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.