Since June we have had an unprecedented number of crime thrillers published, some seven titles: Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No; Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood; Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours; Sarah Lotz's Tooth and Nailed; Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead; and now Jassy Mackenzie's Stolen Lives and Wessel Ebersohn's Those Who Love Night. In a country that produces about 15 crime titles a year, to have most of them appear in short order is somewhat of a feast.
A number of these titles will be published - or have already been published - in the UK, US and in translation (Meyer, Smith, Mackenzie, Ebersohn). Unfortunate thing is, that with the exception of Meyer, they are not read as widely in South Africa as they should be. Which is a pity as they are getting international recognition and attention, let alone being good reads in their own right.
Fact is that in the last year local fiction sales have taken a serious knock here, and that includes crime thriller sales. Publishers and book sellers tend to blame both the economic downturn and what they call 'cultural cringe'. Now this is an old hoary one which comes up repeatedly, and on which I've written before. It implies that our reading population suffers from an inferiority complex when it comes to supporting their own writers. If a novel has flown in from overseas it has to be better. This is hogwash but it's going to take time for that message to get through.
The other factor behind the cultural cringe stems from our past. Apartheid literature was heavy - we were a nation besieged and at war with itself, so this is not surprising - and most of those books induced guilt and shame in their readers. We've come a long way since the advent of the new in 1994, but we can't quite get to believe in ourselves yet. Or so it seems, I'm not totally sure I'm convinced.
Meanwhile if you want a portrait of South African society read the books I've listed above: the Marnewick brings up some traumatic events from our past; Mzobe looks at fast living and drugs in the townships; Meyer launches his chase thriller from the increasing phenomenon of people trafficking, a topic that also features in Mackenzie's novel; Smith stays tightly focused on the traumatised coloured communities of Cape Town, ravaged by gangsterism and drugs; and Ebersohn shifts his sights to the horrors of Zimbabwe's dictatorship. Slightly to the side of these stories is Lotz's funny legal thriller. It's central story is about a father capitalising on the suffering of his stepson who has been attacked by a hyena. I guess that makes it about venality, but with a very local take.
Recently I did interviews with both Deon Meyer talking about Thirteen Hours and Sarah Lotz talking about Tooth and Nailed on my blog Crime Beat. Please click through as they both had fascinating comments to make.
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.
