Well, I reckon so.  Not only did two of the debut writers, Jassy Mackenzie and Michael Stanley, make good on their promise with new titles - My Brother's Keeper and A Deadly Trade respectively - but a hardboiled new name took the opening months of the year by storm.  I'm talking about Roger Smith and his brutal Mixed Blood which added another dimension to our crime fiction.  Here is the local representative of the Richard Stark tradition with no-nonsence plots and a kind of in-your-face violence which left many readers gasping.  The movie rights of his book were immediately snapped up and as the year went on he found publishers in a number of countries. 

Also in the first half of the year came another thriller from Rob Marsh, Beasts of Prey, which gets underway in the Kruger Park.  (An aside: not only did that wonderful game reserve prove a useful setting for Marsh but it was also Meyer's stomping ground for his 2008 novel, Blood Safari.)  Marsh's novel was followed by a debut from Brandon Carstens who published a graphic novel, Project H.  The pity here was that Carstens had to self-publish as none of the publishers would take him on, primarily because marketing a graphic novel is as yet unchartered waters.

A month later one of the rising stars of local fiction, Sarah Lotz, delivered a legal thriller called Exhibit A that also opened a new vein in our nascent krimi tradition.  Believe it or not, although lawyers have had bit parts in our crime fiction, this was the first time they'd featured as the protagonists.  This one happened to be a slovenly chap coated in doghair.  I hear he is to make a return in a few months time.

Undoubtedly the two big end-of-year bonanzas were the return of Wessel Ebersohn after 19 years of silence with a Yudel Gordon thriller, The October Killings, and the third nailbiter in Margie Orford's Clare Hart series, Daddy's Girl.

The year was also marked by the publication of the first crime fiction anthology, Bad Company, edited by Joanne Hichens which featured 17 writers, almost the entire clutch of English crime writers plus a couple from other language groups.  Hot on the heels of that came the reissuing of some titles: all of Deon Meyer's (not the first time and certainly not the last in his career), Margie Orford's Like Clockwork and my own Payback.  I mention the reprints because re-issues are still a novelty and I take them as positive signs that we are beginning to increase our home readership, even if the sales figures are hardly mega.

In fact the sluggish sales figures remain a mystery.  Book reviewers in the major newspapers are most supportive of the genre and authors get a fair number of column centimetres in interviews, let alone radio (and occasionally television) time.  In addition, the genre has been receiving novelty attention at the various festivals.  It had a place at the Time of the Writer week in Durban in March, featured in panel discussions at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May, the next month it got an outing at the Cape Town Book Fair and at a University of the Witwatersrand conference, and this month (January) a bunch of us will be holding forth at the University of Cape Town's Summer School.  The public profile couldn't be better.  So why are the sales figures still so paltry?  Dunno.

Last year, the Afrikaans scene also added eight titles to their growing list with a collection of short stories from Deon Meyer, two thrillers from the prolific Francois Bloemhof, a third in her series by Chanette Paul, a second in a series from Piet Steyn and then a number of debuts from Chris Karsten (known for his true crime books), Karin Brynard, Tinus Viviers and Wynand Coetzer.  How many of these books will find English translations remains an open question.  Interestingly they generally have vastly bigger sales than those of us writing in English.  Such are the conundrums of crime fiction in South Africa.

Finally, best wishes for the New Year.  And, er, I'm off to the beach.

Books by the authors mentioned are available at Kalahari http://www.kalahari.net/ or Loot http://www.loot.co.za/shop/welcome or Exclusive Books 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.