International: May 2010 Archives

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.