Crime Beat: Crime at Franschhoek

That much anticipated and hugely enjoyable Franschhoek Literary Festival happens again at the end of this week and crime fiction gets a good outing once more. The full programme can be downloaded here but for those only interested in the sexy krimi world, here are the sessions. There are also a number of true crime sessions but as I’m a purist you’ll have to track those down on the programme. The Afrikaans session on Sunday may or may not be about crime, the rubric is ambivalent.

Friday 11
13h00 – 14h00

Crime sistas (Hospice Hall)
Joanne Hichens (Divine Justice) holds a magnifying glass to the craft, aided by fellow crime writers Shamini Flint from Singapore, author of the Inspector Singh series, and Hawa Golakai, Liberian author of The Lazarus Effect, the first of a new series set in Cape Town.

16h00-17h00
Brotherhood of crime (School Hall)
Book broadcaster Karabo Kgoleng takes on three masters of crime fiction: Deon Meyer (Trackers), Andrew Brown (Solace) and Peter Church (Bitter Pill).

Saturday 12
11h30 – 12h30
Crime: East meets West (Hospice Hall)
Capetonian Margie Orford (Gallows Hill) banters with Shamini Flint (Inspector Singh Investigates) from Singapore.

14h30-15h30
Is crime fiction the new political novel? (Church Hall)
Lynda Gilfillan threw down the gauntlet in a debate about genre snobs on Stellenbosch University’s SLiPnet site, and chairs the next round of jousting with Margie Orford, Leon de Kock and Imraan Coovadia.

19h30
Sunday Times dinner at Reuben’s
The Sunday Times and Exclusive Books host a crime fiction evening – Crimes and Misdemeanours with Michele Magwood interrogating Hawa Golakai, Mike Nicol, and Margie Orford – at Reuben’s Restaurant and Bar. The dinner is sold out.

Sunday 13
10h00 – 11h00
Crime ace (Congregational Church)
Jenny Crwys-Williams in conversation with Deon Meyer

11h30 – 12h30
So sien ek dit (Church Hall)
Helen Naude gesels met Deon Meyer (7 Dae), Dana Snyman (Hiervandaan) en Kerneels Breytenbach (Piekniek by Hangklip).

14h30 – 15h30
Two to tango (Hospice Hall)
Andrew Brown talks to husband-and-wife team Lisa Lazarus and Greg Fried about their co-authored psychological thriller When in Broad Daylight I Open my Eyes (by ‘Greg Lazarus’).

Crime Beat: The view from elsewhere

Occasionally reviews from elsewhere pitch up in Crime Beat’s inbox. Here’s one from Gunter Blank, the Sonntagzeitung’s crime fiction reviewer, about a novel called High Life which took his fancy. It seems it’s out there in the territory of the perverse. He writes:

This is a truly bizarre novel, that tackles the lifestyle of tinsel town and the rich and famous in a way you have never read before. It’s aptly titled High Life and it’s by Matthew Stokoe and is a rags to riches story of a very very special kind.

It starts with lowlife protagonist Jack finding out that his estranged prostitute wife has been brutally killed and eviscerated after having donated a kidney for a quick thirty grand. Seeing his dreams of movie stardom going down the drain he becomes obsessed with finding her killer. He hangs around the hookers and hustlers and pretty quickly becomes one himself. Maybe it’s because he needs the money and information, but maybe his fall is because he has deeper cravings too.

Anyway while hustling he meets Bella, a mind-blowing femme fatale, a medic who might lead him to the folks that take kidneys from the poor and sell them. Or do they? So far it sounds like a nice, easy read. You think of the writer tackling organ trade using the poor for the needs of the rich and famous.

Well, it kinda is, only in a way you would never had imagined. Forget American Psycho, this is about aberrations Brett Easton Ellis wouldn’t even dare to dream about.

Enter officer Ryan. A twenty-something year old veteran of LAPD Vice, and a man with an agenda of his own. Only it ain’t so clear what exactly his agenda is. Is he out to find the killer or aching to get his share of L.A.’s riches?

He and Jack team up (although Jack’s not exactly exercising free will in the association) to form crime fiction’s most hilarious and sickest tag team and together they set out on a quest for what you might call justice. At the same time they’re trying hard to become part of the chosen few and committing most every conceivable atrocity along the way. Let me put it like this: they start enjoying doing certain things, of which full-on necrophilia is definitely one of the lesser vices.

What makes High Life so disturbing is that Stokoe describes the crusade of his heroes so intimately, that against your will he draws you straight into the hell of unfulfilled desires, and all with a deadpan style, that makes American Psycho pretty much look like the comic book it always was. Everyone, movie stars and hookers alike, seems to crave the ultimate high, almost no one is able to find it, or once they find it, they crave the next level.

I only can recommend diving into the abyss Mr Stokoe opens for you, but don’t expect to surface unharmed. I ain’t saying, that Stokoe is the second coming of Jim Thompson or James Ellroy or that his cruising of L.A. offers totally new insights into the underbelly of the city, but style wise he can swim with the best and his gross depictions of greed and sex driven violence render all that psychologically charged child molesting serial killer stuff useless, senseless and worthless.

Here’s an interview 3:am Magazine did with Stokoe.

Crime Beat: Local krimiheads on international krimis

Because it’s always of interest knowing what international krimis the local crime writers are reading, I put out a query recently and found that one didn’t read crime fiction when she was writing it, while another was only reading literature with a capital L. But those who did respond suggested…

Roger Smith (Dust Devils, Wake Up Dead, Mixed Blood) wrote: ‘Dunno if it’s just me but I’m reading very little crime fiction that’s impressing me, and I can only come up with one title that I’ve read in recent months that I thought was superb: The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis.

‘It’s a sparse, noir tale of a sick and slowly dying hit man, the homicide cop trying to run him to ground and a resourceful teenager carving out an improbable life after both parents abandon him. James Sallis, sadly not very well-known in South Africa, is one of the finest prose stylists in contemporary fiction. Crime fans will love it, and those who dismiss crime fiction as trash will be converts.’

We then went on to chat about Sallis’s Drive which I’d been fortunate enough to pick up prior to a long flight from the north to the south. If you can read a book in a plane it has to say something about the book. Well, I was glued to Drive for the duration. Unfortunately the book wasn’t as long as the flight. And yes, that’s the book of the movie that was on circuit earlier. The book is way better.

Roger tells me the sequel – Driven – is out this month. Probably the best way to get either of these books is through an ebook store as Sallis is published by No Exit Press and they aren’t distributed here as far as I can tell.

Michael Sears (a half of Michael Stanley: A Carrion Death, A Deadly Trade, Death of the Mantis) suggested Snowdrops by AD Miller.

He wrote: ‘The book is set in Moscow at the time of the oil boom. The narrator, a British lawyer doing deals for foreign banks, gets involved intimately with two young women and professionally with a colourful businessman. It’s clear from the start that all is not as it seems in either relationship. The narrator’s inevitable decline has shades of Le Carré, but also a fresh perspective that brings Moscow and its people to life.

‘Snowdrop is Moscow slang for a corpse that lies buried in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw. Great title. Great book! Shortlisted in 2011 for both the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger prizes.’

Michael also mentioned The Whispers of Nemesis by Anne Zouroudi.

‘Set in modern Greece, this is Zouroudi’s fifth Hermes Diaktoros mystery. A famous Greek poet dies leaving a strange will. Following local custom, his body is exhumed after a period of time for the bones to be removed to an ossuary. A shocking find at the exhumation sets off a tangle of issues that Hermes has to resolve.

‘Hermes white tennis shoes (and both his names) point to his identity, and his subtle involvement with human affairs is a gentler take on Greek mythology. The books are beautifully written, showing us the charm but also the underlying tensions of the Greek islands.’

Stanley Trollip (the other half of Michael Stanley) went with The Queen of Patpong by Tim Hallinan.

‘Hallinan’s fascinating mystery,’ he wrote, ‘exposes the dark side of the good life of Bangkok in which American travel writer Poke Rafferty, his wife, Rose, and adopted daughter Miaow, are dragged into turmoil by the return of a terrifying man from Rose’s past. This is a wonderfully atmospheric read. Highly recommended.’

Deon Meyer’s (last book was Trackers, if you don’t know the others where have you been?) has been a Michael Connelly fan (and friend) for many years and thinks highly of his writing, including the latest, The Fifth Witness, another in the Mickey Haller (the Lincoln lawyer) series.

Wrote Deon, ‘The Fifth Witness opens with Mickey Haller in dire straits. He still operates out of the big armour-plated Lincoln Town Car he acquired from convicted drug lord in lieu of a fee, but the profitable criminal cases are hard to come by.

‘Connelly once again taps into the headlines of contemporary America, by having Haller take on clients who are about to lose their houses in the great foreclosure epidemic which is ravishing that country, with banks and foreclosure agencies as the bad guys.

‘The Fifth Witness is vintage Connelly. I know no writer who is better at so perfectly structuring and pacing a crime novel, whose style is so splendidly understated, whose every word, sentence, paragraph and chapter is so effortlessly aimed at driving the story forward.’

My latest read was The Expats by Chris Pavone. A thoroughly different way to write a spy thriller. Minimum sex, minimum violence, lots of domesticity and putting together of Ikea furniture. Nevertheless I was engrossed.

Crime Beat: Q&A with Greg Lazarus

Crime Beat recently whipped that happy couple off their log and pinned some spotlights on them to get the lowdown on their first crime novel, When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes. Here’s what went down.

Crime Beat:Your approach in When in Broad Daylight I Open my Eyes is so refreshing because it focuses on complex characters and relationships rather than crime fiction conventions. What drew you to this form as opposed to a more conventional detective novel form which is so popular?

Greg Lazarus: We love exciting, tense novels, where the stakes are high. We also admire fiction in which the complexity of people – our contradictory desires, our mixture of goodness and malice – is taken seriously, as well as novels that explore fundamental questions, such as how a person’s worldview influences her life. This novel is our attempt to write a psychologically subtle, philosophically engaging page-turner. Of course, whether we’ve succeeded isn’t for us to judge, but that’s what we’ve tried to do.

Crime Beat:Writing as a husband-and-wife team must be quite an experience. What have you agreed and disagreed most strongly on during the writing process?

Greg Lazarus:Writing isn’t usually one of the things we fight about. Maybe we listen to each other better when it comes to writing, or perhaps we’re both happy to slash and burn work that we’ve written.

Also, we’ve found that editing works well with two authors. We bounce a scene back and forth between each other many times, making major changes and small refinements until we’re both happy. Each of us sees different things, and the result is something that neither of us would have written ourselves. Sometimes it feels like the scene was written by someone else, a third person.

Working together also helps us to maintain a reasonable pace. Greg likes things to get done as well as possible. Lisa likes things to get done.  So we try to find a medium between a tortoise and a racehorse. This can cause some friction.

Crime Beat:Let’s take a look at the protagonist, Maria Petros. Why did you choose a woman to lead this story as opposed to any of the other characters and what do you think readers see in her?

Greg Lazarus:Many novels feature feisty, spunky heroines ; as readers, we take pleasure in identifying with these figures, because they are fundamentally sound and admirable, despite their quirks. With one of our main characters, Maria, we wanted to try something different. Though Maria believes herself to be strong and independent, she is flawed and vulnerable. A lot has been hidden from her, but she also hides much from herself. (On one level, the novel is about the impact of these unknown parts of ourselves, how they lead us into dangerous situations.) Some readers identify with Maria, whereas others find her vulnerabilities enraging.

In general, we’re reluctant to see any characters in the novel as wholly admirable or entirely repulsive, including those who are big-hearted, and those who kill.

Crime Beat:Your novel has been described as a psycho-sexual thriller. The leading device in many other thrillers (I’m thinking of Roger Smith here) is violence. Each device brings a different quality of satisfaction and disturbance, how do these elements work in When in Broad Daylight I Open my Eyes?

Greg Lazarus: Sex is the perfect gift for fiction writers. As a writer, you’re often trying to convey a feeling by describing an action. A sex scene can depict lust, tenderness, humour, anxiety, terror – in fact, any emotion or combination of emotions – with physical description, from the grossest acts to the touch of a finger. And of course, most people are interested in sex.

In When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes the sex is often dark, perhaps depraved, and we hope that it adds to the gothic and ominous atmosphere. We also try to explore the many ways in which sex doesn’t bring people closer together, but rather further apart – the frustrations or cruelties of sex, the way people use it to gain the upper hand.

Crime Beat:You have published other books, can you give us a brief of what they are and why you chose to move over to crime fiction.

Greg Lazarus: Our first work is called The Book of Jacob (Oshun, 2009). It’s a parenting memoir of our son’s first year, and attempts to be as honest as possible about what it was like for us to have a child. Like Broad Daylight, our parenting memoir, we hope, is gothic and unnerving.

Crime Beat:In terms of the South African ‘krimi’ readership, do you feel it was a gamble to incorporate elements such as fine art, classical music and philosophy as some of the talking points between characters where it’s usually guns, drugs and cops?

Greg Lazarus: Not if the art is painted by a woman who falls from a cliff, the composer of the classical music hears shrieking beneath the pavement, and the philosopher may be utterly evil.

Crime Beat:Can we expect another crime novel by Greg Lazarus?

Greg Lazarus: On the back cover of an old Bitterkomix, there’s a bearded man lying listlessly in bed, yearning for ‘iets lekker entertaining’. That would be our dream: to write something lekker entertaining. Maybe there’ll be crime, maybe not.

 Crime Beat: When and where is the book launching?

Greg Lazarus: At The Book Lounge, 24 April, 5:30 for 6pm. We’re also speaking with Andrew Brown (Solace) at the Franschhoek Literary Festival  on Sunday 13 May from 14:30 – 15:30. Any other events will be mentioned on our website, www.greglazarus.com.

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Crime Beat: Review: When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes

‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ is  a fantastical, erotic and disturbing painting from the fifteenth century which repeatedly appears in a new South African thriller I’m going to take a look at today. The painting looms in the background of the novel, building in significance and morphing with the plot. If it makes you feel a little uneasy, a little intrigued, a little dark you’re going to love the book.

When in Broad Daylight I Open my Eyes is a sophisticated psychosexual thriller by husband-and-wife writing duo, Lisa Lazarus and Greg Fried.

Maria Petros, an accomplished psychologist in a recognizable Cape Town, pursues information about her mother’s apparent suicide while navigating several dangerous relationships with men, none of whom are the father of the baby she is carrying. While Maria strives to understand more about her distant and eccentric mother, a revered psychic in the Circle of Mystics, the crumbling of appearances around her reveal the complex and increasingly disturbing minds of several intertwined characters.

This is the couple’s first foray into crime fiction and they create a gripping read through their respective expertise in Psychology and Philosophy. These schools of thought feature in the novel and are amplified by recurring tropes of classical music and fine art. The title itself comes from George Berkely’s work on how we know what know about ourselves and world. The full quote reads:  ”When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will”. From this foundation, the novel explores ideas of appearance and reality, knowledge and mysticism, experience and identity through a group of characters that draw you in and make you begin to take another look at the seemingly mundane people around you in the supermarket.

Eloquently written, the novel evokes believable characters and the frightening underbelly of the psyche as well as the powerful effects of experiences and relationships in our past. Like watching a tightrope walker high above you, Greg Lazarus succeeds in writing a novel that disturbs as it thrills, exploring the fine line between desire, obsession and violence.

The novel is launching on 24 April at the Book Lounge Cape Town.

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• When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes by Greg Lazarus
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Excerpt from a new psycho-sexual thriller

When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes is a brand new thriller from husband-and-wife writing duo, Lisa Lazarus and Greg Fried, using the pen name, Greg Lazarus. Here is an excerpt which explores the back-story of one of the main characters. The book which is launching at the Book Lounge, Cape Town, later this month. Be sure to come back next week when we’ll post a review of the book and put the couple in the hot seat (together, all squashed up) for an in-depth Q&A.

He is seventeen in his final year of school. It is a clever school, prestigious far beyond the Stellenbosch region, and takes special pride in its maths and science results. Yet even the brightest
people in the place are idiots. He has heard one of them, a girl who excels at biology and netball, speaking soberly to the red-haired fellow with freckled skin who runs the school’s religious society. “We have to stay alert to the devil’s temptations; he’s always watching for an opportunity to take us,” she says, and the red-haired boy nods and judiciously draws out his “Ja”.
The Prince of Darkness is a hot conversation topic: even the police, taking some time off from their business in the townships – activities never discussed at the school, which keeps itself out of politics – come one Friday afternoon to share their concerns about Satanism among teenagers. Their views are supported with slides, images of candles and red graffiti in abandoned buildings, which they show to a mass of uniformed teenagers facing the overhead projector screen. At the end of the presentation, after the screen goes white, Kris raises his hand to ask whether devil worship is actually illegal. “Why?” asks the detective sergeant standing next to the projector, still holding the final transparency. “Do you want to worship him yourself?”
In this atmosphere of cleverness and inanity, of being good at science while believing in the devil and ignoring the regime, Kris exerts no more effort at school than necessary. The school pays little attention to literature, teaching only the minimum requirements: his class has been studying a book of short stories, each tale didactic enough to demonstrate a moral principle and vindicate the pupils’ belief that literature is pointlessly flabby, a turgid way to express simple truths. Kris, together with his only friend, the gangly misfit Bernstein, reacts by reading, savagely. He never quite finds the right book, the one that will envelop and satisfy him totally, but sometimes there are passages to be copied into his black notepad. His restlessness expresses itself physically; on some nights he lies with his legs twitching, unable to sleep.
Halfway through the year, Kris starts to take the train into Cape Town on Saturday mornings. He wanders the city centre; surely these streets are a gateway into a richer world. Sometimes he views the exhibits at the National Gallery, amazingly avant-garde in relation to the rest of his experience. Clearly these paintings and sculptures express discontent, but further than that they are opaque in their significance. The artworks do not say precisely what it is they object to, or what they prescribe instead. In the entrance hall he walks around three mutant creatures of plaster, sitting together on a bench, but despite his fierce attention no one recognises him as a lover of art; behind the cash register, the attendant looks off into space.
Surely life is elsewhere. He begins to take trips around Cape Town, making journeys from the hub of the central station. Though he finds himself travelling quite long distances, he does not uncover anything really special; he is still gliding on the surface.
One day he takes the train to Muizenberg. The seaside resort is seedy, rundown. He strolls along the beach at the edge of the water, a book in one hand, picking snails out of the wet sand with his toes and watching them burrow down again. The beach seems empty; the sky is covered in dark clouds, and the wind is strong. From a distance he sees the approach of a tall man carrying a long stick. On the otherwise deserted beach, with its lowering skies, the sight of him is almost mystical.
“Good morning,” says the man when he finally arrives. Kris nods.
“Winkling them out, huh?” the man remarks. He pokes his stick into the sand. Kris is not used to being spoken to during his wanderings.
“I don’t mind if you do,” says the man. “Neither do they.”
Together they bring up snails for a while. One has to wait until a wave has just passed. Otherwise it seems too cruel to dig them up; they just lie on the dry sand, unable to turn themselves downwards. To reorient themselves and burrow down again, they require a surface as soft as chocolate milkshake.
“How’s the book?” the man asks, nodding at Kris’s copy of Lions and Shadows, recently acquired at a charity bookshop.
“Pretty good.”
He laughs. “Don’t be simple with me.”
Kris looks up sharply. This man is tall, taller than Kris, and broad. He wears a red-and-black-checked shirt with long black trousers, and goes barefoot. Probably he is about forty-five, an age balanced between strength and experience. He carries with him an air of watchful amusement.
“Alright, then.” Kris gathers his thoughts. “A strange, beautiful memoir. It makes me long for a delicate world I’ve never known, Cambridge in the 1920s . . .”
“Do you think that world ever existed?”
Kris is silent. It seems an excellent question, tricky and deep, and he has no experience in dealing with this sort of thing. In the world of school, hard problems require calculation, but this question seems to call for something else. The man is smiling at him, in no apparent hurry to ease the silence, and so he gropes at a response.
“It wasn’t the world itself, but Isherwood’s way of looking at it.”
“Why do you think it’s so appealing, his way of seeing? Isn’t it just neurotic to twist reality into fantastic shapes?”
This man’s questions are as sudden as blows with a stick. They discuss Isherwood for a while, and the man recommends Goodbye to Berlin, then Berlin Alexanderplatz, and finally a visit to the city itself before the Wall has been entirely removed. They stand a long time on the beach, the snails forgotten; then the man puts out his hand.
“Daniel Vane.” He pronounces his first name in the Afrikaans way, with a long a, like the sound made when opening one’s mouth for the doctor. Kris is a connoisseur of voices, since he seeks always to mould his own into something accentless, the pure sound of an educated being, waiting to be coloured by a worthy influence.
“Kristof Zoetman. Kris.”
“Tell me, Kris, are you still at school?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got a proposition for you. Hang on – don’t worry, I’m not a pervert. Why don’t you come for coffee with me and my wife? Come, it’s freezing. I’ll take you to our place and you can warm up.”
Together they walk to the parking lot, and then off they go in his white bakkie towards Kalk Bay, where they stop on the side of the main road facing the harbour. There is a shop with its name above the entrance, burnt into a thick plank of yellowwood: Bobbejaan Books. As Kris enters the shop, a customer, sipping coffee at a table and leafing through a volume, looks up at him. The place is spacious; between the shelves of bright books are carpets and tables, places to ruminate. There are several customers, but it seems there is no one in attendance. Then a woman enters the shop from a back room. She is tall, nearly Kris’s height, and she turns to Daniel, who says, “This is Kris,”
and pats him on the shoulder. The woman gives him a welcoming smile and comes over to shake hands. “I’m Catherine. It’s good to meet you.” She is somewhat younger than Daniel, in her mid-thirties. Catherine, like her husband, has an over-precise voice, the sound of a native Afrikaans speaker whose English is excellent. Her timbre is low: perhaps she is a smoker.
“Delighted to meet you,” says Kris.
When he leaves Bobbejaan Books at the end of the day, he has his first job. Over coffee and then a glass of brandy, Daniel and Catherine have quizzed him on his knowledge of books (wide but spotty) and his ambitions (deep but vague). They need help on Saturdays; the shop is packed, and they cannot manage it alone. They require someone who is energetic, personable and willing to accept a small salary.
“So are you personable?” Daniel asks.
“It depends on the person.”
“At least he’s honest,” says Catherine. “And bright. Anyone can see that.”
“Then you can have the job,” says Daniel.
Kris, alight with caffeine after three hot coffees, says, “But I didn’t tell you I wanted it.”
“You do want it. Well done.”

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• When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes by Greg Lazarus
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Crime Beat: Some recent good reads

As reviewed on FMR, two crime novels that I found particularly engrossing and a re-read of James McClure’s The Steam Pig, although I haven’t seen it for sale in South African bookshops. However, it is available at online stores.

First up is The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal, the pseudonym of Jamaal Mahjoub, an Egyptian writer known for seven literary novels. Why he decided to turn to crime is unrecorded but crime fiction fans can be thankful he did.

The Golden Scales is set in Cairo and has as its protagonist a very endearing private investigator, Makana. I don’t think his first name is ever mentioned. Makana is a refugee from the Sudan where he was a police officer. The change of regime there brought in a dictatorship of religious zealots and the liberal and rational Makana soon found himself on the wrong end of the political stick. The story of what happened to him and his family prior to his escape to Egypt is one of the storylines that threads its way through this fascinating novel.

Crime fiction has a way of revealing not only a city’s underbelly but also all the concealed secrets and social ills that bedevil a society. And so it is with this investigation as Makana burrows into the corruption and graft and the dark consequences of these acts of greed and empowerment. In one sense it felt like a novel about South Africa and the new power elites.

Makana is a wonderful hero: he lives on a rickety houseboat on the Nile, his clothes have seen better days, he is charitable, he smokes interminably, he has a deep hurt inside him but he can be tough when needed, and he is always determined and courageous. There are bound to be more Makana novels from Parker Bilal because the setting is seductive and the character intriguing enough to last a goodly while.

And now a Japanese novel, in fact one which set that country ablaze and his sold more than two million copies there. It is called The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino and it is set in Tokyo. The difference between this novel and Bilal’s couldn’t be starker. Where Bilal has characters, Higashino has ciphers yet the plot is so strong, so compulsive, that you overlook this simply to find out what happens.

The cop at the heart of this murder mystery is Detective Kusanagi. Unlike Makana we know nothing of his home life or his background, we only ever encounter Kusanagi on the job. Nothing wrong with this if you read for the chase, but if you want fascinating characters you might be disappointed. Still if you are interested in what is happening in international crime fiction, you can’t miss this novel.

The Devotion of Suspect X revolves around a murder. A belligerent aggressive divorced man threatens his daughter and his ex-wife and in a tussle they kill him. A neighbour then helps them cover up the crime. Now, as all your sympathies are with the murderers, this is not a crime you want exposed. But, of course, Detective Kusanagi is relentless. This is a different take on the murder mystery and you turn the pages desperately hoping that the murderers will get away with it.

No spoiler-alert needed, I’m not going to tell you what happened.

And lastly an old novel, in fact the novel on which South African crime fiction is founded, James McClure’s The Steam Pig. First published in 1971, it was lauded in the US and UK where it won the CWA Gold Dagger award that year. McClure’s reception here was muted. There were some reviews in Durban newspapers (he had lived in then Natal), but largely he went ignored. He was even ignored by the censorship board at the time. Possibly his satire was mistaken for realism as he used racist language which they would not have considered anything other than normal.

The Steam Pig has recently been republished in the US, which is just as well as no South African publisher would dare touch it, given the now very unPC language. But McClure is important in our annals of crime fiction and the book needs to be read and kept in print. Certainly the beginning is superb although the ending wanders into farce, a resolution which has lured lesser writers since then. But if you are interested in current SA crime fiction and you haven’t read The Steam Pig, now is the time to buy it.

The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal (Bloomsbury)
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Little, Brown)
The Steam Pig by James McClure (Soho Crime)

Tony Park’s ‘African Dawn’ reviewed by Business Day

Tony Park is an Aussie with an African heart. He spends six months of every year in southern Africa with his wife, Nicola, a tent and a Land Rover. He’s not strictly South African, but we’ll let it slide in the light of his newest crime novel, African Dawn. Here’s a story summary and below, a review by Business Day‘s Lauren de Beer.

Three families – the Bryants, the Quilter-Phipps and the Ngwenyas – share a history as complex and bloody as the country itself.

Dedicated conservationists Paul and Philippa Bryant face an enormous struggle: to save their farm and small herd of endangered black rhinos from corrupt government minister Emmerson Ngwenya. Twin brothers, ex-soldier Braedan and environmentalist Tate Quilter-Phipps join the fight.

But the brothers’ own history is fraught, and when they fall in love with the same woman, Natalie Bryant, their rivalry threatens to not only derail the attempt to save the rhinos, but also puts the lives of all involved at risk. And with Emmerson vowing to stop at nothing until he has control of the farm, a bloody showdown seems inevitable.

With blood feuds still to settle, every one of these players will be drawn into the fray, and not one will remain unscathed.

De Beer writes

With the plight of the rhino and the turmoil in Zimbabwe never far from the headlines, Tony Park’s African Dawn is a timely reminder that almost nothing good ever comes from man’s meddling with nature and politics.

Check out the full review here.

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• African Dawn by Tony Park
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Crime Beat: Politics and cyberspace – the new thriller zone

Last week Gunter Blank, the Sonntagzeitung’s crime fiction reviewer, lamented the paucity of good crime fiction and gave a list of his top thirteen. However, he did think that the political thriller – and especially the cyber-thriller had good futures. Here are his thoughts:

I stand by the thesis that political thrillers in the Eric Ambler tradition can make enlightening reads.

I would distinguish two different currents in contemporary political thrillers:

Firstly, the more traditional political-thriller which, after the end of the Cold War and, particularly after 9/11, started focussing on the Arab/terrorist threat. Especially worth mentioning here are Patrick Robinson, Michael Lawson, Robert Littell, a guy from Finland named Ilka Remes, and Richard Clarke. They’ve all produced exiting and insightful novels on the new world order, although most of them lean a little bit too strongly towards conservatism.

Nevertheless, they’re intelligent guys and some of them have worked within the secret services and are willing to share their knowledge – or some of it – in order to make an extra buck. The only problem is that none of them can write. They all went into the Michael Crichton school of short chapters and even shorter sentences which allow for action and political schemes, but fall short when it comes to psychological or deeper, let’s say, philosophical insight.

Since John Le Carre there has been no thriller writer, I reckon, who can sit at the same literary table as Ambler, Graham Greene, Len Deighton, Brian Freemantle and of JLC himself.

My strong belief is, that if Ambler were writing today he might not focus on Arab terrorism but on the Chinese takeover of Africa, industrial espionage in the computer age, the merging of state and big corporations, the world battle about raw materials, the rising conflict between the east and the old west.

So you aspiring young hacks out there – do a few years in the secret service, learn something about the world, fine tune your writing skills and there’s literally a whole world there to conquer and plenty of bucks to come with movie options.

Your host here, Mike Nicol, might even tell you a secret or two about writing a good thriller with a political background.

Secondly, the more recent and probably even more interesting and versatile subgenre is the cyber-thriller.

Founded by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the young genre soon found it’s Leonardo in Neal Stephenson, a math and computer genius who a decade ago delivered the blueprint of the genre: Cryptonomicon. Pretty soon he decided to write scientific historic novels about the genesis of algorithms and stuff but his torch was kept ablazing by guys like John Twelvehawks, Daniel Suarez, Cory Doctorow, Nick Laird.

All these guy have incredible knowledge about computers, the net and enough imagination to point out the dangers that lie only one mouse click away behind the calm surface of your screen.

For beginners, I recommend Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom – two novels that should make you erase your Facebook account immediately. Leave alone Google, the new Behemoth.

Crime Beat: Is crime fiction redundant?

During a recent email exchange with Gunter Blank, who writes crime fiction reviews for Sonntagzeitung, I mentioned the upsurge in SA krimis and suggested that maybe this showed that we were normalising as a society and allowing ourselves to tell stories that weren’t heavy political numbers. Blank didn’t disagree but he came back with a statement that made perfect sense.

“I would say,” he wrote, “that in a society like Germany, Sweden, the US, crime fiction is becoming more and more redundant.”

Now this remark came hot on the heels of my lament that, despite the torrent of crime novels published annually, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find good crime fiction. The serial killer is still out there, although, why anybody bothers to read them after the Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series (which started with Red Dragon way back in 1981), I don’t know. But thousands and thousands do.

The same goes for the police procedural. Enough already. Please.

To which Blank added: “I agree it has become pretty difficult finding a decent crime novel that’s not chewing up the same ol’, same ol’. I mean how many serial killers, people with troubled childhoods, old Nazi criminals, heists gone awry and adultery turned murder, can you invent to keep the genre fresh? In other words, there is not much a legion of crime writers could add to a simple song like “Knoxville Girl” or “Banks of the Ohio”.’

Gunter Blank is also mad crazy about country rock so we swopped song lists at this point. The man has done some serious listening.

Once we’d returned to our main topic, he wrote, “In turbulent or haunted societies, societies that are trying to find out who they are – there are still hundreds and thousands of lives and experiences to tell.

“This on the one hand.

“On the other, where the genre is still very much alive is when it’s comes to political thrillers, that go beyond the traditional espionage and treason themes.”

I have to agree with him there although my reading has just started venturing down this path.

He has subsequently sent me his thoughts on political thrillers and I’ll post that next week.

In the meantime here are two lists of Gunter Blank’s best krimi reads.

The first list is of crime novelists he believes haven’t had the attention they deserve:

Jim Nisbet (esp. Lethal Injection)
Dan J. Marlowe,
David Peace,
Robert Edmond Alter (esp. Swamp Sister)
Harry Crews (A Feast of Snakes & Celebration)
A.W. Gray (Bino)
Iceberg Slim (Trick Baby and Airtight Willie & Me)

Then he gave an all time Top Twelve, well, Top Thirteen:

James Ellroy: LA Confidential
Dashiel Hammett: Glass Key
Jim Thompson: Pop 1280
Raymond Chandler: The Lady in the Lake (his fav) and Farewell, My Lovely
George V Higgins: The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Richard Stark: The Hunter (Point Blank)
Charles Willeford: Miami Blues
Elmore Leonard: Freaky Deaky
Marcel Montecino: The Crosskiller
Edward Bunker: No Beast so Fierce
Chester Himes: Blind Man With a Pistol
Ted Lewis: GBH

Next week: Gunter Blank on political thrillers and the rise of the cyber-thriller.