In between the hard southeaster blows, there have been some glorious summer days through the festive holidays - like today. The sea is a warm translucent green. A light breeze ruffles white caps on a surface that otherwise sparkles as if diamonds had been thrown upon it. Elsewhere on the Cape peninsula there are traffic jams and heat and frayed tempers in the shopping malls. But I sit tight on the mountain and don't venture out unless it is to evenings like last night in a nearby cellar where Lonesome Dave Ferguson was laying down the sort of sound track I think belongs with crime fiction.
Lonesome Dave is a one man phenomenon. A harp player with a beat box into which he records live loops, layering and building on these with his voice and his harmonicas to construct a sound that is pure heartache. Blues. Americana. Country twang, he calls it. I love it. He's got four songs on his MySpace site. Listen to them, they're worth it: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=196115982
Anyhow, while he was taking a smoke break, one of the people at our table, no doubt picking up the vibe, lent across and tapped my arm. 'You crime writers,' he said, 'are all just repressed serial killers, aren't you? Too scared to do what you write about. In your Payback, you killed a lot of characters.'
I did a quick mental body count and decided to admit to seven, although there'd also been the bombing of a club that took out four. But then we were talking about a territory ruled by vigilante mobs, drug dealers, arms traders, and a vengeful woman.
'Seven,' my moral accuser said, 'in one novel! That's outrageous!'
I didn't want to tell him how many deaths sprawled across the pages of Deon Meyer's latest, Blood Safari. In one scene alone he whacked four guys in a stalking episode that was worth reading twice. And this in a novel where the story starts with a political assassination back in the bad days and the nastiness ripples from there as lives are damaged or destroyed entirely over the intervening years.
But what with Lonesome Dave's songs streaming in the background I got to thinking about how deaths had occurred in our 2008 thriller scene.
The year kicked off with Richard Kunzmann's Dead-End Road where maverick cops and vigilantes, thoroughly disillusioned with the justice system, produced a mayhem that was high on killings. At the base of the novel was a broken society desperately trying to find meaning in a country where law and order had been put on hold. Put on hold to such an extent that car hijackings are passé and nowadays whole blocks of flats are being hijacked by gangsters. (For more on this topic see the excellent movie Jerusalema if it ever comes to a film festival near you.)
Then came Peter Church's Dark Video which ventured into the sordid world of internet porn and snuff stuff. There's a killing where a guy gets fed to a Great White shark and a clutch more deaths that are equally as visceral.
By the middle of the year we were heading for more conventional territory with a police procedural - A Carrion Death - from Michael Stanley that opened with a hyena chewing on a corpse. If you don't have a handy shark, a hyena's not a bad alternative being a good way to get rid of a body as long as the animal can crunch up all the bones. This time round the hyena didn't get to finish his meal, and that interruption got the story underway.
After the hot savannahs, the scene shifted entirely to a snowed in village in Sue Rabie's The Boston Snowplough, where during the course of a claustrophobic couple of frightening days the baddies dispatch at least four of the good citizens before being shuffled off themselves.
This was followed by Jassy Mackenzie's Random Violence that had a wonderfully high body count with the first killing happening three pages in and the last two pages from the end. Between those bookends was a story that focused on that most controversial of subjects in a colonised country: land.
The last two English-language crime novels of the year featured a conspiracy killing in Tracy Gilpin's Double Cross which was set in Cape Town, and, a bush murder that was fraught with the ghosts of dead ancestors in Diale Thlolwe's Ancient Rites. The supernatural hasn't come up much in local thrillers yet, although Michael Stanley's novel also made good use of the subject, so I suspect we could see more intervention by the ancestors in the future.
Among the Afrikaans crime novels the territory was not too dissimilar. Traditional cop stories in Piet Steyn's Snoeisker but also conspiracies and state shenanigans in Francois Bloemhof's Rooi Luiperd, Chanette Paul's Fortuin and Deon Meyer's 13 Uur went to suggest that all was not well in our beloved country.
Now, thrillers are thrillers and they're firstly about a good read. But we've long had a tradition in South Africa of measuring our nation by our literature and I'm not quite ready to abandon that critique just yet. Given our high murder rate - 55 killings a day, - and the uninspiring sight of our previously saintly leaders wallowing in greed, corruption, and fraud, perhaps the fictional deaths are a barometer of anger. Certainly the wealthy and powerful are not getting away unblemished while they plunder our coffers.
But, as this is the start of a new year, I don't want to dwell on the maggots in the body politic, so instead I'll summon up Lonesome Dave's blues harp which, paradoxically, makes my heart sing. Easy enough when outside there's a blue sky day.
May 2009 be a prosperous year for you all.
ITW International Committee Chair for South Africa, Mike Nicol, is a journalist and writer and now a hard-core crime fiction addict. He's published two crime novels - Payback and Out to Score (a co-authorship), and is a founder of the blog Crime Beat. He lives on Cape Town?s peninsula, up a mountain, in the teeth of the wind.
