city. Most wonderfully this aspect of the krimi city is illustrated in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus novels. Rebus is a pavement philosopher not only of the contemporary city but of an older city ghosting behind the one where he lives. Rankin, through constant references to street names and buildings and the names of the famous dead who lived in them makes us (and Rebus) aware of this city, yet at the same time Rebus disparages it. And in this tension between the two elements it is almost as if the dark events of the contemporary city have their origins in the dark events that make up the city’s history. Here is the lone crimefighter out on the mean historic streets:

‘The streets were deserted, pavements glistening from an earlier downpour, street light reflected in them. Rebus’s shoes were the only noise to be heard as he started the climb back up the slope: Queen Street, George Street, Princes Street, and then North Bridge. … Rebus took a left at the Tron Kirk and headed down the Canongate.’ (The Falls)

Later in the novel Rebus parks his old SAAB on North Bridge and he and his lover, Jean, stare at the view: the Scott Monument, the Castle, and Ramsay Gardens. A cold wind is blowing to remind us that all is not well.

‘ “Such a beautiful city,” she said. Rebus tried to agree. He hardly saw it any more. To him, Edinburgh had become a state of mind, a juggling of criminal thoughts and baser instincts. He liked its size, its compactness. He liked its bars. But its outward show had ceased to impress him a long time ago. Jean wrapped her coat tightly around her. “Everywhere you look, there’s some story, some little piece of history.” She looked at him and he nodded agreement, but he was remembering all the suicides he’d dealt with, people who’d jumped from North Bridge maybe because they couldn’t see the same city Jean did.’

A recent arrival on the Edinburgh crime scene is the novelist Tony Black. He too has this ambiguous relationship with his city. His PI Gus Dury is a fallen man, a drunk burning with anger at the corruption at the heart of his city. Like Rebus’ Edinburgh, his city too is constricted. He gets about on foot or public transport – also an indication of his fallen status. He is an everyman. In the second Dury novel, Gutted, Dury surveys his domain from the steps of Carlton Hill:

‘Up here you can see the whole city. Just about. It’s not big by any means. Do a three-sixty and you can take it all in. But from here I always feel part of the history of the place: the grey buildings, the grey skyline – makes me forget we’re in the new millennium.’

Later he remarks:

‘Sometimes, when I come up here now, I’m amazed by the beauty of the city. It’s as though my memory of how the place looks gets sealed off and I’m seeing it for the first time again. It holds me. All those old turrets and spires, the hotchpotch of the Old Town, buildings leaning into each other: it seems like another city entirely.’

The entry of the historic city into crime fiction occurred at about the same time as the make-believe city that is the gawp-zone of the tourist. While the historic city gave texture to the crime story so that texture was subverted by the cheap packaged touristic version of the city as a romantic place where the gothic horrors have been cleansed and tamed. And then, of course, in one of those post modern flips, the tourist industry went and co-opted the urban critics – the crime novelists – by making them a factor in the gawp-zone. Thus in Edinburgh you can go on a John Rebus tour of the city – a real tour of a fictional place – and, as Joe Muller pointed out, crime novels are now sold alongside city guides. It is merely a matter of time before there is a krimi guide to the restaurants of Cape Town.

But what has this conflating of the historic and the touristic city done for the fictional crime city? Well, authors often use the tourist city as an intro to the historic city and from there the focus shifts to the contentious aspects of the contemporary city. At issue remains the matter of who knows the truth about the city. Is the truth the tourist version or does it belong to the pavement philosopher? Here are answers: first from Rebus and then from Gus Dury.

In The Falls, Rebus on his way home, stops to chat with two cops in a car staking out a suspect. They tell him it’s been a quiet night apart from Apart from foreigners asking directions.

‘Rebus smiled and looked up and down the street. This was the heart of tourist Edinburgh. A hotel up by the traffic lights, a knitwear shop across the road. Fancy gifts and shortbread and whisky decanters. A kiltmaker’s only fifty yards away. John Knox’s house, hunched against neighbours, half hidden in scowling shadow. At one time, the Old Town had been all there was of Edinburgh: a narrow spine running from the Castle to Holyrood, steep vennels leading off like crooked ribs. Then, as the place became ever more crowded and insanitary, the New Town had been built, its Georgian elegance a calculated snub to the Old Town and those who couldn’t afford to move.’

In Gutted, Gus Dury at one point revisits the scene where a murder had been committed.

‘I schlepped all over, through dub and mire. It felt unsettling to be back near the scene of Moosey’s murder. The place I once knew as a beauty spot had changed; more and more this city was revealing its true nature to me. In the most brutal ways imaginable. Try as they might to paint the place as a capital of culture, as ‘genteel’ Edinburgh, I knew the real deal. They could stick their tartan troosers, their tea towels with the castle on, and the Scott Monument shortbread tins, I knew what this joint was made of, and it was rotten through.’

The crime fiction city that Marlowe and Easy Rawlins and Rebus and Gus Dury understand is one that Sherlock Holmes too would have understood. But when you take this city and site it in Cape Town, what happens? Undoubtedly, we inherit the divided city: the city of commerce with its underworld city of crime. Added to this is Easy Rawlins’ racially divided city. Added to this is Marlowe’s city of the rich and city of the poor. We inherit the city of freeways and cars because they are the means by which our pavement philosopher navigates the city. They are also the means by which the baddies can encompass the entire city in their evil doings. The city that can be walked has been replaced by the city that is stalked. The city of public transport – taxis, trains, buses – becomes a comment on those who are marginalised by the city. And for we South African writers, it goes without saying, that our version of the krimi city has inherited both the overlay of the historic city and the tourist city.

As an aside the historic city plays very little role in current US crime fiction. When it enters at all it is usually a site of nostalgia and sentimentality and a lament for the good ole days now gone to hell in a handbasket. It also functions as a way of highlighting the idea of the tough city that harks back to Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, those deadly cities where only the tough survived.

Here’s Elmore Leonard on Miami in La Brava.

‘They had dinner at Picciolo’s on South Collins, Maurice telling them what it used to be like before the lower end of Miami Beach went to hell. … Picciolo’s Maurice said, height of the season you couldn’t get near the place, the cars lined up outside. Now you could shoot a cannon off in here, maybe hit a waiter. … Maurice saying Picciolo’s and Joe’s Stone Crab were the only places left on the south end, the neighbourhood taken over by junkies, muggers, cutthroats, queers, you name it. Cubans off the boat-lift, Haitians who had swum ashore when their boats broke to pieces, old-time New York Jews once the backbone, eyeing each other with nothing remotely in common, not even the English language. The vampires came out at night and the old people triple-locked their doors and waited for morning. Ass-end of Miami Beach down there. Remember the pier? Look at it. Used to be nice. They sell drugs out there now, any kind of pills you want, take you up or down. … Bar around the corner there, guys dress up like girls.’

This sort of nostalgia for a lost city has yet to occur in a Cape Town crime novel, this is not to say it won’t, but at the moment the sentimentality is left for descriptions of the city’s beauty.

In the last five years with the rise of the genre in South Africa some critics have wondered why Cape Town has emerged as the crime fiction capital, rather than Johannesburg which is better known for the violence of its true crime. Probably Cape Town’s dominance was simply happenstance: Deon Meyer just happens to live here, Margie Orford just happens to live here, I just happen to live here, and Roger Smith happens to have ‘semigrated’ here from Johannesburg. Yet on a simple headcount the Johannesburg area has almost as many writers with more than one book to their name, Richard Kunzmann (even though he now lives in London), Jassy Mackenzie, Wessel Ebersohn (who has returned to the crime fiction scene), Rob Marsh, and a number of ‘starting-out’ novelists – one of them Angela Makholwa who will be on the panel tomorrow night.

But my focus is Cape Town. Geographically Cape Town is an interesting city: it is surrounded by sea and has a mountain slap bang in the middle of its urban areas. A mountain that ambiguously offers refuge and solace (in Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak, Bennie Griesel who is suffering a serious personal crisis looks up to the mountain for comfort; and another character, Thobela drives to Kirstenbosch and climbs up Skeleton Gorge until he stands on the ‘crest and looked over everything.’ Regrettably he finds it is of no help. In Orford’s Daddy’s Girl Riedwaan Faizel also goes onto the mountain to search for answers, but that doesn’t help him either.) The mountain may be beautiful and offer spiritual comfort but that’s as far as it goes. At best it is benign, at worst a threatening place where rapists and muggers lurk. In Roger Smith’s novel, Mixed Blood, the mountain is on fire – a very obvious threat to the city clustered along its lower slopes.

Of course Cape Town is a divided city in another sense too. Apart from the generic convention of dividing the city into good and bad, it is divided into rich and poor, black and white. Linking these divisions are motorways clogged with traffic and public transport systems that are often deadly.

Cape Town, too, although it is as old as any US city, is depicted in our crime fiction more in the manner of Rankin’s or Tony Black’s Edinburgh than in the way Elmore Leonard sees Miami. Cape Town we find is an historic city with historic references. The Slave Lodge, the Castle, the Grand Parade, all the iconic buildings are scattered through the stories as are the street names. Of course the most important clues to our city’s past are to be found in the names of the fictional characters.

Cape Town has also become a gawp-zone and tourists feature prominently in our crime fiction – sometimes as the lead character.

In Smith’s novel the main protagonist, Burns, is a fugitive from the US desperately trying to understand the city he has holed up in, especially as he has two bodies he needs to get rid of. He drives out onto the Cape Flats looking for the proverbial wasteland.

‘Burn drove along the N2 towards the airport. Even though it was way past midnight, the road was busy, taillights streaming away like fireflies in the dark. He kept to the speed limit as kamikaze taxi drivers from the Flats rattled past him in their battered minibuses, jammed full of faceless workers on their way home from the late shift. … Mean houses and shacks sprawled on either side of the freeway as Burn left Table Mountain behind. The Cape Flats. Where more people died of violence everyday than in your average war zone. Where children disappeared and their violated bodies were found in boxes under neighbour’s beds. Where the dispossessed had their hungry eyes fixed on the rich man’s playground around the mountain.’

Because the city is made up of so many disparate parts the car becomes a major tool for the investigators moving between the city’s downtown, the leafy suburbs, the townships, the beaches, the winelands, the southern reaches of the peninsula. Margie Orford’s novel Daddy’s Girl begins by contrasting the very different sides of the city and by drawing in its colonial inheritance. We find Clare Hart on a Friday morning driving out of the city towards the Flats:

‘Clare looked up at the pockmarked buildings; three-storeyed walk-ups that baked in summer and froze in winter. The Flats. The buildings were named after battles fought long ago by people who’d lived far away. Waterloo, Hastings, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Tobruk. The people who lived in this place called it Baghdad. Coke adds life. A hand-painted slogan in red and white on the wall of a corner cafe, its small dispensing window covered with hand grenade mesh. On the opposite corner the primary school, rubbish swagged against rusting barbed wire. The playground was filled with children in white shirts. The girls wearing bottle-green skirts; the boys in grey pants. In a corner, a little girl stood alone under a bullet-riddled sign. Your Neighbourhood Watch watches out for you.’

After she has transacted her business Clare drives back to the city:

‘As she got closer to town, the pavements became less cracked, then they sprouted trees, and the houses were set further and further back from the road. There were walls instead of wire fences, and soon she was back in the oak-lined avenues of the suburbs that sheltered in the grey skirts of Table Mountain.’

Holmes would not be surprised by this city and nor would Marlowe. The question now becomes: how difficult is this city for the pavement philosopher? Unsurprisingly, the answer varies from author to author and from book to book. In Orford’s Daddy’s Girl the city comes across as a supportive place, as a place desperately trying to protect and secure its citizens. Thanks to the World Cup there are surveillance cameras everywhere as the city watches out for its own. And although the police force might be suffering from internal squabbles and ego problems, the forensic department is working efficiently. Moreover, Clare Hart is able to access a number of technical experts in what is today called civil society to help her trace the missing girl. Even the witnesses who don’t know they’re witnesses are able to add a few helpful details to the information Clare Hart is gathering. But having said this, Orford’s fictional Cape Town is also a place of terror and Clare comes under threat from some decidedly nasty types.

As does Deon Meyer’s cop Bennie Griesel. In Devil’s Peak and against the odds, he manages to overcome his drinking problem, he succeeds in rescuing his daughter, and he solves his case. Like Clare, Bennie takes us into all the corners of the city, the scary ones and the ones of safety and luxury. Meyer’s krimi city also has the convention’s characteristics: there are muggers on the streets and these people occasionally take advantage of Meyer’s characters but for the most part they do not inflict serious damage. Like Orford’s city, Meyer’s city does not reach out a long and random arm to wreak its mischief. This is not the case, however, in Roger Smith’s Mixed Blood.

Conventionally when you enter a crime novel, you enter at a point where a backstory is waiting to be uncovered. Something has happened – a murder, a theft, a kidnapping, a cheating spouse – and the story you’re about to read concerns the consequences of this action. Because of this the setting – the city – is often a backdrop. It might be brought to vibrant life by the writer in all the aspects of its character but it is not itself a malignant character.

In Mixed Blood the city itself is malicious in that two characters representing the city walk in off the street at random intent on mischief. That they happen to pick the wrong man is their tough luck, but the essential point here is that Smith’s plot extends from this random act. But then Smith likes random acts and certainly Mixed Blood is book-ended between two coincidences. To deviate yet further from the conventions of the krimi city, Smith uses a pavement philosopher who is so repulsive that we do not readily follow him as he explains our city and because he is so extreme, one distrusts him.

A final observation which is as true of the crime fiction city in the US, UK and here. In all these jurisdictions the cities are under redevelopment. They are all in a state of change, they are unstable. And often this state of change is itself a source of crime as land becomes a valuable commodity.

Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins views land as an important investment, a way of possessing his environment, literally and figuratively a way of owning his city: ‘I was dreaming about the day I’d be able to buy more houses, maybe even a duplex. I always wanted to own enough land that it would pay for itself out of the rent it generated.’ Orford has gangsters negotiating to control rented properties from Camps Bay to Milnerton.

Sometimes the potential development never happens or is delayed or goes bust but this still heralds a change in the city even if only to open a new wasteland. So to conclude here are a few quick takes on the unstable krimi city:

Black’s Gus Dury: ‘I walked through the close skirting the Holy Wall and onto the main drag of Easter Road. The street was packed, builders mainly. The flats round here had been late to get dragged into the property-price surge. Now they’d shot-up twenty per cent in six months; not even the news of a credit crunch had put a halt to them.’

Meyer’s Bennie Griesel lamenting something all locals recognise: ‘He drove through Durbanville and out along the Fisantekraal road. He could never understand why this piece of the Cape was so ugly and without vineyards. Rooikrans bushes and Port Jackson trees and advertising hoardings for new housing developments. How the hell would the Cape handle all the new people? The road system was already overloaded – nowadays it was rush hour from morning till night.’

Elmore Leonard’s Maurice in La Brava: ‘They were suppose to start redeveloping the whole area ten years ago, put in canals, make it look like Venice. Nobody’s allowed to fix up their property, they got to wait for the big scheme. Only the big scheme went bust, never happened. The boat-lifters and dopers came in, half the neighbourhood’s already down the toilet.’

Half the neighbourhood already down the toilet is about as good a definition of the krimi city as you’re likely to get.

© Mike Nicol

For my take on Cape Town see Payback and Killer Country.