Crime Beat

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.

Trawling round the net recently I came across this fascinating article by Barbara Fister called ‘Copycat Crimes: Crime Fiction and the Marketplace of Anxieties’. Fister’s an American academic librarian turned crime novelist with some trenchant things to say about our beloved genre. Here are the opening paras and a link to the full article. (more…)

It’s that time of the month again and yesterday (Thursday) afternoon FMR broadcast this review of one of my favourite crime authors. And as Crime Beat has a piggy-back relationship with the radio station here is the blog version.

A book from James Ellroy is always an event, especially, as unlike most crime novelists, they don’t come annually. And so if there was a highlight to last year it came in the final months with the publication of his massive Blood’s a Rover. This ended what has now become his Underworld USA Trilogy, a project that began – although he didn’t know it at the time – back in 1993 with the publication of American Tabloid. This book took the crime novel into a whole new direction as Ellroy wrote a fictional version of American history that set his characters among the real politicians and events of the JFK years. (more…)

We’ve done music in crime fiction. We’ve done food. And coffee. And wine. So it’s time for sport … and we start with the greatest sport of all – surfing. Well, not too many references here in the krim lit but here are two for starters. (more…)

It is always interesting to see how thriller writers process success says William Saunderson-Meyer, writing in his Killer Thriller column for the Sunday Times. Most settle into a groove of producing tiresomely similar new novels, working to a safe cookie-cutter formula. The exceptions continue to develop as writers, trying different things, taking risks. He looks at the most recent releases from a trio of hugely successful writers which prove that doing the unusual can deliver handsomely, at least in literary terms. (more…)

The long awaited sequel to Dark Video (Umuzi), ‘Black Mark’, has been delivered to the publishers, though the release date has not been finalised. Peter Church was ‘KGB’ about the content matter, but disclosed that it involves a Cape Town businessman (someone in our midst) who is utilising the services of an underground network of barmen (the Mickey Finn Club) to procure the services of unwitting young female students. Dark Video, released by New Holland in Australia, has struck a chord with local readers, according to the following review in the Sydney Morning Herald. (more…)

In her first Thriller Talk column for 2010, Jassy Mackenzie – who is a finalist on the International Thriller Writers annual awards list in the Best Paperback category – pays tribute to the death of a master crime novelist, Robert B Parker. (more…)

One of the requests from participants at the Schlock Horror lectures during UCT’s Summer School two weeks back was for a list of hot shot crime novels and novelists. So here’s a list of sorts compiled by Joe Muller with some minor input from me. Below the list are links to some websites which are always interesting guides to current krimi fashions. And if you still want more click on the Top Ten Krimi button to the left of the Crime Beat blog. There you’ll find the top reads of almost all the local crime novelists. And that should be enough reading to last a lifetime.

Some suggestions

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Stick by Elmore Leonard
The Steam Pig by James McClure
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake
On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
The Killing of the Tinkers by Ken Bruen
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins
Down by the River where the Dead Men Go by George P Pelecanos

As well as all their other books, and in no particular order, anything by Vicki Hendricks, Don Winslow, Philip Kerr, Michael Dibdin, Nicolas Freeling, Richard Price, Robert Ferrigno, Julie Parsons, James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis, S.J. Sansom, James Ellroy, Louise Welsh, Ian Rankin, Donna Leon, Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indridason, Johan Theorin, Karin Fossum, Peter Temple, Val McDermid, Edward Bunker, Jo Nesbo, the list goes on…

And then here are some website:

Top-100 Crime Novels of all Time
50 Crime Writers to read before you die
Murder They Write: 100 Masters of Crime

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. (more…)

Here’s Margie Orford’s wonderful contribution to the Schlock Horror series of crime fiction lectures at UCT’s Summer School last week. Entitled Killing for Others: the ethics of writing crime, she takes a look at why we like reading and writing crime fiction. And, more importantly, are we morally in the clear when we indulge this guilty pleasure? (more…)