There was a quote from Ian Rankin floating around the web recently that had him lamenting the distinction that's made between crime fiction and literary fiction by reviewers and prize administrators. The UK Independent had him saying, 'The best crime fiction today is talking about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations ... some of the best crime fiction is literature. And some of the best literature is crime fiction.'I'm hardly going to disagree with this and thought it might be worth pointing up the situation in South Africa. Ours is a country built on a history of conflict between the indigenous people and those who came to settle here. The politics of conflict and resolution are among our first articles of co-existence, and our literature, certainly our apartheid literature, drew attention to this contention and the attendant inequities of legalised discrimination.
Our literature as a result was a deadly serious, high-minded affair. Then along comes democracy and with it the gradual emergence of a commercial fiction - genre fiction, be it crime thrillers, science fiction, love sagas, historical romances, the airport stuff that most nations take for granted. I thought this a wonderful departure full of possibilities and decided I had had enough of writing literary novels and turned to crime fiction.
Now with the publication of my third crime novel (Killer Country which is the second in a planned trilogy that began with a novel called Payback) I am reviewed thus in the upmarket Sunday Independent:
'South African literature has come a long way from Cry, the Beloved Country to Killer Country. In Paton's great liberal novel, a cry of humanist outrage at the implicit violence of social racism, as much as in Nadine Gordimer's novels about the ways in which things went wrong in South Africa's 20th century, there is a deep moral sense, an inviolable core of belief that things can, and should, be otherwise. Ditto the works of Andre Brink, Achmat Dangor, Breyten Breytenbach, Marlene van Niekerk, Wally Serote, even JM Coetzee. And, one should add, Mike Nicol before he turned into a crime-thriller writer.'
And then later:
'[The] big question for the serious critics of South African literature becomes relevant here: has Nicol found the form (crime-thriller, morally deadpan narration, best gun wins, amoral universe) that allows the most astute social analysis possible in current conditions, or is he a formerly serious, literary writer who has deliberately dumbed down to play to the gallery, and to make better returns from his full-time writing? (Serious South African writing does not sell.)'
And finally:
'Nicol makes excellent use of the laconic, racy style so typical of crime thrillers and their protagonists. His writing is taut and snappy, his chapters quick and compelling. His heroes, Bishop and Busi, have seen it all, done it all. They are, to a large extent, adequate centres of consciousness for the kind of world we live in.
'But there are troubling questions, too. One must ask: is this it, then? Is this kind of narrative representation, implying a severely foreshortened range of inferiority and perceptual/experiential variation, what our literature has come to? In several of the pot-boiling short chapters, especially towards the end of Payback and Killer Country, Nicol stretches his readers' credulity quite severely for the sake of plot, and the texture of the fiction begins to feel compromised. Is that good enough for South African readers? It is a question Nicol might have to consider, at some point, too.'
The point that the reviewer missed is that commercial fiction can and does exist quite happily alongside serious literary fiction. And writers should be allowed to write what they will. My decision to try genre fiction was not about playing to the gallery or dumbing down but simply about writing a different type of novel. Nor was financial return a motivating element. In fact the crime novels have proved to be a lot less lucrative than the literary ones I wrote in the 1990s.
But to return to Rankin's contention about tackling the big moral issues of the day. He's right, crime fiction is excellently placed to do this and it was a major reason why I was attracted to it. Come to that there has always been a political element in our crime fiction. It started with James McClure, continued with Wessel Ebersohn (who is once again tearing into the government and commercial elite, see his The October Killings) and crops up in Deon Meyer's books - criticism of the judicial system in Devil's Peak, the machinations of the secret service in Heart of the Hunter, and an apartheid crime in Blood Safari.
So now the question is being asked (in our serious Mail & Guardian): 'Could crime fiction be the new direction the "political novel" is taking in contemporary South Africa? If that is so, what does this say about our self-perception as a nation?' It seems we can't get away from taking ourselves seriously and viewing everything that our writers dish up as in some way a message about our life and times.
Of course being a writer in a troubled society puts you in an ambivalent position. You might want to write a book that can be read on the beach but you might also want to say something about the state of your society. In other words, deal with Rankin's big moral questions. This is the conundrum I find myself in, and, admittedly, I want it both ways. For the record then, according to that review in the M&G, my 'vision' of my country finds it 'bleak, brutal and corrupt'.
True enough. But I hope the story is racy. And it is, after all, a fiction.
Now with the publication of my third crime novel (Killer Country which is the second in a planned trilogy that began with a novel called Payback) I am reviewed thus in the upmarket Sunday Independent: 'South African literature has come a long way from Cry, the Beloved Country to Killer Country. In Paton's great liberal novel, a cry of humanist outrage at the implicit violence of social racism, as much as in Nadine Gordimer's novels about the ways in which things went wrong in South Africa's 20th century, there is a deep moral sense, an inviolable core of belief that things can, and should, be otherwise. Ditto the works of Andre Brink, Achmat Dangor, Breyten Breytenbach, Marlene van Niekerk, Wally Serote, even JM Coetzee. And, one should add, Mike Nicol before he turned into a crime-thriller writer.'
And then later:
'[The] big question for the serious critics of South African literature becomes relevant here: has Nicol found the form (crime-thriller, morally deadpan narration, best gun wins, amoral universe) that allows the most astute social analysis possible in current conditions, or is he a formerly serious, literary writer who has deliberately dumbed down to play to the gallery, and to make better returns from his full-time writing? (Serious South African writing does not sell.)'
And finally:
'Nicol makes excellent use of the laconic, racy style so typical of crime thrillers and their protagonists. His writing is taut and snappy, his chapters quick and compelling. His heroes, Bishop and Busi, have seen it all, done it all. They are, to a large extent, adequate centres of consciousness for the kind of world we live in.
'But there are troubling questions, too. One must ask: is this it, then? Is this kind of narrative representation, implying a severely foreshortened range of inferiority and perceptual/experiential variation, what our literature has come to? In several of the pot-boiling short chapters, especially towards the end of Payback and Killer Country, Nicol stretches his readers' credulity quite severely for the sake of plot, and the texture of the fiction begins to feel compromised. Is that good enough for South African readers? It is a question Nicol might have to consider, at some point, too.'
The point that the reviewer missed is that commercial fiction can and does exist quite happily alongside serious literary fiction. And writers should be allowed to write what they will. My decision to try genre fiction was not about playing to the gallery or dumbing down but simply about writing a different type of novel. Nor was financial return a motivating element. In fact the crime novels have proved to be a lot less lucrative than the literary ones I wrote in the 1990s.
But to return to Rankin's contention about tackling the big moral issues of the day. He's right, crime fiction is excellently placed to do this and it was a major reason why I was attracted to it. Come to that there has always been a political element in our crime fiction. It started with James McClure, continued with Wessel Ebersohn (who is once again tearing into the government and commercial elite, see his The October Killings) and crops up in Deon Meyer's books - criticism of the judicial system in Devil's Peak, the machinations of the secret service in Heart of the Hunter, and an apartheid crime in Blood Safari.
So now the question is being asked (in our serious Mail & Guardian): 'Could crime fiction be the new direction the "political novel" is taking in contemporary South Africa? If that is so, what does this say about our self-perception as a nation?' It seems we can't get away from taking ourselves seriously and viewing everything that our writers dish up as in some way a message about our life and times.
Of course being a writer in a troubled society puts you in an ambivalent position. You might want to write a book that can be read on the beach but you might also want to say something about the state of your society. In other words, deal with Rankin's big moral questions. This is the conundrum I find myself in, and, admittedly, I want it both ways. For the record then, according to that review in the M&G, my 'vision' of my country finds it 'bleak, brutal and corrupt'.
True enough. But I hope the story is racy. And it is, after all, a fiction.
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.
