One of the big success stories in the rise of crime fiction in South Africa since 2006 has been a series featuring a female profiler, the bright, somewhat delicate Dr Clare Hart. Her originator, Margie Orford, a Cape Town gal with a background in journalism and film, scored big time with her first two novels in the series, Like Clockwork (2006) and Blood Rose (2007) which soon found publishers in the UK and were translated into eight languages.
Two months ago she published the third in the series, Daddy's Girl, a prequel, which is gathering a fair amount of ra-ra press in South Africa. One newspaper called her the 'queen of South African crime thrillers', another said she was Cape Town's Val McDermid. Reviewers have described her books as 'smart, sassy and sexy,' 'terrific reads' 'chilling reading' and 'impossible to let go of'.
A couple of years back Margie ran a series of creative writing workshops with prisoners at Victor Verster prison (as it happens the place where Nelson Mandela spent the last 18 months of his 27 years of incarceration. Although by then he was being accommodated in a house in the prison grounds. But that is another story altogether.) At the base of Orford's three novels is a darkness - an evil - that targets children and by so doing destroys families. In this darkness swirl gangsters and murderers, rapists and paedophiles - all the horrors of the modern demonology. It is her pervading theme, and Daddy's Girl is about the abduction of a six-year-old, Yasmin. What intrigued me was how her work with the prisoners might have influenced her approach to Daddy's Girl.
'That sense of darkness - a kind of moral contagion - is not so much the theme as the context against which I write,' she told me. 'I think of my theme as a resistance to that, a refusal of the brutishness of might is right. My prison work - the year long writing workshop - revealed some unexpected things to me. I had and still have no idea of what crimes the men I worked with had committed. What I did realise was the unrelenting horror of the worlds that most of those men came from - no fathers, little education, a brutal urban landscape, gangs as family substitute. And for the most part an unrelenting and humiliating entrapment in poverty and unemployment. The imprint of the social and psychic effects of apartheid is the DNA of so much of the violence that surrounds us. You don't need to be that smart to figure that out. These men - and once I knew fifteen I could imagine all the thousands of other men in prison are not monsters (although some have done monstrous things). They are part of us - us on the outside, us filled with fear - and we need to find a way to live together.'
Orford's novel is firmly rooted in Cape Town, known in SA as the Mother City. In fact, it seems to interrogate the city. For instance, when Clare Hart interviews witnesses near the ballet school where the young girl was abducted, she drags out of them details that they were not even aware were significant. This seems to suggest that the citizens of the city all bear witness to the evil of the city, often without knowing it.
To my speculation Orford responded 'We are certainly all witness to the evil of this Mother City. Most of us choose to look away much of the time. A police director did tell me once though that how you find out what happened is finding out things that looked different, that sounded different, that smelled different. People might not be aware of something until they think through what they did not see or hear at a particular time. A disruption of the familiar - that leaves a trace too.'
There is a sense in Orford's books of a city at war with itself, a sense of devils but also of angels even if the angels come with emotional baggage. Foremost among the angels in her three novels are Clare Hart and the cop Riedwaan Faizel but Orford is also at pains to present the role of the foot soldiers - those who suffer and are deeply wounded but who persevere in helping to right the wrongs. The two champions in the current novel are Pearl and Calvaleen. So despite the prevailing mood of darkness there is too the 'whipped pink as the sky lighten[s] in the east'.
Orford says she wasn't thinking of angels when she wrote Daddy's Girl but that in her Cape Town she is frequently struck by how 'damaged people try to save other people from themselves - how women who have been brutalised will try to break the cycle of abuse by not passing it on, by doing things differently, by speaking out. Those people who picket the gangsters' houses are very brave - and some have paid for their bravery with their lives. But I have been struck by how many people choose to behave morally and who recover. Resilience in the face of trauma is fascinating. And I do think that there is an innate goodness - or perhaps an innate sense that things can be different - in most people. It is possible to take things on - and women do this often - and resist the brutality that has become so normalised that many people have stopped being outraged.'
Like many crime novelists, science plays an important part in Orford's plots. Although in this instance she felt she had eliminated it because, as she says, the novel is 'set over three days and on a weekend so no one would be cooking things in patria dishes'. But she admits, 'I do love science - the idea of it, the drive that our culture has to dismantle all the bits that make up that whole as if those will explain what happened. That said, I do use ballistics and there is quite a bit of surveillance technology. It fascinates me how people (the scientists) sublimate their horror (or indifference) to suffering and turn it into a puzzle, how they look for and find patterns. I find patterns very curious - the invisible marks, the traces left behind. We all know that every contact leaves a trace. But how to see it? How to interpret it? What to do with it? Where to look? What to do with what you've seen? Science too is a world well-suited for a female lead. Much of the wall to wall fighting possible if you have a male lead is tricky with a tiny little tough-chick like Clare. She has to use her brain to solve things - and science is a way of borrowing other people's brains from them so you can figure something out.'
Margie Orford's novels are available in the UK and through Amazon and can be ordered at these online SA stores: http://www.kalahari.net/ or http://www.loot.co.za/shop/welcome or http://www.exclusivebooks.com/ .
All that remains is for me to send Seasons greetings to all those members and visitors to the ITW site. Hamba kahle, mooi loop, go well.
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.
