Undoubtedly the right thing to do this month is to welcome the return of a writer I thought had packed up storytelling and a character of his I'm only too pleased is back with us. The writer in question is a guy called Wessel Ebersohn and the character is a prison psychologist named Yudel Gordon. Both have taken the bookshops by storm with a novel called The October Killings. But before I get to that some history.Way back in 1978 I was a reporter on a newspaper in Johannesburg and about to have my first slim volume of poetry published by a house called Ravan Press. The editor was a maverick giant named Mike Kirkwood who in those dark days of apartheid did a huge amount to get black voices heard through the books he published and through a magazine called Staffrider. Well, one day I wandered into Ravan's offices to find Kirkwood dressed in a suit - by no means a usual mode of attire for him - and clutching some pages from a manuscript.
What's with the suit? I asked. Turned out he'd dressed up for a meeting with the censorship board who'd banned the first edition of Staffrider and were hell bent on doing the same to number two. Kirkwood had been off to their Pretoria offices in an attempt to persuade them from further maliciousness. He must have worked some kind of magic because Staffrider continued to appear throughout the 1980s.
'Sit, sit,' he said, waving the manuscript pages with excitement, 'let me read you some of this.' In his huge rich voice he started: 'They were coming for him as he had known they would. He could see the headlights on the track far below where the first truck had stopped at the donga and the second truck still struggled up the incline. Behind him was the spur that went all the way up to the crest of the hill and, just beyond the crest, the barbed-wire fence. He knew that beyond the fence there was nothing like you had on this side - no hill, no farmlands, no distant plain - nothing at all.'
Kirkwood flipped through the pages. 'Wonderful. You know we could make a lot of money with this novel. Just a pity the author's gone to Gollancz in the UK. Not that I blame him, I'd have done the same thing.'
That manuscript was Ebersohn's A Lonely Place to Die and brought Yudel Gordon onto the virtually non-existent SA crime fiction scene (and gave Ebersohn an international audience). The only other fictional characters around in the genre were James McClure's Mickey Zondi and Tromp Kramer. Yudel pitched up in another two novels Divide the Night and Closed Circle. Divide the Night appeared in the UK a couple of weeks before its publication in South Africa and the Pretoria censors immediately banned it. Anything to do with the prisons services got the government antsy in those days, and by virtue of his work Yudel was slap bang in the centre of the evil heart. Interestingly the only McClure novel to be banned was The Sunday Hangman which also featured the prisons' department. Anyhow, after Ebersohn published the Closed Circle in 1990 some 19 years of silence followed during which South Africa changed from a police state to a democracy awash in greed, cronyism, nepotism, corruption, sleaze, bribery, and moral turpitude. Not that I'm annoyed by the shenanigans of the current government, you understand. Then again I'm not alone in these sentiments as they boil through Ebersohn's latest, The October Killings.
In days of yore Ebersohn was a strong critic of the apartheid government and he didn't pull any punches in his novels when it came to political comment - which was why the censors tried to keep him quiet. I'm pleased to say that he's come out with guns blazing at the new bunch taking out such badly implemented policies as affirmative action - which saw a wholesale loss of white skills to more appreciative countries (some of them in Africa) - not to mention black economic empowerment schemes which have enriched a handful of individuals to obscene levels in a country where millions are poverty stricken and unemployment is 35 per cent. So if you want something more in your reading than vicarious thrills (although let me reassure you Ebersohn does the conventional thriller stuff with great expertise) then visit one of our internet stores (www.kalahari.net or www.exclusivebooks.com or www.loot.co.za) to buy a copy of his book.
And just before I go it's worth adding that Deon Meyer's Blood Safari appears in the US towards the end of this month (September). Actually the Ebersohn and the Meyer together paint a pretty accurate portrait of the tensions and faultlines bedevilling South Africa currently. Now let me go and fume at the latest high-ticket Mercedes Benz purchase by the mayor of some moribund small town municipality.
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.
