In 2009 the total number went up to 15 with Mackenzie producing her second novel, My Brother's Keeper, and the return of Wessel Ebersohn to the scene with The October Killings after 19 years of silence. 

Obviously I've left out a huge number of names but I'm concentrating here on the writers who have produced more than one book - with apologies to Roger Smith who appeared last year with Mixed Blood and will publish again this year his Wake up Dead, and Sarah Lotz who hit the scene last year with Exhibit A and will be back this year with Tooth and Nailed.  I've also left out the novels of Michael Stanley simply because they're set in Botswana.

To narrow the focus a tad starting with Meyer: Dead Before Dying is a straight down the line police procedural centred around a series of murders.  Here we meet Mat Joubert - the protagonist - and Bennie Griesel, who has a small part, for the first time.  Dead at Daybreak is a PI novel where the investigator is an ex cop Zatopek van Heerden (from the first book) who is sent on an investigation that takes him into a dead man's past.

With his third novel, Heart of the Hunter, Meyer broke away from the investigatory approach and produced a chase thriller that introduced a new character, a former MK hitman, Thobela Mpayipheli.  Some of the characters from the earlier novels have walk-on parts.

Then came Meyer's Devil's Peak which gave centre stage to a wrecked Bennie Griesel who gets kicked out of the home by his wife and told to sober up.  Thobela is back on the scene again this time wielding an assegai after his adopted son is killed in a random shooting.

In last year's Blood Safari, Meyer went into the territory of private security (up till then I thought I'd had it cornered) and brought on a new character Lemmer.  This novel also touched on a major historic event - the crash of Samora Machel's plane inside South African territory in 1986 .

In short Meyer has made use of almost all the sub-categories of the crime thriller genre.

To Richard Kunzmann: he decided to go for the serial character, in his case two cops, Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala.  The first of his three books (Bloody Harvests) deals with muti (medicine) killings in the underworld of Johannesburg.  Harry gets severely treated in the first novel and resigns from the police.  But in the second novel (Salamander Cotton) his colleague Jacob manages to persuade him to put aside his new career as a carpenter/cabinet maker and investigate a recent murder and the disappearance of the murdered man's daughter three decades before.  Come the third novel, Dead-End Road, Harry is back in the cops and this time he and Jacob get caught up in revenge killings and vigilantism that link Johannesburg with remote villages in the Eastern Cape.

Like Kunzmann, Margie Orford opted for a duo: one in the police force and the other a profiler called in to help when the going gets tough.  Essentially Dr Clare Hart is the main protagonist of Margie's novels with Riedwaan Faizel as her 'handler' - in more ways than one.  So these books are part private investigator, part police procedural.  The first one, Like Clockwork, is an investigation into some brutal murders in Cape Town; the second, Blood Rose, takes us to Namibia on the trail of killers in a story that enters the terrain of the political thriller and calls up the ghosts of times past, as Deon had done.  With Daddy's Girl, a prequel to the other books, Orford is back in Cape Town and Riedwaan's daughter has been kidnapped.  Once more we are on an exploration to discover and uncover what has happened.

In the two novels by Jassy Mackenzie, the first one is part police procedural, part private investigation.  The PI is Jade de Jong whose father was a cop.  She has returned to the country after years abroad and hooks up with her father's colleague David Patel to solve a murder that has its roots in some very crooked property deals.  In her second novel, My Brother's Keeper, Mackenzie chose as her protagonist a paramedic with a mercenary background who gets pulled into a conspiracy to commit a heist inside the premises of a security company.  Mackenzie has promised to bring Jade back in her new novel to be published later in the year.

Finally to Wessel Ebersohn.  In the late 1970s, early 1980s he wrote a handful of crime novels featuring a prison psychologist called Yudel Gordon - A Lonely Place to Die, Divide the Night, Store up the Anger.  Then he went quiet but last year returned with a new Yudel Gordon novel - The October Killings.  We find that Yudel has now been given the golden handshake but he is called back from retirement and teams up with a lawyer Abigail Bukula in the justice department.  Soon these two have joined forces to stop a series of murders that have their origins back in a defence force raid in the mid-1980s. 

What is worth noting here is that many of these books are about a search for the truth.  Once the facts are known then justice - either official or unofficial - follows.  There is nothing particularly unusual here because this form is common to the genre, but what is a little different is that these investigations are in all cases under the auspices of the authorities.  In other words, none of these books deals with private investigations where the client is a private individual wanting a resolution to a private problem.

What we are dealing with is private public partnerships which have become a buzz word in the business world these days.  My understanding of these partnerships is that the private/public alliances have come about in an attempt to help government deal with the huge social challenges we face as a nation.  Are we finding an echo of this in our crime fiction?  Are our crime authors expressing a desire to see our society work?  Is that what we should read into these novels?

Take a look too at the inter-racial cooperation.  In Meyer's Devil's Peak, Bennie Griesel and Thobela Mpayipheli.  In Kunzmann's books Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala.  Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizel, in Orford's work.  Jade de Jong and David Patel in Mackenzie's first novel.  Yudel Gordon and Abigail Bukula in Ebersohn's return.  These stories are all about people who were kept apart by apartheid joining forces to combat a common evil.  They are about previously separated people forming friendships, finding common ground, getting together to shape their lives.

Now, I suppose I fit into this scheme of things by courtesy of my duo, Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso.  They were a deliberate nod and wink - and maybe this goes for Meyer, Kunzmann, Orford, Mackenzie, Ebersohn, too - to James McClure's twosome of Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi.  Perhaps McClure set up a convention and we are all honouring it.  But my take on the crime fiction scene is from a slightly different angle to my comrades.

I didn't want to be associated with the state law enforcers.  In fact Mace and Pylon have a tame cop who they bribe when they need information.  So their relationship with the authorities is strictly financial.  But apart from that they operate in the private sphere by protecting their clients from the big bad world.  It is in the pursuance of this that they get drawn into the nefarious doings of the underworld and have to confront once again the violence that they are so desperately trying to get away from.

In this world the forces of the law are almost immaterial, occasionally even a hindrance when cases go to court.  The criminal world that Mace and Pylon confront is one of state corruption and greed, and connivance for gain by the private sector.  Of course they are also - as in my novel Payback - not above a little adventurism themselves and given a chance to earn blood diamonds by conducting some arms trading they'll grab at it.  In this they are different to their compatriots in our emerging crime fiction. 

But what of all these characters' family relationships?  Well, Yudel Gordon enjoys a marriage that has notched up a good many years; Abigail by the end of The October Killings has managed to put the kick back into her not entirely happy relationship that we encounter at the start of the novel.  Mackenzie's Jade and David are not quite making it by the end of Random Violence and Orford's Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizel seem poised on the edge of being an item but one never knows.  Either way Riedwaan's come out of a broken marriage and his daughter's been taken off to Canada.  So the man's not exactly happy. 

My guys both have wives and daughters, they both enjoy stable family lives with house bonds and aspirations to middle class lifestyles.  Although Mace was tempted, and fell briefly into the arms of an old flame in Payback, his marriage survived and he wants it to remain that way.

But look at poor Bennie Griesel with his rocky marriage but at least he's trying to keep it together with his children while he battles the demon booze.  And then I suppose one could say that Lemmer gets the cherry in the final pages of Blood Safari which is a happy ending.
 
But now to the PI question.

Before Payback and Killer Country I wrote Out to Score (Cape Greed in the US) with Joanne Hichens.  That was a private investigator novel where the central character, Mullet, was contracted by a private person.  Once again the cops play a side role and do not influence the way events pan out.

What has surprised me is that there are not more PI novels of this type being written.  To a degree we could say that Mackenzie's My Brother's Keeper, falls somewhat into this domain, but not entirely.  Her character - Nick Kenyon - gets involved in the world of chaos mostly because it is being stirred up by his brother.  In that respect he is swept willy-nilly into the action, an unwilling participant.  Although the book is an investigation to find out what is going on, it is more a novel of a sibling struggle, and in its structure a thriller.

To conclude: the character of the PI is an interesting one: they operate in a difficult area between the state and their clients and they are often put upon by both.  In his instructive book on contemporary American crime fiction, Neon Noir, Woody Haut comments that private eye fiction 'always seems to flourish in periods of, or immediately following, government secrecy, duplicity and paranoia.'

Well now, if ever there was a good description of our current political climate that would be it.

Could it be that we are about to encounter a similar trend in SA crime fiction?  Referring to the 1980s in the US, Haut writes: 'With state crimes so glaringly apparent, the problem facing private-eye writers [...] would be one of locating new boundaries, redefining the relationship between the private-eye and the state, and investigating the role of the investigator.'

Interesting times ahead.

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.