Crime Beat

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From left: Chanette Paul, Rob Marsh, Roger Smith, Margie Orford, Michael Sears, Jaco Fouche, Deon Meyer, Peter Church, Riana Mouton, Brandon Carstens, Joanne Hichens, Sarah Lotz, Sue Rabie, Richard Kunzmann
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Chill time. And how better to chill out, if not with a krimi. So I rounded up the usual suspects and asked for the crime novel/thriller that had fired them up the most this year in the hopes it’d provide a useful list. Which it does. Interestingly, only one mention of Stieg Larsson (but then perhaps the cognoscenti realise he’s not all he’s cracked up to be). And before I let the hotshots have their say, my vote for the year goes to Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine (actually published in 2006 but I’m a slow reader), followed in rapid succession by Neville Stuart’s The Twelve and Richard Price’s Lush Life (2008). Also don’t forget to read local. All you have to do is click on the author’s title to order. (more…)

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. (more…)

There are more flavours of crime novel than colours in a box of Smarties says Barbara Ludman in a recent column in the Mail&Guardian. Protagonists in police procedurals range from tough American cops to highly civilised British policemen, from deeply depressed Scandinavian detective inspectors to the Italian inspettore who tracks down the bad guys in a world where nearly everyone is corrupt. (more…)

Wanna know how the reviewers are responding to the home-grown crime novel? Then here’s a take on how they’ve raved over Margie Orford’s latest – Daddy’s Girl. In case you’ve been in prison for the last few months (or maybe the last three years) and haven’t been aware of her Clare Hart series let us put you in the know: you see Daddy’s Girl is the third in the series but a prequel to the previous two, Like Clockwork and Blood Rose. So get with the programme. If you’re a television nut then you might want to check out Margie on Carte Blanche this Sunday evening. And on Monday Crime Beat releases the transcript of a quiet chat we had with her under the interrogation lights. Meanwhile, take a decko at what the reviewers had to say: (more…)

The streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh are getting meaner by the day if you take the word of Tony Black in Gutted ( Preface) and Craig Russell in Lennox( Quercus). William Saunderson-Meyer, writing in The Weekender, was impressed by both of these gritty thrillers and also by All the Colours of the Town( Faber&Faber), Liam McIlvanney’s assured political thriller debut. The damp squib in this week’s selection of fireworks is Glasgow Kiss (Sphere) by Alex Grey. (more…)

William Saunderson Meyer reviews Londongrad (Atlantic) by Reggie Nadelson, Gone Tomorrow (Bantam Press) by Lee Child and
Dead Men’s Dust (Hodder&Stoughton) by Matt Hilton. In each, the hero tangles with state-sponsored corruption in modern Russia. (more…)

Last month after Jassy Mackenzie had finished a panel discussion at the WISER colloquium on crime stories she rushed off to catch a flight to London. While in that great metropolis she happened to go into a betting shop to place a few quid on a horse (Jassy has a thing about the gee-gees) and who should she bump into but a famous diamond thief.

One of the high points of my recent trip to London was having lunch with my agents in the West End. As the lunch was drawing to a close, we started discussing the famous Ascot race meeting that was currently under way. (more…)

By special arrangement with FMR here’s a note on a few krimi novels that kept me reading into the small hours during recent weeks.

It is seldom – actually it has never happened before – that I’ve reviewed a book without having it sitting on my desk as I write the notice, but I have to admit that I don’t have a copy of Sarah Lotz’s Exhibit A to hand. (more…)

Bilingual author Carel van der Merwe’s new novel Shark ( Umuzi) is a gripping account of backhanders and back-stabbing, writes LAUREN DE BEER

This review first appeared in The Weekender

IN AN emphatic endorsement of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, on the day Carel van der Merwe was in conversation at the Cape Town Book Fair with MP Dene Smuts about his book Shark — which documents corruption in the government and business — Sunday newspapers splashed the story of findings by SA’s auditor-general that public servants had swindled more than half-a-billion rand in “irregularly awarded” government tenders. (more…)

Like many South African families, I can’t just pop down the road to visit the new grandchildren. I have to get on a plane and fly to a different continent – and it’s a long way from Cape Town to Vancouver. But I got lucky in Exclusive Books at Cape Town airport. I picked up Sophie Hannah’s Little Face (Penguin) I was a fan by the time we landed in Amsterdam where I found Point of Rescue , her second novel. Airport books at Seattle had the third one – Hurting Distance. I hardly had time to look at the grandchildren… (more…)