Thriller News from South Africa
Declan Burke's column in last month's The Big Thrill sent me on an internet chase that took me to his website and blog and a post called 'Irish Crime Writers: Yankie Doodling Dandies'. What warmed my heart - if only because it showed that we (South African crime fiction writers, that is) were not alone in the world - were his comments about Irish readers thinking their writers produced inferior crime novels. In this instance inferior to the novels of US writers. Declan's sentence read: 'It'd be a huge pity, though, if Irish readers were to ignore the likes of Gene Kerrigan, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Tana French, Brian McGilloway, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Alan Glynn (who set his debut novel in New York, incidentally), Garbhan Downey, et al, simply because their very fine novels were set in Ireland, and especially if it's because of some kind of inferiority complex. (My emphasis.) Replace the names with those of SA crime authors, change Ireland to South Africa and we have the same situation. You see, one of our major problems over the last four or five years has been encouraging South African readers to read us.
I used to think that the lack of interest we were shown by our book buying public had something to do with the apartheid novel which very few local readers wanted to read because (a) it showed that you were living in a police state; (b) that if you were white, which generally you were if you were buying the book, you were guilty of racial exploitation; (c) that apathy wasn't an appropriate response to the cruelty of the times; and that (d) the writer had the moral authority because of a, b, and c to castigate you. Come the end of apartheid, how to persuade your fellow countrymen that the society was now a democracy and normalising and that part of that process of normalisation was that writers were going to write entertaining books that you could read on the beach or on a plane and that weren't going to wrack you with shame. A difficult prospect.
Dare I say it but I think the tide has turned. Or is turning. Why? Because Deon Meyer's books are currently sold out and are being reprinted (not for the first time admittedly but on this occasion the reprint comes hot on the heels of a complete redesign of his novels some six or eight months ago). And Margie Orford's first in her Clare Hart series, Like Clockwork, has been reprinted with a spectacular cover. And, with complete lack of modesty, I'll let it be known that my novel, Payback, is also being reprinted.
In most parts of the world a reprint is no big deal. Certainly it's not news. In South Africa a reprint is, well, it's unusual. So I am optimistically reading into these reprints a trend that suggests that maybe we - SA crime fiction writers - are beginning to get an audience. When my first crime novel, Out to Score (with Joanne Hichens), was published in 2006, the sales were disappointingly low. Three years later the situation is completely different. What has happened?
Well, what has happened is that there have been some 25 crime novels published in the intervening years. Add to this the arrival of the Cape Town Book Fair (which is now three years old) and has been hugely responsible for introducing local writers to readers, and the fact that there are now writers festivals all over the country which have started to show readers that local authors are not prophets of doom and can actually be quite fun (and funny). So, dare I say it, but things might be changing. We might be getting over our inferiority complex.
Another thing that Declan mention was that 'the majority of Irish crime writers [himself included] tend to take the American hard-boiled novel for their stylistic cues, with the transmogrification of Irish society over the last decade making the transplant an all-too-believable one'. That's another sentence I could apply to my home turf simply by changing 'Irish' to 'South African'. There's been some debate locally about whether this is a good thing - the American model - and what we should do to introduce a distinctly African feel.
I'm not too bothered about this as our content and sense of place gives the African feel. Actually getting snotty about the style - the wonderful hard-boiled poetry of snappy dialogue and casual violence - that we overlay onto the crime fiction, I don't even think rates as criticism. Crime fiction is pastiche (bloody nearly most of the time), so if you're half aware of what you're doing you're going to be subverting the model anyhow. Isn't that what's happening in Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels? Maybe I've had a sup too much Jameson's and should stop now.
Cheers, anyhow.
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.
In most parts of the world a reprint is no big deal. Certainly it's not news. In South Africa a reprint is, well, it's unusual. So I am optimistically reading into these reprints a trend that suggests that maybe we - SA crime fiction writers - are beginning to get an audience. When my first crime novel, Out to Score (with Joanne Hichens), was published in 2006, the sales were disappointingly low. Three years later the situation is completely different. What has happened?
Well, what has happened is that there have been some 25 crime novels published in the intervening years. Add to this the arrival of the Cape Town Book Fair (which is now three years old) and has been hugely responsible for introducing local writers to readers, and the fact that there are now writers festivals all over the country which have started to show readers that local authors are not prophets of doom and can actually be quite fun (and funny). So, dare I say it, but things might be changing. We might be getting over our inferiority complex.
Another thing that Declan mention was that 'the majority of Irish crime writers [himself included] tend to take the American hard-boiled novel for their stylistic cues, with the transmogrification of Irish society over the last decade making the transplant an all-too-believable one'. That's another sentence I could apply to my home turf simply by changing 'Irish' to 'South African'. There's been some debate locally about whether this is a good thing - the American model - and what we should do to introduce a distinctly African feel.
I'm not too bothered about this as our content and sense of place gives the African feel. Actually getting snotty about the style - the wonderful hard-boiled poetry of snappy dialogue and casual violence - that we overlay onto the crime fiction, I don't even think rates as criticism. Crime fiction is pastiche (bloody nearly most of the time), so if you're half aware of what you're doing you're going to be subverting the model anyhow. Isn't that what's happening in Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels? Maybe I've had a sup too much Jameson's and should stop now.
Cheers, anyhow.
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.
ThrillerFest
ITW's annual celebration of the thriller world is the largest event of its kind, a meeting place for authors, readers, budding writers, and publishing industry professionals.
For 2011, we’ll be back in the heart of New York in July with the ThrillerFest conference including CraftFest and AgentFest.
ThrillerFest VI will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.
The dates will be July 6-9, 2011.
More information to follow.
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