Stray doppies
At the London Book Fair in April ‘Writing Crime in South Africa’ is up for discussion with Deon Meyer, Jonny Steinberg, Angela Makholwa, and Gillian Slovo. Seems a mixed bag: two crime fiction writers, a thriller writer, and a true crime dude.
Then at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May, Deon and Angela are at it again joined by Margie Orford, Wessel Ebersohn and Sue Rabie. According to the blurb they ‘will have their magnifying glasses out discussing X-ratings and crime taboos’.
The review below I snitched from Glen Harper’s excellent US-based blog International Noir Fiction because it seems Cape Town is gaining an international profile in the krimi stakes. Glen writes of a new addition from a French novelist:
Zulu, the first novel by French author of “polar,” (as the French call crime fiction) Caryl Férey is about Cape Town, South Africa: truly an international crime novel. Zulu (published this spring in English by Europa Editions) begins as a police procedural, centered on the head of the homicide team of the Cape Town police, Ali Neuman, whose Zulu background will become relevant to the plot, though, as it shifts from mystery to pulp noir to thriller (almost to futuristic thriller in its vision of an extreme category of crime), in constantly shifting plot lines circling around the drugs and violence in the townships surrounding Cape Town and the murder of two white women. Férey has a tendency to explain South Africa to the reader, more so than the indigenous crime writers of the country (Deon Meyer for one) whose first audience has been South African readers who don’t need the “back story” filled in. In that sense, perhaps, Zulu is a book that could introduce South Africa as a setting for crime fiction to those unfamiliar with the country’s history. And Férey gives a very comprehensive “tour” of Cape Town and environs, from the beaches (some with penguins) to the townships to Table Mountain, to the Cape of Good Hope, and several surrounding towns. But a reader will need considerable tolerance for fictional violence as the novel shifts from “policier” to pulp to thriller, as the tone shifts from the struggle against ruthless gangs to drug-induced of almost ritual intensity to sociopathic mass murder and international corporate crime. The novel becomes almost apocalyptic as it leaves behind more and more corpses and any sense of hope for the country (much less for this story) becomes less and less viable. Roger Smith’s recent novel of Cape Town gang violence is violent and nearly hopeless, but Férey’s raises the violence to another level. And Férey’s story shifts from driven by dialogue and action to historical information to the biographical background of his characters and to philosophical and politically impassioned narrative: in that way, it seems more in one of the traditions of French crime writing, a philosophical and tendentious approach–but Férey never forgets about his story and the reader will be pulled along through the various stages and into identification with those who are killed and those few (people and values) that survive. This impressive and distinctive novel is a different angle on the South African crime story, and a bleaker one than some of the viewpoints offered by others in that rapidly developing field. After reading Zulu, the reader, a little stunned by the experience, may be left hoping for the no less jaundiced but perhaps more hopeful (and occasionally myth-making) Cape Town crime stories offered by Deon Meyer, whose new novel is to be released in English very soon.
‘If you have to spend a weekend alone, with only one book for company, you’d want one that reads as slickly and as compellingly as Killer Country‘.
Leon de Kock :Sunday Independent
‘Thrillers set in Cape Town, in the hands of consummate writers like Nicol, mean you never see the city in in quite the same way again.’
Vivien Horler:Cape Argus
Crime Beat gives readers a taste of the action in Killer Country, the second in Mike Nicol’s Revenge trilogy, publlshed locally by Umuzi.
Sheemina February told Spitz to meet her at Rhodes Memorial. At the bottom of the steps. That way she could watch him approach for no reason other than she wanted the drop on him. For the hell of it. Wanted to clip down the steps towards him saying, ‘Bang, bang, Spitz boyo, you’re dead.’
She got there fifteen minutes early. Banked on being five minutes ahead of him. Knowing he’d case the area first as a matter of habit. She left her car in the upper parking lot near the restaurant, took the path to the memorial, waited in the shadow behind the columns. Gazed across the suburbs and the industrial belt towards the Durbanville hills, beyond that to the Hottentots Holland and the winelands. Thought about money. That of all human inventions money had the measure of each person’s heart. Hers was expensive.
She watched Spitz drive up in his white hire, park beneath the stone pines in the main lot. He got out looked around for her black Beemer. Only seven cars there, none of them a BM. At this hour of the morning no one hanging around either. Too early for tourists. Probably the car owners were walkers, strolling the contour paths, enjoying themselves.
Spitz walked quickly to the lower entrance that led onto the flagstones below the steps. A viewpoint with a wider aspect than the memorial. Almost a bay to bay sweep: west coast to Hangklip. He took this in, pivoted to look at the memorial, Devil’s Peak rising behind it. Sheemina February wondering what he’d make of a classical folly with columns, steps leading up flanked by walls, eight lions at rest on them. In front, on a plinth, a horse and rider, the rider shading his eyes, squinting at the hinterland. Spitz turned back to the view.
Sheemina February watched him. An elegant man, the crease on his trousers exact. Black polished shoes. The bandage on his little finger encased in a leather sheath. A slender man, and graceful.
She waited until his back was to her before she came out of the shadows and down the steps, her heels clicking on the granite. Spitz spun round almost immediately.
‘Do you know, Spitz,’ she called out, ‘there are forty-nine steps. One for each year of his life.’
‘Who is this?’ said Spitz.
‘Cecil Rhodes. Used to come up here to contemplate, according to the tourist guides. Stare out at the dark continent and think of money.’ She came level with the hitman. ‘Worked for him.’
‘But he did not make even fifty years.’
‘Neither did Obed Chocho.’
Spitz looked away. ‘I was not able to…’
‘Oh, I’m not blaming you Spitz.’ Sheemina February touched his sleeve with a gloved hand. ‘Things have worked out better than I planned. And for this I have you to thank all along the way. Last night especially. Without you the judge would not have been so … accommodating. Men are much more inclined to listen to other men I find. Particularly to one who’s pointing a gun.’
She paused. The dull growl of the city filled her silence, and closer birdsong, insistent sunbirds.
‘Up here,’ she said, ‘you can understand his point. Old Cape to Cairo Cecil. The birds make it peaceful.’
‘What do you want to tell me?’ said Spitz.
She sat down on the low parapet, faced the memorial. Patted the stone alongside her. Spitz sat.
‘Obed had a contract with you on Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso, how much was that for?’
‘There was no money.’
‘You were doing it for free? You?’
‘Because I had spoken his name to them.’
She crossed her legs. ‘Obed getting his payback. Fair enough. And now, are you going to honour it?’
‘There is no point.’
‘I suppose not. But there would be a point if I offered you money.’
‘Of course.’
‘So, I will offer you one hundred and fifty thousand, not to kill them, but to kill the wife of Mace Bishop.’
‘That is more than my fee.’
‘I know. There is a catch.’
‘What is this catch?’
‘I don’t want you to use a gun.’
‘My weapon is a pistol.’
‘I know, Spitz. But think about it. You kill her with a .22 or any other calibre and Mace Bishop will not even stop to think who did it. He will think Spitz-the-Trigger. What’s more he knows exactly where to find you. Before you got home he’d be waiting inside your apartment.’
Spitz stroked his bandaged finger to ease the throbbing. ‘Which is the weapon you want me to use?’
‘A knife.’
‘I do not use a knife. It is too dangerous.’
‘That is why I’m paying you a lot of money.’ She smiled at him. ‘Let me be generous. How about two hundred thousand? I can afford it.’
She watched Spitz think about this. Not a twitch on his face. No frown. No tightening of the lips. She liked that, the calm contemplation.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘you used a knife.’ She drew a finger across her throat. ‘Your trademark. No noise. Spitz the silent steps out of the shadows and ssssh the blade slits open the jugular. I know about that Spitz.’ She reached out, lightly squeezed his forearm with her gloved hand. ‘I might, too, Spitz, have a position for you. In my organisation. A career change. The comfort of a salary. Medical aid. Shares. A pension. The full rootee tootee of the late bourgeois world.’
Smiled at Spitz staring at her, his lips glistening.
‘Eventually he said, ‘Alright for that much I will use a knife.’
‘There is another condition,’ said Sheemina February. ‘It must be in her pottery studio.’
‘It has to be in some place.’
‘The pottery studio is underneath their house.’
‘I do not like that.’
‘Can’t be helped. I’m willing to pay a lot of money for this, Spitz. Offering you a future. There have to be some risks.’
She waited. When Spitz made no comment, held out a photograph: Mace, Oumou, Christa eating breakfast beside a swimming pool.
‘Happy family. They live on the mountainside. The studio has an access onto the lower garden. The only other access is a spiral staircase inside the house. A man with your resources shouldn’t have any problems getting in.’ She dangled some keys from her gloved hand. ‘But these may be a help.’ Spitz reached out, she dropped them into his hand. From a coat pocket took out a barber’s razor. ‘As might this.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not a knife.’
Sheemina let it lie bone-white against the black leather of her gloved palm. ‘You thought differently once, I am given to understand.’ She closed her fist, used the fingers of her good hand to open the blade. ‘This is a special razor. It is not something I picked up in a junk store. It has provenance, Spitz. A history. A memento you should leave at the scene.’ She held it towards him.
‘When I used knives I was a younger person.’
She laid it against his hand, the blade’s edge lightly on his skin. ‘Take it. This is how I want it.’
‘You are a demanding woman.’
‘Not demanding, Spitz. Insistent. But generous too. I pay for that over the odds.’
Spitz closed the blade into the handle. Lifted it from her fingers.
Sheemina stroked his arm. ‘I’m impressed. Now listen.’ She gave him more details: access, the Bishop routine, the best time to do it. ‘I must go now, Spitz.’ Stood looking down at him. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get to have a drink on the town but under the circumstances this would no longer be a good idea.’ She held out her hand. ‘I must say you have been an easy person to work with. My offer remains open for the future.’
‘Please,’ said Spitz, keeping a grip on her hand even as she gently pulled away.
‘No, Spitz,’ she said, using her gloved hand to free herself. ‘Some things are not to be.’ She headed for the steps. ‘When the job is done, you’ll get the money in cash at JB’s. Special courier. While you’re drinking a latte. After that I’ll be in touch.’ She pointed at Devil’s Peak. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to get up the mountain this time. It’s a wonderful view from the top.’
Stray doppies
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