International

Crime fiction and books on true crime I tend to see as two very different things, especially in a country such as South Africa where crime is in our faces much of the time.  But there is a tendency at local book fair discussion groups to lump the two together.  Invariably we end up at the same table.

This happened at the Cape Town Book Fair this year, it happened at a conference in Johannesburg last year that was ostensibly about true crime, and it happen last month at the Mail & Guardian Literary Festival in Johannesburg.  Which is unfortunate as I don't believe our true crime scene has anything to do with our fantasy world of crime fiction.

Nor is it a response to the crime situation, although this has been suggested by some critics.  As I've said before, our crime fiction is about the normalization of a society that was deformed for decades by apartheid and before that by colonialism.  We have finally given ourselves permission to write commercial fiction.

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.

Two years ago a hard-hitting anti-capital punishment book hit the shelves here called Shepherds & Butchers by an advocate named Chris Marnewick.  The book was a mixture of fact (the gruesome details of a hanging) and fiction, the crimes that had resulted in the various characters being sentenced to death.  The book was controversial even though South African abolished the death penalty some years ago.

Last month Marnewich published his second novel, The Soldier Who Said No, which has another social injustice at its heart.  But this is a bonus.  Because for the rest his novel is an unputdownable thriller.  Under the auspicious of my blog, Crime Beat, he and I had a chat about his new novel.

After the non-fiction/fiction of Shepherds & Butchers, you've moved into what could be regarded as the terrain of the thriller.  In an interview you indicated that this was at the suggestion of your publisher, Umuzi. It's difficult to imagine this book being anything other than it is; did you have to make many changes?

The issue central to this month's column actually came up during a panel discussion at the London Book Fair in April, so my apologies for only getting round to it now, but there've been equally pressing issues to write about in between.  Always assuming that in the heady world of crime thrillers, there are some issues more pressing than others, that is.  The LBF panel was to address the matter of writing crime fiction in South Africa.  As is the nature of these things, it did more than that.

The 'more than' part was about race - which, for those of us at the bottom of the African continent, is a topic that's never far from our everyday lives let alone our fiction.  In the run-up to the panel discussion I asked local crime novelists for their opinions on the main topic and ran them on my blog Crime Beat and then summarised them in my May column for ITW.  But the focus there was violence in our society and its representation in our fiction.  I felt the race issue needed a separate outing.

I'd been wondering for a while about what was going on in SA crime fiction and decided to take a closer look recently.  Some time back a local critic, Louis Greenberg, got to the nub of issue, I thought, with his remark that our crime fiction was about finding common ground in our beleaguered democracy - the 'beleaguered democracy' part being my words not his.  Anyhow it got me to pondering 'thusly' (to use Declan Burke's favourite word):

A quick scope: when I first thought about writing crime fiction in the late 1990s, I looked around at a rather bleak landscape with one lone figure on a motorbike: that lone figure was Deon Meyer.  By 2000 he'd published two novels in English, Dead before Dying and Dead at Daybreak.  He remained the lonely upholder of the faith until crime fiction took off from about 2005 with Richard Kunzmann's Bloody Harvests, and Andrew Brown's hybrid literary/crime novel Coldsleep Lullaby which went on to win the Sunday Times Literary Award for Fiction.

The following year Kunzmann brought out another novel, Salamander Cotton, and Margie Orford published the first of her Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizel series, Like Clockwork.  In 2007 Orford was back with Blood Rose and Meyer brought out his Devil's Peak.  The following year, 2008 saw 13 crime novels published in English and Afrikaans and of note among them was Jassy Mackenzie's Random Violence.

At the London Book Fair last month there was a panel discussion on writing crime fiction in South Africa scheduled with the my comrades Deon Meyer, Angela Makholwa, Jonny Steinberg and Gillian Slovo.  The foursome to be kept in check by Tom Harper.  In the event a volcano blew up in Iceland and the number of panellists shrunk because Makholwa and Steinberg couldn't fly into London.  The discussion bravely went ahead and Harper reports that it was lively and controversial.  Deon Meyer weighed in with statistics which made us sound as safe (or as dangerous) as Ireland.

As a prelude to the discussion I canvassed some local authors to get their thoughts on the topic and here are the choice bits:

Deon Meyer: South Africa influences me in every possible way, of course. I live and breathe this country, just like everybody else. I listen, I talk, I think, I read (I try to avoid TV news, though), and it permeates me and my stories. There is no way one can escape the history, the fabric, the current political and social situation and events. Especially when you have policemen and women as characters, because their lives are touched by everything in the country every day.

Northern Irish Crime Fiction - The Next Generation

You've heard of Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway and Stuart Neville, right? If not, you're missing out. You should do yourself a favour and look for their work immediately. The talented trio are the newest blood in the Northern Irish crime fiction scene and they're doing the likes of Colin Bateman, Paul Charles and Sam Millar proud.

This month you can pick up the paperback release of Adrian McKinty's FIFTY GRAND and get your mitts on a copy of Brian McGilloway's latest Inspector Devlin novel, THE RISING. And as if he needed something to keep up with his contemporaries, Stuart Neville only went and won the 2010 LA Times Book Prize this month. But major award-winning skills aside, you shouldn't forget that the follow up to his award winning debut (THE GHOST OF BELFAST in the US -- AKA THE TWELVE in the UK), COLLUSION, will be released in the summer.

The last two months have gone in far too fast for me to keep track of.  Why? Well, apart from starting a new day job I've also been concentrating on a new anthology of short fiction that I co-edited with fellow writer Mike Stone. Requiems for the Departed is an anthology of crime fiction stories that are based on Irish mythology. It features top shelf work from Ken Bruen, Maxim Jakubowski, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty, Sam Millar, John Grant, Garry Kilworth, and many more. And one of my favourite American crime writers had this to say about it:

"Requiems For The Departed is as Irish as a broken heart, yet universal in appeal. Stuart Neville's "Queen of the Hill" alone is worth the price of admission, but it's only the cream at the top of the pint. With stories from the likes of Bruen, McKinty, Moore, and Grant, you'll want to squeeze every last drop out of this glass." -- Reed Farrel Coleman three-time Shamus Award winner and author of Innocent Monster

The collection is set for release on 1st June 2010. For a full table of contents and a peep at the snazzy cover visit CSNI. Requiems for the Departed will be available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and some of my favourite bricks and mortar bookstores.

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.

A writer who's been making waves in South Africa of late is a chap called Andrew Brown.  In 2007 he walked off with the Sunday Times award for fiction - which is a big deal here - for a novel called Coldsleep Lullaby.  Now the thing about Coldsleep Lullaby is that it intertwines two stories, a contemporary one and an historical one, and central to the contemporary story is a murder.

So, three years back when local crime novels were thin on the ground, some of us pulled Brown into the ranks.  He came reluctantly it has to be said and I understand why.  Coldsleep Lullaby used thriller techniques but it wasn't crime fiction, not in the conventional sense anyhow.

Now he's published another novel, Refuge, which involves crime and the underworld and a subject which has crept into dinkum crime fiction - the refugee in our cities.  After all didn't Ian Rankin devote a whole book to the subject - Fleshmarket Close?