Crime Beat: Deon Meyer talks about his Thirteen Hours
Deon Meyer’s Thirteen Hours has taken the crime fiction market by storm – not only here but in the UK, US and in the many other countries where Meyer is published. It is the sixth of his books and yet another narrative experiment by the man who never fails to surprise from book to book. I sat him down and turned up the heat.
Picture: A Henrietta Rose-Innes photo of Deon Meyer at the London Book Fair
Crime Beat: Let’s start with the title: Thirteen Hours. Thirteen, that’s a loaded number.
Deon Meyer: Absolutely. Once I knew I was going to attempt a novel happening within a specific and short-ish time period, the big question was: How many hours? Thirteen was the obviously choice – given the bad luck baggage it carries.
But I was never sure that I could make it work, and was quite prepared to call the book ‘Sixteen Hours’, or however long it was going to take Benny to wrap things up.
Fortunately, he came through…
Crime Beat: And then there are the hours. Time is a critical part of the story and of the structure of the novel. Why did you choose to compact the story, and the telling of it, into a handful of hours?
Deon Meyer: One way or another, I’ve been fooling around with time in most of my books, and I’m fascinated by how much it influences structure, suspense, and the writing process, to name just a few instances.
But after I finished writing Blood Safari, I realised that it was the book that played out over the shortest period of time of all my novels – four or five days. (And I liked the influence that had on the tempo.)
Which got me thinking: How short a period could still work? From there, it was a short leap …
Crime Beat: By the way, which came first the story or the decision to write a novel that took place in a short period?
Deon Meyer: The kernel of the story idea came first, but very early in the development stage, I knew I wanted to try the time thing. So, perhaps, this was a case of ‘simultaneously’?
Crime Beat: Of course compacting all the action into a set number of hours means that the characters have little time to themselves outside of the job, was this restrictive in any way?
Deon Meyer: I was worried about that before I started writing, but soon found that it was okay to let a character’s mind wander, especially if I needed to work in some back-story.
Of course, there are limits to how much one can allow yourself this luxury without spoiling the pace, so it was a little restrictive, but never really a problem.
Crime Beat: Thirteen Hours is more a thriller than a police procedural, if you’ll excuse my being picky about the sub-category. You’ve done chase stories before – Heart of the Hunter, Blood Safari – so clearly you enjoy the challenges of this type of narrative. From a writer’s perspective what are the most daunting aspects of such stories?
Deon Meyer: Credibility. Verisimilitude. I had to do some fancy footwork to keep Rachel on the run …
Crime Beat: Thirteen Hours sees the return of Bennie Griessel, who has been off the booze for 156 days (a dry-out that started in Devil’s Peak). The thing about Bennie is that although affirmative action has caught him at the wrong end of his career, he’s actually ahead of the game. He is the ideal cop in every aspect: a role model, a mentor, and a reader’s delight. Of all the characters you’ve created, on a favourite scale of 1 – 10 where does Bennie rate for you?
Deon Meyer: Benny is definitely a 10 (as is Lemmer from Blood Safari), perhaps because I think I really understand him after three novels in which he plays a major part. But also because of his personality. He has the uncanny knack of making things happen on the page, mid-scene, that always surprises me. And I really like him. He is perhaps the most honest guy I know…
Crime Beat: All your characters at some point have a rough time, but Bennie’s torment never seems to be resolved. At the end of Thirteen Hours we have him with another personal problem in his life. Obviously his life goes on, question is, does it go on in the next novel? How long do we have to wait?
Deon Meyer: Absolutely – I can’t leave Benny in the lurch like that. I’ve just finished a new novel (Afrikaans title is Spoor) without Benny, although his good friend Mat Joubert is a major character.
But Benny will be back as the protagonist in the next one, which I hope to start in a month or two.
Crime Beat: Now let’s get to the story – or rather the stories. From the outset there are two completely different cases and Bennie has to keep his head wrapped around both. Partly, I’m sure, the fiction dictates this, but are you also saying something about the life of a SAPS detective?
Deon Meyer: I’d be happy if the book said something about the hectic lives of SAPS members, but that was never my intention. I knew from the start that a single story line just wasn’t going to be enough to fill 13 interesting hours.
Crime Beat: The story of a young woman on the run is the thriller backbone to the book. The murder of the music producer becomes an accompaniment: a second theme in a larger symphony. However, it’s the Meyer style to splice stories, now, do you write it the way we read it?
Deon Meyer: I can’t do it any other way, so yes, I write it the way it reads. Writing the two stories separately in any way is, from my point of view, a recipe for disaster – readers will notice soon enough …
Crime Beat: Of course behind the young woman’s story is a story of contemporary Africa, of people who lose everything to a corrupt dictator (in this cast Mugabe) and in the process their ethical values become distorted. In a capricious world money becomes god, and human decency gets sacrificed along the way. Evil begets evil. Is that the trigger as you see it behind Thirteen Hours? And the antidote is Bennie Griessel, as flawed and damaged a righter of wrongs as you can get.
Deon Meyer: It’s a strange process. For me, writing a novel is a little like wading into a pool of water. First, you sort of stick your toe in, not knowing how deep or wide the water is. And then I get drawn in – through research, through plain old problem solving – and include more and more of what I read and hear about our continent, our country, my city. (The danger is, of course, not to get in over your head …)
So it’s not a trigger, it’s an unstoppable force.
Crime Beat: The story of the murdered Adam Barnard serves to reinforce the central them. In fact this paragraph says it all: “‘People are people, Nikita. If there is wealth and fame at stake…It’s the usual game: cliques and camps, big egos, artistic temperaments, sensitive feelings, hate, jealousy, envy; there are people who haven’t spoken to each other for years, new enmities… the list is endless. Our Adam was in the thick of things. Would it be enough to inspire murder? As Fransman correctly pointed out, in this country, anything is possible.’” Greed once again motivating the chaos. Amidst the blood and bullets an idea of right and wrong, at least of moral right, runs through your novels. Now I know your coda is story above all else, but crime fiction is also about social commentary, don’t you think?
Deon Meyer: This is a great example. I did not plan the social commentary in that specific scene or passage at all. The goal of the scene was to convey certain information to the reader and the detectives, in order to advance the story. But the words are spoken by the middle-aged and thoroughly experienced coroner, a wise, learned and cultivated man who has seen it all.
It was in the consideration of his point of view that the commentary happened – inescapable, unavoidable, and purely by chance.
I still maintain that, had I planned to insert specific social comments, the scene – and the book – would have fallen flat. So, my philosophy is: If it happens, allow it. But never force it.
Crime Beat: No, no I’m not suggesting that the social commentary was planned. More that crime novels allow characters to make these sorts of comments. Perhaps it’s because the characters are up against the life or death issues, so meaning-of-life type observations become part of the territory.
Deon Meyer: Indeed. And perhaps more than any other genre, the cast often represents people from all walks of life (especially the dark side), who have unique perspectives on matters of life and death. The real-life police detectives I’ve had the good fortune to get to know, are philosophers all, often with very quirky and interesting points of view – because they’ve seen humanity from a very different angle.
Crime Beat: Popular and literary references are a feature of your novels and give them a grounding and resonance. Often Shakespeare surfaces (Hamlet in this instance) or movies (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) and, inevitably, music. In fact you dissect the Afrikaans music scene in Thirteen Hours. Why do you see these references as important?
Deon Meyer: Again, I don’t see them as essential or important, it just happens. I insert my characters into modern Cape Town, they interact with each other and their environment, they all have a background and a frame of reference, all I can do is to try and stay true to it all.
The coroner loves theatre and saw Hamlet the previous night, so his actions will be influenced by it. The lab technicians watch the movies we all watch, so that will be their world …
It really does happen very spontaneously on the page.
Crime Beat: Never thought it was anything other than spontaneous. However, there are lots of crime writers who never mention music, movies, art, food, books, theatre, restaurants – the background of our daily lives. So when one comes across it, these references are a bonus. Clearly you believe this texture is important. Even in the rush of a plot like Thirteen Hours it plays a part.
Deon Meyer: There’s something we as authors perhaps don’t talk about often enough: The huge privilege of seeing the world through the eyes of our characters, and how it broadens our personal perspective, and our understanding of the opposite sex, other cultures, other points of view, etc.
For me, it has become a game, in a certain sense: What would Benny or Vusi or Mbali Kaleni think of a movie, a book, a restaurant. It’s a great aid in building and understanding characters, and it provides these references you mention, indeed as a bonus.
Crime Beat: One last issue, violence. John Connolly recently said that, if he were writing them today, he would probably have written less violence into his first novels. He feels he needs to be more circumspect about how violence is presented. Now, we know it’s part of the territory and there’s no getting around it, however in Thirteen Hours there’s a lot less than in some of your other novels. Two bodies are dead before the book starts (which doesn’t really count), and then there are various violent incidents (I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t yet read the book), but they don’t come anywhere near the violent scenes in Blood Safari or Devil’s Peak, for example. Are you also rethinking this subject? Or is it that with a chase novel the body count is low anyhow – as it was in Heart of the Hunter?
Deon Meyer: Truth is, it’s probably about character. Lemmer (Blood Safari) is a violent man. At one stage, he says: ‘I think I understand today. How it all fit together. From that day on, my father hit me. A lot. And hard.’ The trouble with violence is that it begets more violence. In people, in communities, in countries. It’s like this evil you let loose, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle.
So he attracts violence, he reacts violently, it’s his way of dealing with the world.
Similarly, Thobela (Heart of the Hunter, Devil’s Peak) is a warrior who fights fire with fire.
Benny Griessel, on the other hand, is repulsed by it – that’s the real reason why he’s an alcoholic, he finds it extremely difficult to cope with the violence at every murder scene.
So, to try and answer your question: In the book I’ve just finished, Lemmer returns, and there’s more violence.
Crime Beat: I have been speculating recently that we might start seeing more PI novels – or novels where the protagonist is outside the state legal system – appearing locally. A US academic writing on US crime fiction has suggested that when governments become paranoid and tighten up secrecy legislation, there is a corresponding rise in the number of PI novels. Off the top of your head, what’re your thoughts? You wouldn’t be heading in this direction, would you?
Deon Meyer: It’s an interesting notion, with some truth to it, although there hasn’t really been a huge upsurge in PI’s lately, but it might be on its way – following the real-life exodus of cops into the private sector all over the world, and especially in South Africa.
And funny that you should mention it: In Spoor, coming out in Afrikaans in October, I’ve had Mat Joubert, former SAPS detective, join a private investigation firm. It was a very interesting exercise, putting someone outside the system after 30 years in the Service. Suddenly, a whole new set of rules, challenges and obstacles.
So I might do it again.
ALERT: Catch Deon Meyer talking to Jenny Crwys-Williams as part of her In Conversation series, at the Theatre on the Square, Sandton, on Wednesday 4 August at 7.30 pm.
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