One of the bright new lights on the South African crime fiction scene is a Johannesburg gal called Jassy Mackenzie. She gave notice of her intentions last year with the publication of a novel titled Random Violence that, by the by, got through to the second stage of the ITW debut fiction competition. This book was also shortlisted on the Africa section of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Not bad going for a first outing. To top it she signed US and German deals for that book and her new one, My Brother's Keeper.
Of this she has Jeffery Deaver giving a helluva shout on the cover: 'A smart, page-turning thriller populated with living, breathing characters.' Let it be said, too, that local reviewers have heeded his words and come out smiling, heaping a head of praise on Jassy.
The first time I met her was in a coffee bar in Johannesburg where she told me she edited a hair stylists magazine (but, hey, we all have to earn a living somehow) and then a few nights later we met again at a Fright Night dinner. Now Fright Night dinners - where people flock to eat and listen to thriller writers holding court - are high on the Johannesburg social calendar. They're arranged by radio 702's talk show host, Jenny Crwys-Williams (who probably does more for books in this country than anyone I know) and that particular night featured Jeffery Deaver (who'd arrived in the country without his luggage). While being quizzed by Jenny, Jassy happened to mention an attraction to scissors. Strangely, she has yet to use them to skewer a character to death.
With the publication of My Brother's Keeper, I decided it was time to put her under the interrogation light. Some background: Random Violence was about a scary man with psychopathic tendencies. In her new novel she's portrayed a similar sort of evil character, Paul Kenyon.
So what is it about these kinds of men/characters that you find so fascinating, Jassy?
I think it must be a serious character flaw on my part that I love flawed characters! Although my villains are both cold-blooded killers, I think Paul Kenyon is somewhat more human and less psychopathic than Whiteboy [from Random Violence]. If I had to choose to be stranded on a desert island with one of them it would be a difficult choice, but I'd probably go with Paul. I think I might live a few hours longer.
My Brother's Keeper looks to the old Cain and Abel story not only for its title but for its relationship between the two brothers. As with Cain and Abel so with Nick (the Abel character) and his elder brother Paul. By attaching your story to the biblical mythology that places Cain as the third human being to be created and the first murderer which tends to suggest that we are not a great species are you advancing a similar argument?
Not altogether, because there are two pairs of brothers in the book. Nick and Paul have a dysfunctional, hate-filled relationship, but the two young black brothers Sipho and Khani have the opposite - Sipho is striving to be his younger brother's keeper even if he goes about providing for Khani in a rather unfortunate way.
While it would be fascinating to pursue the Cain/Paul and Abel/Nick relationship to the end of the story it would spoil the twists and turns for readers, but the use of this biblical myth did lead you and your characters to an interesting moral dilemma. Without saying what happens finally, did you agonise over that dilemma or was it inevitable?
The moral dilemma was one of the elements that made this story so exciting to write. I found myself getting disturbingly involved with both Nick's and Paul's characters as I wrote my way towards the conclusion. This made the ending inevitable, because their conflict took over the story and all I had to do was let their actions guide its course.
You have effectively two intertwined plots - the story of the brothers and the story of a heist. The playing out of both constantly rearranges what the reader begins to expect of the narrative. In other words your story has more twists than a corkscrew. Do you plot all this out in advance or did it come about while you were writing?
I don't plot in advance at all, although I did have an idea when I started writing the beginning of the book of how I wanted it to end. The corkscrew twists and turns in the story were as surprising to me as I hoped they would be to the reader.
Let's look at the main protagonist Nick Kenyon. He's a paramedic but he has also been a medic for mercenary armies and for this reason he's a man with a dubious past. For instance, he knows people who can find out information that ordinary citizens would never be able to get their hands on. In a genre where it is increasingly difficult to find new types of heroes what led you to an outsider like Nick?
Paramedics make wonderful crime heroes because they are the first responder in so many critical situations where crimes have just been committed. However, my main problem with using a paramedic was that they are such good guys, and good guys in real life end up being boring characters in novels. So I set out to create a past for Nick that would give him just enough "bad" to make him a compelling character and add some spice to the sugar of his paramedic goodness. And by the time I'd created his past, I had the makings of the novel's plot as well.
Will you bring Nick back in future novels?
I would love to write about Nick again. He may have to wait a couple of years though, because I have other plans for the next two books.
Nick is a man unlucky in love. He is divorced from his wife and he falls for Rachel - a woman who steps unwittingly into the hell that is My Brother's Keeper. Yet in the end Nick loses her. Why is he so unfortunate?
I didn't want a traditionally happy ending full of hearts and flowers and cute little puppies. I wanted some issues to be resolved but others to be left open-ended. I think if the story had concluded with Nick and Rachel riding off into the sunset, it would have been clichéd.
And then there is Paul's treatment of his lover. At first he is prepared to sacrifice her but at the last moment he recants? Your protagonists in Random Violence also had an uneasy love relationship. Is love in your fiction an unattainable ideal?
Well, so far it certainly seems that way. I think a conflicted love relationship makes for a wonderful subplot in a crime novel. It provides another reason to keep turning the pages during those sections of the book when the baddies aren't actively trying to kill the hero.
On a different tack altogether, there is a fair amount of technical information in My Brother's Keeper, be it the paramed details, or the helicopter scene or the inner workings of a security company operating cash collection vans. Did your search for information take you into some strange and intriguing places?
Yes. My medical knowledge is just about non-existent, so the book took a huge amount of research and I was fortunate to be able to spend an entire day at Netcare 911 head office speaking to many different people, and I also had a paramedic read the entire manuscript to make sure that I hadn't inadvertently made any glaring errors.
As for the cash collection company, that wasn't as easy because they flatly refused to let me come and tour their premises. I think they must have thought I was a wannabe robber. So I had to resort to devious methods to get my information from there.
I remember driving out to Modderbee Prison in Springs [a town not far from Johannesburg] to see what it looked like, but I was so caught up in the book and thinking so furiously about how I was going to resolve the ending and what all the characters would do, that I kept overshooting my turnoffs on the highway and losing my way. I did this about three times on the way there and the way back. At one stage, I thought I'd never get home again.
I seem to recall your saying that Jade, the feisty PI from Random Violence, was set to make a return. Will she feature in your next novel?
Yes, Jade is dusting off her Glock again. The next novel, Stolen Lives, sees her hired as a bodyguard by a wealthy housewife whose husband has disappeared. When his horrifically tortured body is discovered at their Sandown home, Jade realises that her client is concealing some vital truths from her.
Meanwhile, Superintendent David Patel, Jade's conflicted love interest, is pursuing two suspected human traffickers who have fled to South Africa from the UK. When new evidence comes to light, Jade and David discover their cases are connected - and they will need to move fast if they are to have any hope of preventing a further, terrible crime.
So there it is, Jassy Mackenzie, in full flood. If you're in the US, I'll update you on the publication dates of Jassy's books nearer the time, but if you can't wait that long you can order them at these online SA stores: http://www.kalahari.net/ or http://www.loot.co.za/shop/welcome or http://www.exclusivebooks.com/.
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.
