About Crime Beat

Crime Beat has gone through a number of phases since I started the blog with Barbara Erasmus in August 2007. For a while it was extremely productive, then it wasn’t. For a while Chanette Paul helped by posting Afrikaans features but then pressure of work pulled her away. All of that led to a Sunshine Award last year (conferred by the energetic Janet Rudolph of Mystery Fanfare). It’s a mark of recognition made by international bloggers dedicated to crime fiction.

Thus far during 2011 Crime Beat has been somewhat tardy, but that is now set to change: enter phase the next. It was my good fortune to meet Liz Fletcher at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May 2011, and eventually I managed to twist her arm into joining the blog. Liz is a krimihead of note, and is registered at the University of the Western Cape to do an MA in SA crime fiction. So I figured we’d be in for some interesting posts.

If you’re visiting for the first time, here’s a guided tour of our stash: On the ‘Shelf’ page you’ll find news of the latest releases and a backlist of the crime novels that’ve appeared since 2008. In the right hand panel is a menu listing the latest posts and below that links to authors’ websites and to other good crime fiction blogs.

On the Blog page is the daily hot stuff. Over the years Crime Beat has interviewed every local crime fiction author and these interviews can be tracked down by inserting Author Interviews in the search panel.

If you click on the ‘Pages’ button you’ll find a short history of SA crime writing and a Who’s Who of SA crime and thriller writers including biogs, titles and their crimefighters.

As we’re in the business of posting anything that ups the profile of local crime fiction, if you have news, gossip, tittle-tattle notes, death threats, hit lists send these gems and nuggets to crimebeat@book.co.za.

Crime Beat editors:

Mike Nicol is a full-time writer, born in Cape Town but with a soft spot for Johannesburg. He has written a handful of non-fiction titles, some poetry (although admittedly that was a long time ago) and a number of novels, most recently Payback – a crime novel set in Cape Town, the first in his Revenge Trilogy. Number two, Killer Country, appeared in March 2010, and the final one, Black Heart in April 2011. Before that he wrote (with Joanne Hichens) the private investigator krimi, Out to Score.

*
*
Liz Fletcher was born in Durban and studied at Rhodes University. After graduating she travelled through the Far East, then went over to Ireland and finally ended up doing dreadful sales jobs in London before returning to South Africa and a new city, the crime fiction capital of Cape Town. She is writing an MA on South African crime fiction.

*
*
*

Past editors: Barbara Erasmus and Chanette Paul
Past columnists: Joanne Hichens and Jassy Mackenzie
*