An email from Mervyn Sloman of Book Lounge fame tells me there may be ‘slightly more than five’ people attending the launch of my book Killer Country this evening. What he means by ‘slightly’ I take to be himself and a staffer. Should be an intimate discussion and as Mervyn is firing the questions, please don’t disappoint him. So be there: 5.30 for 6pm at the Book Lounge.

Out in the bookshops as of right now is the latest edition of wordsetc devoted almost entirely to SA crime fiction. Check out the Dame as the chilly covergirl.

A debate in the chat columns of Book SA on the notion of SA lit caught my eye during the week particularly this contribution from Fiona Snyckers, which could be a manifesto for writers of crime fiction: ‘I don’t see this [a cheeky reference, among other asides, by Lauren Beukes to the mid-1990s flood of middle-class memoirs to which I am guilty of contributing] as a reminder to be careful when talking about our past at all. I see it as a challenge to be MORE irreverent, MORE outspoken, MORE critical, and LESS careful of treading on sensitive toes. This reviewer is trying to use “The Struggle” as a trump card to shame Lauren and to excuse poor, derivative and just plain boring writing. South African fiction is maturing at last and Lauren’s writing is at the forefront of that process. If we cannot have a fearlessly critical debate about what constitutes good fiction then the freedoms that were fought for in the struggle are worthless.’ Amen.

Watch this space as Lauren Beukes is to join the krimi ranks.

Muziwethu Zwane on Bad Company, edited by Joanne Hichens

It would probably come as a shock for my friends and acquaintances to discover that I actually have a morbid fascination with the dark side of the human psyche. I have always had a secret desire to get into the mind of a criminal and find out what makes them tick. Perhaps growing up in Alexandra had something to do with this. After all, at some point my home town had the dubious honour of being called the crime capital of the world. I don’t know – I’ll make it a point to check with my shrink at our weekly session. That being said, you can imagine my utter delight when I received this book for a review!

This superb anthology is a must have for those with a taste for the macabre. It is a truly fantastic tribute to crime-thriller writing in this country. The broad range of writing styles and the memorable characters makes the collection particularly fascinating. Some of the stories follow the traditional whodunit style, while others offer the crime of passion angle. There is also the hard-hitting, gripping style heavily influenced by American pulp fiction.

The stories cover topical themes such as racism, xenophobia, violence against women and children, and corruption in high places. It is against this proudly South African setting that tales of murder, mayhem, intrigue and mischief are told. From Mike Nicol’s hilarious adventure of a stolen rhino horn in ‘The Fixer’, Deon Meyer’s troubled cop in ‘The Nostradamus Document’ to Jassy Mackenzie’s ‘The Beginning’ ,Tracey Farren’s gruesome tale of abduction in ‘Chop Shop’, Michael Stanley’s mystery about a stolen goat in ‘Neighbours’, Diale Tlholwe’s tale of police corruption with a twist in ‘Anger Mismanagement’ and Joanne Hichens’ sordid tale of sexual depravity in ‘Sweet Life’, the stories entertain, delight and shock all in one beautifully presented, frightening package.

As is the norm in crime fiction, there is a palpable tension between good and evil. Sometimes the good guys are bad, such as dirty cops and at times one finds oneself involuntarily sympathizing with the villains. As in real life, the perpetrator sometimes gets away and doesn’t see the inside of a jail cell. In other stories, justice prevails. I have no doubt you will be caught up in the literary whirlpool as you dive into the dark underbelly of crime. The one gripe I have with these stories is that they are too short. Just as I was immersed in the pulsating plots, it was all over and I was left gasping for more. But the one consolation I have is that all the authors are already published so I can follow up on their respective works.

William Saunderson-Meyer on Sarah Lotz’s Exhibit A

There was a time when one approached local writing with a heavy heart and a sense of duty. All so ponderous and self-conscious, riddled with angst and the inferiority complexes that thrive in Anglophone societies that take as reference a motherland across the sea.
No longer. A cohort of young crime writers has revitalised the whole body of South African writing – including the serious ‘literature’ that everyone pays homage to but no one reads – with a well deserved shake up.

One of my favourites is Sarah Lotz, who writes with a sure hand and a song in her heart. The plot of Exhibit A involves claims by a bohemian young woman, Nina, that she was raped in the holding cells of a small Karoo town, by a police officer.

Fiction is a way of trying to render reality so as to make it more comprehensible. We turn to novelists, poets and playwrights because they have the magical ability to prune and shape the hopeless confusion of real life to a gestalt that is instantly recognisable and fathomable.

This is true of Exhibit A, which was inspired by actual events, another one of those instances where the sometimes bizarre realities of SA provide endless fodder for the writer. Although the tone is angry, it is controlled, never preachy or naïve. And damn, in spite of overdoing it on occasion, Lotz is a wickedly funny writer.

The protagonist, Georgie Allen, Cape Town’s worst dressed lawyer cum second-hand car dealer, is a convincing and endearing creation. So too is his sidekick Patrick, a transplanted Glaswegian advocate who has no embarrassment at proving accurate those stereotypes of the tight-fisted Scotsman.
The secret star, however, is the eponymous Exhibit A of the title, a scruffy, hairy, malodorous, lion-hearted stray mongrel, with a penchant for licking his scrotum and rolling in smelly deposits. In fact, while this is a legal thriller fired by the author’s almost palpable sense of outrage at South Africa’s ugliest social phenomenon, at another level this is something of an animal story as to how an ugly little canine shite can wriggle his way into a tough-skinned lawyer’s heart.

Tymon Smith on Mike Nicol’s Payback

As a Joburger I can’t help thinking whenever I’m in Cape Town that there’s something sinister lurking beneath the beaches, restaurants and trendy boutique stores. Something wicked which has to eventually make its way down from the mountain and into the gardens. Recently thanks to South African crime writers like Margie Orford and Roger Smith, my suspicions have only been reinforced. Oh and then of course there’s Mike Nicol’s Payback; a breakneck ride through the underbelly of the city that takes you breathlessly from Cape Town to South America, New York and back in time to exile, arms dealing and shady political scores, all in the company of two of the coolest and aptly named bodyguards in any fiction and a bunch of twisted politicians, gauche tourists, crooked club owners, drug dealers, vigilantes and a nasty femme fatale of a lawyer bent on revenge. Nicol’s razor sharp plotting and snappy writing make the tale of Mace and Pylon not only a great and thrilling piece of crime fiction but also a sly commentary on the social landscape of post-apartheid South Africa with its backdoor dealing, secret grudges and glaring gaps between the rich and the rest. Hopefully the two bodyguards will make another appearance soon but for now they’re safe in Cape Town slunk down in the seat of their car lurking somewhere near Margie Orford’s house, watching over Dr Clare Hart and waiting their turn for television success and international stardom. As the preacher man says, “Good things come to those who wait.”

J.B. Roux on Afrikaans crime fiction in 2009

Until several years ago Afrikaans crime fiction was virtually non-existent. It simply didn’t sell. Romance novels did. Cook books did. Almost any other genre had a sporting chance of reaching the best seller lists but crime novels seldom proved worth the effort.

Enter Deon Meyer with Wie met vuur speel in 1994.
Nothing changed.
Deon Meyer, Take Two in 1996 with Feniks.
Everything changed.
Feniks became the first Afrikaans crime novel to be translated into English and published abroad. Afrikaans readers were suddenly receptive for crime and suspense novels. The flood gates opened.

2009 has been another great year for Afrikaans crime fiction. Chanette Paul released Boheem, her third suspense novel. Paul is the only Afrikaans romance-suspense writer and like Springgety and Fortuin, she once again put her own unique stamp on this sub-genre.

Geld wat stom is, Tinus Viviers’s debut, makes a fairly good impression but is spoilt by bad editing. Plaasmoord by Karen Brynard is still hot off the press. This book tackles the weighty theme of farm killings – a very readable and enjoyable book.

The highlight in Afrikaans crime fiction for 2009, however, must be Chris Karsten’s Seisoen van Sonde. The main characters are Wim, a butterfly farmer in the Southern Cape; Portis, his crippled and much younger friend; and Molly, a pathologist.

A series of murders is committed. The identity of the murderer is no secret: a traumatized young man known as Jack. But Jack receives his orders from the real culprit: the mysterious Minos. As the story develops, it becomes clear that Antinor, a secretive government organization from the apartheid years, has a major role to play in the murders.

Karsten’s stripped style can be contributed to his background as a seasoned journalist. He has the almost magical gift of gripping his readers by the heart by purposely maintaining a distance between author and audience. The writer’s background as journalist is fortified by the inclusion of several aspects that were inspired by reports in the media, such as an ex-minister’s ritual washing of his former enemy’s feet, and apartheid agencies destroying proof of their “dirty tricks” on a massive scale.

Other recent releases to look out for are Harde woorde and Afspraak in Venesië, both by Francois Bloemhof, Geldwolf by Carel van der Merwe, Bottelnek by Piet Steyn, Karoonag en ander verhale by Deon Meyer and Lammervanger by Wynand Coetzer.

The Reviewers

Muziwethu Zwane is Senior HR Consultant for a multinational media company in Auckland Park. He has an insatiable appetite for reading, writing and listening to Michael Franks crooning about some secret garden somewhere. A 34-year-old husband and father of three, he lives in the eastern suburbs of Joburg, not too far from the dusty streets of Alexandra where he grew up.
William Saunderson-Meyer writes the syndicated Jaundiced Eye column of political commentary, which appears in The Weekend Argus, The Citizen, and Weekend Witness. He also writes a books column called For the Thrill of It. \
Tymon Smith has been a freelance journalist, researcher, worked in documentary film and television and is currently the books editor of the Sunday Times.
J. B. Roux (Jaybee) is an avid reader of crime and suspense novels, and has been writing romance novels, short stories – including whodunits – newspaper articles and book reviews for more than twenty years. He lives in Velddrif on the west coast.

Ann Donald on Daddy’s Girl by Margie Orford

Journalists, on a daily basis it seems, bring us stories of the unthinkable: young children (usually girls but not always) abducted, raped, murdered – most often by people they know. Safe in the suburbs, we shake our heads and shut our eyes to the details, not wanting the images of brutality to penetrate too deeply. We convince ourselves of the otherness of these events and we turn the page to the horoscopes, which are always positive and reassuring. And when we want to read about crime, as is evident in the book sales stats, we turn to the safety of international writers, where the plots, the settings and the characters are safely removed from anything resembling real life.

So, then, just who does Margie Orford think she is, not only daring to write a series of South African crime novels in the first place but, in Daddy’s Girl, placing at the very centre the worst of the dangers and fears that we so assiduously try to avoid?

Common understanding has it that crime novels are supposed to offer escapism: The characters are meant to be types, the plots are intended to be exaggerated, the prose should rip along. We don’t expect to remember them after the final page has been turned; their function is not to help us understand the human psyche or the inhuman condition, after all.

So what does Margie Orford think she has done, writing a book that offers us characters we actually can believe in, revealing a city we instantly recognise as one we both know and don’t know, and offering a story that helps us face our fears and see the ‘other’ and their ‘otherness’ as part of ‘us’ – all of this while never deviating from the form of the crime novel?

Hmm. She might just have crossed a line here and damn fine writer that she is, what she has done is give us real crime, in a real crime novel that, in its page-turning effect, offers us an escape from our own lives while simultaneously helping us to understand the reality of the lives around us.

James Mitchell on Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson tells us Jo’burg is supposed to be the city “where you go if you want to be carjacked, shot, stabbed, killed and eaten”. Living as Jassy Mackenzie does to the north, in quasi-rural Kyalami, she has so far “only” been hijacked at gunpoint. Her imagination more than makes up for the other potential fates. And yet, it’s an imagination totally in sync with our bizarre society.

Example: Mackenzie’s second thriller, My Brother’s Keeper, has the “good guys” coming under attack. They survive the shootout, of course (otherwise the storyline wouldn’t), leaving a couple of corpses littering a squatter camp outside Louis Trichardt. The locals have shown no particular interest in all the mayhem. So what to do? Call the cops? Nah. What’s the point. Just get on with it.

Would this surprise your average Seffrican reader? I doubt it. It’s how we think… or at least, how we think it’s normal to think, if you see what I mean.

What, on the other hand, how would a foreign reader – say, German – feel? I ask because Mackenzie’s first book, Random Violence, came out last August in translation as Todeskälte. There it was the individuals, whether snooty suburbanites or fearful pensioners, who gave life to our ordinary background noise of hijackings, murder and corruption. In My Brother’s Keeper the outrageous becomes the accepted, whether in action or attitude. If our hypothetical German readers can accept that, they will have come a long way to understanding us. In the same way, if Deon Meyer’s foreign readers can get their heads around the relationship of mutual respect that develops between an ex-cop of the “old” South Africa and a former MK cadre, they’ll realise that what unites us is far stronger than what divides.

My “must-have” crime thriller is not even published yet, but I’ve no doubt it’s Mackenzie’s third novel, with the working title of ‘Stolen Lives’. We’re promised that Jade de Jong and David Patel – first met in Random Violence – will reappear. One’s a conflicted PI, the other a police detective; and they didn’t satisfy every reviewer at the time. But the “murky” nature of De Jong’s morals – as one quibbled – will resonate with those who prefer their heroines real rather than ideal. (In much the same way, the shocking death of one character who initially appears to be surviving extraordinary trauma comes as a jolt of vile reality in My Brother’s Keeper.) I won’t necessarily “like” Stolen Lives when it comes out. But going on Mackenzie’s track record, I also know I won’t be able to put it down.

Michele Magwood on Richard Kunzmann (Bloody Harvests) and Wessel Ebersohn (The October Killings)
The borders of crime fiction have become porous. Where once the American and English writers dominated, now the genre has been colonised by Scandinavian, Australian, South American and European authors. The fictional world is strewn with bodies from Bangkok to Beijing, Istanbul to Rio, Laos to Moscow and now, Cape Town.

In South Africa Deon Meyer is the undisputed king and Margie Orford is pulling on the bloody mantle of the queen of local crime writing. Both have cracked open the till of the overseas market and are building readerships in other languages, spreading uniquely South African stories around the globe.

I read a lot of crime novels. I think of them as McBooks: you gobble them down, they’re briefly satisfying but ultimately forgettable. Plots and settings blur after a while. What makes some live on long after the mystery is solved and the culprits are caught are the characters, and for this reason I’ve chosen two books that deliver on the conventions of the genre – pace, plot, puzzle – but whose characters are stamped on my mind.

My copy of Richard Kunzmann’s Bloody Harvests vanished long ago, lent out and never returned. But every time I look at Ponte, the malignant pillar that looms large on the Johannesburg cityscape, I think of it. This is the domain of The Albino, one of the most chilling villains I’ve ever encountered, a man of mythic powers and unspeakable appetites. From his penthouse The Albino rules a rancid dominion of slums seething with junkies and whores, abject amakwerekwere and feral children. When some of these children turn up dead, their organs harvested for muti, two cops are assigned to the case. Jacob Tshabalala was raised in a sangoma’s home and knows his way around witchcraft. His partner Harry Mason is a British ex-pat who has a lot to learn about the occult. Together they are plunged into this baneful world, but Kunzmann manages to balance science and superstition, the goodness of traditional healing with the horrors of its corruption. Fast, visceral and hugely atmospheric, Bloody Harvests was a staggering debut, and he has gone on to write two more books in the series.

I read The October Killings in manuscript last year, and the freshness of its characters and wry take on contemporary South Africa quickly propelled it into the bookstores. Wessel Ebersohn is an experienced author and this is a slick, assured suspense novel. He spools his story out from the Maseru raid in 1985, when a South African hit squad stormed an ANC house and killed a number of MK operatives. Every year on the date of the raid one of those soldiers has been murdered, and the anniversary is coming around again. Only two of the hit squad are still alive and one of those is in prison. Enter Abigail Bukulu, a director in the Justice Department and a feisty, likeable young heroine. She sets out to find the murderer and turns for help to Yudel Gordon, a stooped, greying Jewish psychologist who had been retrenched from his prison work but who has been recalled to boost the faltering system. It’s a race against time as they track down the killer. Gordon is a marvellous character, absent-minded and faintly Woody Allen-ish, and he and Abigail make a memorable team. I’ve since learned that he starred in Ebersohn’s early novels in the 70s and 80s, along with Freek Jordaan, a thoughtful, effective cop. See what I mean about fresh characters? I’m off to hunt down those books.

Michiel Heyns on Shark by Carel van der Merwe

Shark by Carel van der Merwe (Geldwolf in its Afrikaans version) is as fast-paced and gripping as any thriller, but it is more than that: it is a mordant commentary on a society (ours!) in which the pigs and the sharks are running the show. For whereas a traditional crime novel tends to define, by implication, crime as anti-social behaviour and to set up its criminals against law-abiding society, here the criminals are in fact also the pillars of the community. That the pillars are all rotten is the cynical premise on which this novel is based.

Van der Merwe’s protagonist, Stephen Winter, is the much-feted CEO of a large corporation. In order to clinch a multi-million rand deal with the Department of the Interior, he has to take on board the Minister’s personal choice of Black Empowerment partner – which just happens to be run by the Minister’s son-in-law. This is the backbone of the novel, but the intrigue ramifies into any number of sub-intrigues, plots and betrayals. Crime becomes indistinguishable from normal corporate practice, and criminal from leading citizen.

Missing from the equation is the usual good guy – and although the good guys, say, in Deon Meyer’s gripping cop thrillers, like the recent 13 Hours, are heavily compromised by their personal weaknesses, they are, by and large, on the side of the angels – so, too, in Mike Nicol’s rip-roaring Payback and in Margie Orford’s Clare Hart novels. It’s no reflection on these exemplary thrillers to note that their moral categories are relatively clear-cut: the reader knows where his sympathies lie, whereas Shark gives us no-one to identify with other than the Shark himself.

Shark, then, seems to me to be a novel of our time and place in defining crime as the norm, moral behaviour as the aberration. Society as a whole has lost its moral compass and the traditional distinctions between good and bad no longer apply. It’s not a cheery perspective, and it may be challenged by more upbeat writers, but it is timely and it is extremely well executed.

The Reviewers

Ann Donald worked as a journalist and editor for 23 years, before following her heart and opening an independent bookshop, Kalk Bay Books. When not selling books, she writes a weekly books column, Between the Lines, for the Sunday Times.
James Mitchell is books editor for The Star, and still believes the written word enlivens the imagination more than any other communication form. He retains this touching faith despite birth in the US, education in New Zealand, and life in South Africa.
Michele Magwood is an award-winning journalist who has worked in radio, television and magazines. She was the books correspondent of the Sunday Times for many years, and still contributes to those pages. In between reading she manages to eat and sleep.
Michiel Heyns studied at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. Apart from a book on the nineteenth-century novel and many critical essays, he has published four novels, The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic. He reviews regularly for the Sunday Independent.

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.

Fear sells books, as anyone who scans fiction bestseller lists knows. Fear also sells claims about social problems. Appeals to anxiety are both persuasive and attention-getting. “The idea,” according to critic James Kincaid, “is not to erase the anxiety but to excite it, since it’s the anxiety itself that’s doing so much for us”. Stories that unsettle us are compelling, whether in the form of fiction or on the front page. As the old newsroom slogan goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” – often leading us to conclusions we’d never entertain without appeals to fear.

Crime fiction, a genre that deliberately exploits anxiety in the reader, taps into topical social concerns using familiar formulas to produce suspenseful narratives. Our fascination with crime has deep cultural roots. It seemed fitting that Anthony Hopkins, an actor famous for his role in Silence of the Lambs, would a few years later be cast in a film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a tragedy that features violent rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. The Elizabethan stage often drew on historical and classical sources for its blood-drenched narratives, but pamphlets recounting grisly crimes were also popular at the time and sometimes became the basis for “murder plays.” A homicide recounted in Sundry Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, Lately Committed (1591), for example, appears to have been a source for Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson’s 1599 tragedy, Page of Plymouth.

Early novels such as Moll Flanders and the biographical sketches of rogues in The Newgate Calendar fed an eighteenth century appetite for criminal adventure. Today, crime fiction employs procedural, forensic, and social detail to imitate reality, while the true crime genre borrows narrative techniques from fiction to give its stories a satisfyingly dramatic shape.

According to Stephen Knight, crime fiction’s popularity is drawn in part from its ability to reuse and reinvent familiar, even “compulsive” patters. Another attraction is the genre’s “rapid responses to changing sociocultural concerns” . The interplay between crime fiction and other social texts can illuminate the ways claims-makers influence the formation of social issues. This analysis will examine the construction of four contemporary anxieties—urban violence, threats to the environment, child abuse, and serial homicide—through the lens of crime fiction. Novels by Richard Price, James W. Hall, Dennis Lehane, and Jess Walter make creative use of these fears, offering their readers new ways to read the news.

Wanna read more? Click here.

Guarded Comments

For the purposes of research, I ordered a book on bodyguarding over the internet a while ago, direct from the author’s website. Titled The Bodyguard’s Bible, written by James Brown, and touted as “without doubt, the finest book on close protection ever written”, this 380-page, large format paperback cost an eyebrow-raising sum. I haven’t spent that much on a book since I accidentally bought the special limited-issue collector’s edition of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun from Exclusive Books and only saw the price when I was signing the slip.

These days, if I buy a book from anywhere except Kalahari.net, I pretend that I lost my wallet with that amount of money inside. That way, it softens the blow if the book does not arrive. But this one did arrive, six weeks later, signed by the author himself.

I soon realised it was a self-published book, and I shouldn’t have liked it. I really shouldn’t, because I do get annoyed when my eyes keep snagging on grammar and spelling errors. Brown regularly substitutes “there” for “their”, and randomly capitalises words like “Bodyguard” and “Principal” (when it isn’t spelled “principle”).

And yet, despite these glitches and the occasional awkwardly worded sentence, Brown – who has over 25 years’ bodyguarding experience and today runs a bodyguarding agency and training school – can write. He can write in an interesting, conversational style, with humour. And he knows his stuff. He gives advice on defensive and evasive driving, on how to guard a principal on a train, plane and cruise ship, on providing body cover, on using weapons and on unarmed combat, and much more. The book was packed full of fascinating detail, well illustrated with diagrams and photos. It was a goldmine of information and it helped me enormously with my research. I’d recommend it to any bodyguard, potential bodyguard, or author writing about bodyguarding.

Here are two of my favourite excerpts:

“It is rare for the Bodyguard to be kidnapped alongside the Principal, Bodyguards are normally killed. So if your Principal is kidnapped and survives the ordeal, you are either dead or at best unemployed!”

“I recall an incident about a female pop star staying in a very exclusive hotel in the South of France. She enjoyed using her high profile security team to assist in keeping her profile high. This star worked hard at staying fit and decided early one morning she would like a swim in the hotel pool. She dispatched her minders to the pool who found a couple of other hotel (paying) guests enjoying a swim. In a typically aggressive high profile way they asked these people to leave the pool as their client wanted to train alone, after a heated debate the people left the pool but not I hope before they urinated in it!”

Jassy Mackenzie is the author of My Brother’s Keeper and Random Violence.

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.

Of the three main characters of that novel, Kemper Boyd and Lloyd Littell have FBI-connections, while Pete Bondurant was once an LAPD cop but is now a fixer for hire. The real Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover play dominant roles as does the Mafia and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But it is the machinations of the three characters that keep you glued to the pages as they get sucked into the paranoia and end up being involved in the sloppy but deadly assassination of JFK which gives you some idea of the murky undercurrents of US politics that swirl through Ellroy’s fiction.

It was eight years before Ellroy published the second in the trilogy – The Cold Six Thousand – which saw Littell and Bondurant with the help of a Las Vegas cop – Wayne Tedrow – trying to cover up the Kennedy hit. Once again the Mafia plays a major role in the story – in fact, for Ellroy, Hoover and the Mafia are the main sources of evil deeply embedded in the psyche of the time. The Cold Six Thousand ends with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy attributed to a Mob hitman Sirhan Sirhan. During the course of the novel – to give you some idea of the complexity – Littell has gone from being pro-Bobby to loathing him and back to supporting him although his recovery is too late to prevent the hit.

Enter now Blood’s a Rover featuring a manic Hoover in terminal and dangerous decline, and plots and counterplots and a violent heist of a bank security van that rumbles through the plot as if everything that happened in American politics in the early 1970s somehow was tied to this theft. Tedrow is back but he’s increasingly fickle, a drug chemist and assassin for hire. Onto this stage comes a truly wonderful character, Dwight Holly – a freelance FBI agent with unlimited powers – who is regularly phoned by both Hoover and, when he’s drunk, President Richard Nixon. Dark US interests in Haiti feature prominently as do Mafia turf wars and Hoover’s attempts to destabilize the Black Power movement. Then there’s the slimy private investigator Don Crutchfield who is subjected to some horrible beatings on his assignment to find a missing person when he walks into a conspiracy that is Machiavellian in the extreme.

As Littell in the previous novel had a change of heart, so these three men move from the deep recesses of the far right-wing ever leftwards. Tedrow and Holly pay a price for this, Crutchfield is rewarded with a prosperous agency and he is ultimately the story teller behind the book.

As always women play a huge part in Ellroy’s novel. In this instance two of the best female characters he has ever created, Joan Klein and Karin Sifakis. Both are revolutionaries, both are gorgeous and hot. Joan’s name comes up wherever there has been trouble in the world and she is distinguished in the FBI files by the knife scar on her arm. Sifakis is less well travelled and her terrorist activities are restricted to blowing up property across the length and breadth of the US. No one dies is her mantra. Joan and Karin are both connected to Dwight Holly in ways that only Ellroy could construct and they both light up the pages whenever they appear – which is an achievement in a novel of perpetual fireworks.

It has to be said that to read Ellroy requires being subsumed into his fevered nightmares. His prose is the drug and once that drug takes hold you are hooked on a high that is vivid and bright and you don’t want it to end.

If you’re in need of rehab after James Ellroy then I recommend three novels from the Scandinavian countries. First up is a new Inspector Sejer investigation from Karin Fossum called The Water’s Edge which sees Sejer at his lugubrious best; then there’s a haunting novel from the Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason. He made his appearances some years ago with the excellent Tainted Blood and Silence of the Grave, went a bit soft with Arctic Chill but is back on stream with Hypothermia. His detective Erlendur features again and, as usual, the investigation opens deep faultlines in the country’s history. And finally a new writer for me but one who is getting attention in his homeland, the Swede Johan Theorin with his second novel The Darkest Room. This was voted best crime novel of 2008 by the Swedish Academy of Crime. It’s a police procedural and a ghost story wrapped together and probably worth saving for the bleak mid-winter months.

Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy (Century)
The Water’s Edge by Karin Fossum (Harvill Secker)
Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker)
The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin (Doubleday)

First up, there’ve been some changes at Crime Beat as the super sleuths will have noticed. For starters co-founder and opening blogger Barbara Erasmus has decided enough is enough. Almost three years ago, July 2007, she started putting up the first posts for Crime Beat (along with a blook version of her intriguing novel, Chameleon) as I was intent on keeping away from the technical end. But then the whole thing took off and I had to get Ben to give me lessons in posting. For two years Barbara and I (with help from first Dirk Jordaan and now Chanette Paul on the Afrikaans side) kept up a steady stream of info but that has cut back this year to three posts a week. No question about it without Barbara’s energy from the get-go, Crime Beat wouldn’t have got under way as early as it did nor would it have made the in-roads it has done internationally on the crime fiction blogging scene. So thanks, Barbara, for all the help and enthusiasm. You’ll still see her byline from time to time as she now has an emeritus position on the blog.

This evening at the Book Lounge witness the Dame (Margie Orford, who else!) chatting up international bestselling author Peter James. Be there at 5.30 pm to hear dark and dangerous stuff.

And finally Celine Jacobson at a blog called Court Reporter has posted one of those always fascinating 100 best crime reads which you can check out on her site.

Coming up in the weeks and days ahead: a bunch of krimiheads write on their best SA crime fiction; and an as yet unpublished short story from the man who begat the local version of the genre, James McClure.