Random violence - funny thing to think about in these lovely autumn days as the wind dies away and the first rains bring a heady smell from the vegetation and clouds of cormorants arrow across the bay after the shoals of fingerlings. But when your new president has a favourite anthem which he and his supporters delight in singing and dancing to, Umshini wam (give me my machine gun), then maybe random violence is higher up the national agenda than it should be.On the scale of our crime war we ordinary citizens are less likely to be hit by random violence than we are by domestic abuse or stepping into the crossfire of a gang shootout or wandering into the path of a bank heist or being hijacked at a traffic light - at least that's the general wisdom of the official statistics.
And when you look at the crime fiction that's added such a dynamic side to our literature in recent years you don't find many incidents of random violence. Jassy Mackenzie called her first novel Random Violence but the story was anything but that, in fact it concerned a highly organised property grab by some avaricious investors. I can only think of two writers who've gone for the random violence opener in their novels. Deon Meyer, in his multi-storied Devil's Peak, kicks off one of the stories with his protagonist's adopted son being shot dead. The two are at a petrol station filling up their car when some robbers pull a job. The boy goes down in the crossfire.
And then in his recently published Mixed Blood, Roger Smith has two thugs come in off the street and cause mayhem in a house in an upmarket suburb of Cape Town. This is the dread scene - the burglary that unravels into rape and torture and bloodshed - that terrifies most people in this country whether you live in a suburb or a township. Given this you'd think it might feature more prominently in our crime fiction than it does.
Anyway I was intrigued by Smith's opener (and his closing for that matter as it also involves a random act) so asked him what had led him there. His response:
'I was robbed at knife-point outside my house when I lived in Jo'burg. A few years back I caught an intruder who was cooked on something (crack? tik? [methamphetamine]) in the bedroom of my flat here in Cape Town. Not long ago my 70-year-old mother was mugged and assaulted by two men in broad daylight in a leafy suburban Cape Town street. Friends of mine have been shot in hijackings and home invasions. So, no matter what the stats say, this stuff happens. To us and people close to us. And all of these incidents were random and opportunistic.
'So to start Mixed Blood with an act of random violence seemed very believable to me. But the violence directed at Jack Burn and his wife and child has to be seen as a form of reply to the violent act he was part of in the States: the murder of a policeman after a bank heist. Burn is not an innocent. And neither is his wife: she fled the US with him, knowing what he was implicated in. Jack Burn can run, but he can't hide. No matter how he tries to avoid his fate, there is a reckoning at the end of the book. The laws of karma are immutable. In this story anyway...'
The laws of karma return moral order to Smith's world but it takes a hectic ride through considerable mayhem and a clear-eyed look at Cape Town's underbelly to get there. But enough of the underbelly in these soft autumnal months. We have a new president who has promised to get tough on criminals and of course I'm completely reassured by that. So, although night has fallen, the house is alarmed against the barbarians and I'm lost in the fantasy world of Michael Stanley's latest - The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (in the US), A Deadly Trade elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and if the baddies try to break in I'm going to be on the hotline to the president toot sweet. Dream on, dear citizen, dream on.
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.
Anyway I was intrigued by Smith's opener (and his closing for that matter as it also involves a random act) so asked him what had led him there. His response:
'I was robbed at knife-point outside my house when I lived in Jo'burg. A few years back I caught an intruder who was cooked on something (crack? tik? [methamphetamine]) in the bedroom of my flat here in Cape Town. Not long ago my 70-year-old mother was mugged and assaulted by two men in broad daylight in a leafy suburban Cape Town street. Friends of mine have been shot in hijackings and home invasions. So, no matter what the stats say, this stuff happens. To us and people close to us. And all of these incidents were random and opportunistic. 'So to start Mixed Blood with an act of random violence seemed very believable to me. But the violence directed at Jack Burn and his wife and child has to be seen as a form of reply to the violent act he was part of in the States: the murder of a policeman after a bank heist. Burn is not an innocent. And neither is his wife: she fled the US with him, knowing what he was implicated in. Jack Burn can run, but he can't hide. No matter how he tries to avoid his fate, there is a reckoning at the end of the book. The laws of karma are immutable. In this story anyway...'
The laws of karma return moral order to Smith's world but it takes a hectic ride through considerable mayhem and a clear-eyed look at Cape Town's underbelly to get there. But enough of the underbelly in these soft autumnal months. We have a new president who has promised to get tough on criminals and of course I'm completely reassured by that. So, although night has fallen, the house is alarmed against the barbarians and I'm lost in the fantasy world of Michael Stanley's latest - The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (in the US), A Deadly Trade elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and if the baddies try to break in I'm going to be on the hotline to the president toot sweet. Dream on, dear citizen, dream on.
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.
