Jassy Mackenzie on SA crime fiction

At the recent WISER crime stories colloquium held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Jassy Mackenzie delivered a paper looking at post-apartheid crime fiction. Here’s what she had to say:

Going way back in time, I discovered that the first-ever crime fiction hero was a Vizier called Ja’far from the Arabian Nights tales, as told by Scheherazade in the 1001 Arabian Nights. In this story, which Scheherazade called The Three Apples, a fisherman found a big chest floating in the Tigris river. He took it to the Caliph, and when he opened it, he discovered it contained the body of a young woman, cut into nineteen pieces. In true Arabian Nights style, Ja’far was told by the Caliph to solve the crime or else get put to death within three days. I know that would certainly motivate me to work hard…

That crime ended up being solved when the murderer came forward at the last minute and confessed to his deed. As a reward for his superb detecting skills, the Vizier was given another crime to solve and another three-day time limit to do it or be killed. By chance, he discovered an important clue that allowed him to solve the crime through reasoning, and save himself once again from certain death. I’m not sure if he got given yet another case to solve after that, but I think this story is interesting because it’s the only incident I know of anywhere in fiction where a Vizier has ended up being a hero.

Usually, as soon as you hear the words Grand Vizier, you know for sure the man’s a villain and he is shortly, and without fail, going to commit a series of dastardly crimes involving serpents and poisoned sherbet and hidden trapdoors and turbanned thugs wielding scimitars. So the role of the Vizier has definitely evolved as far as crime fiction is concerned. And so have the roles of heroes and villains right here in South Africa.

When I decided to talk on post-apartheid heroes and villains, I soon realised I’d given myself a rather difficult task, because in South Africa, with every second that passes, we are moving further away from apartheid and towards normality. So I’m basically doing a talk on normal characters in South African crime writing.

I think that the influence of apartheid on South African writing can be compared to the influence that Hitler and the Nazi regime had on Germany. This had the same lasting repercussions on the culture and society it affected, and the way that everybody involved ended up perceiving themselves. Books are still written today featuring Nazi war criminal villains who have somehow managed to live in hiding and go unpunished for decades until their past evils catch up with them. Occasionally you also get a modern thriller set in the Nazi era – Jeffery Deaver’s Garden of Beasts is one of my favourites, and Fatherland by Robert Harris is a brilliant example of a thriller set in a fictitious Germany a couple of decades after Hitler had won the war. One of the most wonderful touches in that book was the way that Robert Harris still had Barbara Cartland writing romances, only because Britain had now been conquered by Germany they had titles like The Kaiser’s Ball.

The same thing is happening here in South Africa. Some crime fiction villains have their roots buried in the rotting carcass of apartheid, some of today’s books are still set in that era. I’d love to read the equivalent of Fatherland, set in this country. It would feature a heroic police officer, a figurehead feared by society as an oppressor and a perpetrator of the violent apartheid regime, but who discovers the truth about the country’s past while investigating a seemingly unrelated crime, and manages to expose the atrocities committed by the ruling party and bring the whole system crashing down.

Anyway, that made me wonder what heroes and villains would be like in South African crime fiction if apartheid actually hadn’t ended. Quite honestly, I think these characters would end up being as formulaic as the ones you find in a Barbara Cartland novel or a modern Mills & Boon, because there would be such a narrow mix of people and plots that would get past the censor’s scissors, and there would be an army of censors keeping an eagle eye out for any signs of subversive literature.

So a writer in the new old South Africa would have two choices for their hero. Either he would be the heroic white South African police detective, or he would be the heroic white South African private citizen. Note that I say “he”. A blonde, beautiful and curvaceous heroine would certainly feature in these books, but she couldn’t possibly be the protagonist, because otherwise it would have to be a romance novel. You see, in this fictitious new Old South Africa, women “can like to know their place”.

Pitted against the heroic white hero would be, of course, the evil black South African criminal, who had committed an unspeakable crime, so terrible and vile that it would not even be revealed in the first book in the series, but only in the sequel, working title, “The Mealie Thief Returns.”

To add a twist to the plot in this new Old South Africa crime novel, a devious writer could also include the treacherous white friend of the white police detective. The treacherous friend would be in cahoots with the black criminal and as a result would have to die a most horrible and grisly death in the last few pages of the book. Because no white South African could possibly be such a subversive traitor, this character would be British, which would also give the book an international flavour and make the poor isolated new old South Africans feel as if they were part of the global village. As a result of his betrayal, the treacherous friend would end up suffering even more than the villain. If they were both cut into pieces at the end of the book, his pieces would be smaller.

Luckily the end of apartheid has done one very important thing for crime fiction characters. It’s levelled the playing field, and given everybody equal license to be good or evil. Now, evil characters have always fascinated me, and I must say that when I do have to kill a baddie off in one of my own books I feel really sad about it. So as a writer it’s good to have such a wide field of races, cultures, personalities and backgrounds to choose from when creating another one.

However, when a crime writer sits down to dream up the cast of heroes and villains for their next book, they must bear in mind that although apartheid is officially over, it is not yet entirely dead. It exists in the minds and attitudes of many people from all walks of life, and its legacy is still affecting society. So we post-apartheid writers have to take this into account when creating our characters, whether they are good or bad. We don’t have complete carte blanche; we are bound by a set of unwritten rules that dictate each character must be a plausible product of the society they come from, with a background and a set of belief systems that will not seem out of place.

Where I think it gets interesting is that South Africa’s apartheid history has allowed us to create more complex characters that combine elements of good and evil in a way that everybody can now understand better. They’re either flawed heroes in the very best traditions of Greek tragedy, or they’re sympathetic villains. When I dream up my villains, I like to give them plausible backgrounds. I’d like the reader to think: if I had grown up in those conditions, would I have turned out any differently?

Whiteboy, the villain in my first book Random Violence, suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his mother when he was a child and, not surprisingly, grew up to be a psychopath with a fondness for torturing people. I think that’s quite understandable. Paul, the villain in my next book My Brother’s Keeper, which is due out in August, also had a rough childhood. As a youngster, he was beaten by his father, a violent criminal and borderline alcoholic, but Paul’s real hatred is for his mother, who tried to protect his baby brother Nick, but would not protect him. Paul is actually inspired by a real character – the ex-bouncer Gary Beuthin. Although I don’t know what Beuthin’s childhood was like, I would imagine it was similar to Paul’s. I followed Beuthin’s story with fascination. He was a violent, sadistic man – he still is, but he’s in prison now. He beat up his mother. He abducted an ex-girlfriend and kept her imprisoned for about three weeks before she managed to escape. God knows what he did to her during this time, but the poor girl committed suicide shortly afterwards.

Beuthin was tracked down by uber-cop Piet Byleveld a couple of years ago, and at the time when he was arrested, he was driving down Rivonia Road in the early hours of the morning with his new girlfriend in an old, beaten-up Toyota. That fascinated me. What does it say? It says that crime and violence doesn’t always pay. And it says that even a man who’s an abusive criminal and an ex-jailbird and drives a crappy car, will still have girls running after him. There’s simply no justice in the world.

Anyway, enough about villains. Let’s move on to the far more appealing crime fiction hero. Now, there are four main archetypes when it comes to heroes in this genre, because almost all crime fiction heroes will, at some stage of the book, have to try and solve a crime.

The first archetype is the amateur detective. Although they are not involved in law-enforcement, these characters have an uncanny knack of walking into situations where crimes take place and dead bodies are found. In real life, they’d be somebody to avoid and definitely to leave off your dinner party list unless you want corpses keeling over for inexplicable reasons in between the main course and the dessert. Of course, these characters do stretch the limits of plausibility somewhat, especially if they are used in a series of books, because how often can Average Joe keep stumbling over dead bodies? One of the best examples of this archetype is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who met with approximately two corpses per year without leaving her village. In fact, that quiet little village of St Mary’s Mead was described by one critic as having “put on a pageant of human depravity rivalled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah”.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is an amateur detective, and so is the character who inspired him, Travis McGee from the John D. McDonald novels. They’re both drifters, which makes the high body count in their lives that much more believable.

In South African fiction an excellent example is Lucy Khambule from Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink. She’s a journalist and PR consultant until the convicted serial killer Napoleon Dingiswayo summons her to C-Max to talk about his life. Then, as a series of terrible events start taking place around her, she has to start digging deeper into the background of Dingiswayo and his connections. Another of my favourites is Lemmer, the bodyguard hero in Deon Meyer’s Blood Safari. He starts off being hired to guard the beautiful Emma le Roux, but when she’s seriously injured by an unknown assailant, Lemmer takes matters into his own hands and sets out to solve the mystery surrounding her long-lost brother, and find out who’s trying to kill Emma.

The second archetype is the private investigator, like Spenser in the Robert B Parker novels or the famous Hercule Poirot. Now, Hercule Poirot had very high standards, and only liked to solve crimes if they took place in upmarket locations like the elegant atmosphere of an English country house or a private compartment on the Orient Express. In America, thanks to writers like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, the opposite happened. The private investigator devolved into the “hard boiled” stereotype.

The best way of describing a hard-boiled detective is a guy that Chuck Norris might be afraid of. They’re tough loners that seldom speak, and when they do will only utter deadpan quips. They frequent shady late-night bars and are often mysteriously short of money. They always carry guns and, although they drink heavily, they are never too drunk to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat or, if necessary, shoot the bad guys right between the eyes. There are some fantastic examples of these heroes in South African crime fiction, and two of the best characters are undoubtedly Jeffrey ‘Mullet’ Mendes and Vincent Saldana from Out to Score, by Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens. These two are so hard-boiled that if they were eggs they’d be like rubber and you’d have to throw them away.

Although not quite as hard-boiled, nor nearly as egg-shaped, my heroine Jade de Jong from Random Violence also falls into this category. She’s a tough lady with a distressing tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. She’s sexy in a gung-ho way, but not particularly feminine, and although she can identify any type of gun on the market from fifty metres in the dark, she’s hopeless when it comes to birds – she wouldn’t know a turkey from an ostrich unless it ended up on her dinner plate. I’m busy writing a sequel to Random Violence at the moment and doing my best to curb all these distressing tendencies, but unfortunately Jade will always be Jade.

The next archetype is the police detective. One of my personal favourites on the international scene is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who’s the creation of British writer Peter James. This detective is an especially interesting character because he has a wife who disappeared in mysterious circumstances a few years ago, and four books later, we are still wondering where she is, if she is still alive, and what really happened to her. South African writer Richard Kunzmann has created a pair of cop heroes, Jacob Tshabalala and Harry Mason, who’ve played lead roles in all his books so far. Tshabalala is a native South African from a family of tribal priests and healers, and Harry Mason his partner was born in England. So if Richard Kunzmann was writing in the new old South Africa, Tshabalala wouldn’t exist, and Harry Mason would undoubtedly be a colonialist traitor who’d end up being sliced into little pieces and stashed inside a chest in the Tigris river…. I think?

Finally, the last archetype is the forensic specialist, like Temperance Brennan from the Kathy Reichs novels, or the famous Kay Scarpetta who was created by Patricia Cornwell. And, in South Africa, although she doesn’t actually wield a scalpel, we do have a heroine who gives this category a whole new dimension, and that is the police profiler Dr Clare Hart, created by Margie Orford. I think it’s interesting that all these forensic specialists and profilers, both local and international, are women – and strong and ballsy ones, at that.

And finally, I think one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing post-apartheid crime fiction is that South Africa is back on the world stage. This means that crime fiction writers can write for an international audience as well as a local one without having to turn our books into struggle literature. It also means that our settings, whether Cape Town, Joburg or the South African bushveld, can become characters in our stories too, either good or evil as the situation demands. This allows South African readers to experience the thrill of reading a crime story in a familiar setting, and brings the flavour of a different and exotic country to readers abroad.

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