International: September 2010 Archives

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.