Crime Beat: stray doppies
CrimeWrite has come and gone and I think if it proved one thing it was that the bunch of krimiheads who sat on the panels and the one-on-one discussions can deliver the goods. Just a great pity that the audiences didn’t pitch up. Those who did were all enthusiastic and many remarked that they’d never experienced anything like it before. There is, I am convinced, a great marketing opportunity here but it needs the help and financial muscle of our publishers and the bookshops.
Last night I attended Exclusive Tuesday, a monthly event held at Da Vinci’s restaurant in Harfield Village, Cape Town. Linda Nel at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, is backing it with her book clubs, Leopards Leap sponsor the wine and the restaurant sees it as a public relations opportunity that has the welcome spin-off of promoting local writers.
The result is extraordinary. Such enthusiasm from the book clubs. For many of them these Exclusive Tuesday discussions – there have been three so far – were their introduction to South African writing. They have all been pleasantly surprised. They are all starting to buy local. Multiply this across the country and surely our print runs must increase.
When the Cape Town Book Fair first happened and we saw the crowds that booked out the author sessions, it was obvious that the reading public were intrigued by the writers in their midst. Likewise the hugely popular Franschhoek Literary Festival has proved this each year in the short time it’s been running. The Time of the Writer in Durban is another case in point. Give writers a public platform and the chances of selling books is greatly increased.
I’ve heard it whispered that the Book Lounge and Book Southern Africa have an important announcement to make along these lines this evening.
A quick wrap of CrimeWrite: the topics ran from the good old fall-backs such as preferred methods of killing to discussions on fast cars and country rock music, and from writing court room scenes to deadly females and the legacy of our founder of the genre in SA, James McClure.
An interesting topic this as McClure’s two characters Mickey Zondi and Tromp Kramer established a partnership across the racial divide, and although Kramer was racist in his language towards Zondi the two shared a deep friendship at an emotional level. That duo now manifests themselves in a number of partnerships, some of them strictly professional, some also with a love interest: Margie Orford’s Clare Hart and Riedwaan Faizal, Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong and David Patel, Richard Kunzmann’s Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala, Wessel Ebersohn’s Yudel Gordon and Abigail Bukula and my own Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso.
Looked at from a distance, it does seem that our crime fiction is also trying to imagine a country where language and emotional bonds unite the individuals across the race lines, as Louis Greenberg has pointed out. This topic prompted Richard Kunzmann to remark during the conversation, not altogether facetiously, ‘There we go, crime fiction as therapy.’ Of course, none of us set out to do that, our aims were more modest, I would think: just to write an unputdownable book.
Among the other topics discussed at CrimeWrite were crime novels as love stories in disguise (and given the amorous adventures of most of the couples in our fiction this does seem to be the case), the tenacity of the series character, and, finally, a discussion on reading SA crime fiction.
Some points raised here were that often we need to be ratified by overseas publication before local readers will buy our books (which is sadly all too true); that crime fiction is seen as dumbing down (an opinion held largely by academics who haven’t yet got their heads around the idea that commercial fiction has a completely legitimate place in any society’s literary life); and that constant refrain about why should SA crime fiction be read when real crime is daily in our faces? This is a fair question given the horrors of our crime, but it fails to distinguish between fact and fantasy, which was a topic that came up repeatedly during the discussions.
My quote of the weekend came from Jassy Mackenzie who said, ‘A good crime novel is utopian fiction.’
Will CrimeWrite continue? Difficult to say. Although there is a wide readership for crime fiction in SA, the local version is not well known, so we’re going to have to work a lot harder at public events. And, of course, write more books.
Those who attended included: Antony Altbeker, Wessel Ebersohn, Sarah Lotz, Sifiso Mzobe, Richard Kunzmann, Jassy Mackenzie, Chris Marnewick, Margie Orford, Michael Sears, and Stanley Trollip. Thanks to Skype we also had links to Roger Smith who was in Thailand, and Deon Meyer who had recently returned from a book tour in France.
