Crime Beat

Jane Taylor dismissed confession as inherently untrustworthy in her Schlock Horror lecture but a few confessions were forthcoming from local luminaries in the panel discussion which wrapped up the Summer School Schlock Horror series last week.
Mike Nicol was forced to admit to being the author of South African Mammals although Jane Taylor denied all connections with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, ascribed to her on Wikipedia. Angela Makhlolwa who flew in from Joburg for the event said she’d sufficiently overcome her fear of revenge knee-capping to admit that the serial killer in Red Ink was a real person – the character was based on a serial killer whom she’d interviewed at C Max for a proposed biography which evolved into a novel.
Nicol, erudite as always, filled the audience in on the development of local crime fiction – Crime Beat readers who misssed the talk merely have to click a button on our site to download the details. I was aware of a dearth of black writers in his list – as well as in the predominantly white audience. It was fortunate that Makholwa was there to balance the books – the only white character in her book is some obscure municipal official.Margie Orford and Nicol, both published internationally, are conscious of the laden race issue in South African writing and have consequently avoided it in character development in their novels. The race of their heroes is less of a factor in European and American translations and both have allowed it to evolve through dialogue and plot in an effort to avoid the racial stereotyping intrinsic to all novels in a local setting. Taylor has concentrated instead on geography – anyone familiar with South Africa will recognise the gender and cultural differences inherent in location in Limpopo or the Eastern and Western Cape.
Orford made the interesting point that profiling studies of killers in the USA differ from those done on South Africans. While 99% of white killers in the States have white victims, these demographics are not significant in South Africa, the most racially statified country in the world.
The issue of translation was directed towards Deon Meyer who was spotted in the audience, despite his newly acquired beard. He said that Madeline Van Biljoen, his original translator, had no trouble with correlating local slang into English and neither did his German and Swedish tranlators. Orford felt that some of the Cape vernacular was untranslatable as illustrated by the various versions of moer in her novels. Nicol claims to limit himself to five fucks a novel – but who’s counting?
All four novelists denied ignoring the upper classes in their stories.For example, Orford’s latest offering relates to the morning upsurge in the takings of hookers on the Main Road beat which coincides with the dropping of kids at upmarket schools in the Southern suburbs.
No-one left the panel discussion early – our local crime writers are equally talented at public speaking;an amusing and enlightening lecture indeed. All were delighted to hear of new krimis in the offing. The Black Widow from Makholwa; Killer Country from Nicol, already available on Amazon and The Quarry, the fourth in the Clare Hart series from Orford