Barbara Ludman
INDIANA GOTHIC by Pope Brock (Review)
Anyone who hasn’t a skeleton in the family cupboard isn’t looking hard enough. Pope Brock didn’t have to look far – there had always been rumours of something funny about Great-Grandmother Maggie, something weird about the sudden death of Great-Grandfather Ham. Eventually, an elderly great-aunt steered Brock in the right direction – a crime of passion, illicit sex, a sensational trial – all deep in the cornfields of the American midwest.
A murder, a trial : some critics have compared Indiana Gothic to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but it’s not nearly as slow-moving, not nearly as boring as that interminable book set in Savannah, Georgia. Like it, however, Indiana Gothic delves deeply into another place, another time – Indiana at the turn of the century – recreating in painstaking detail the minutiae of a world we are all lucky to have avoided.
DEAD BEFORE DYING by Deon Meyer (Coronet); THE NO 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY by Alexander McCall Smith (David Philip)
Time was if you were looking for a local thriller you’d be out of luck. South Africans were writing fine novels but they weren’t turning out the workaday adventures you wanted to curl up with on a rainy day. The last really good examples of the genre bit the dust when James McClure stopped writing about Trompsburg.
Things possibly are beginning to change. Both these thrillers are set locally; neither aspires to the heights of JM Coetzee nor to the absurd depths of Wilbur Smith; and although they’re very different, both are eminently readable.
Dead Before Dying, published in Afrikaans as Feniks, was translated by journalist Madeleine van Biljon, and the team of Van Biljon and Meyer – a former journalist who’s gone into advertising – is one to be reckoned with. The book is the story of Cape Town policeman Mat Joubert whose fight against his own personal demons looks like getting in the way of solving high-profile cases – a series of murders, what else?
Alexander McCall Smith is not a South African; a law professor at the University of Edinburgh, he was born in Zimbabwe and has worked for many years on and off in Botswana and Lesotho. The Africa we travel, case by case, with Precious Ramotswe, who has opened her own private-eye firm, the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, in Gaborone, is rather more gentle than the Cape Town we trawl with Mat Joubert, but no less interesting. If one were looking for an overseas comparison, it’s Miss Marple vs Lew Archer.
SHAUN – I’ve got two reviews here. The first combines two sort-of-local books, and the second has a book on its own, but short, hey? Please sort out my tenses in the intro – I think I might have got my hard drive in a twist. – BARBARA
DEAD BEFORE DYING by Deon Meyer (Coronet); THE NO 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY by Alexander McCall Smith (David Philip)
Time was if you were looking for a local thriller you’d be out of luck. South Africans were writing fine novels but they weren’t turning out the workaday adventures you wanted to curl up with on a rainy day. The last really good examples of the genre bit the dust when James McClure stopped writing about Trompsburg.
Things possibly are beginning to change. Both these thrillers are set locally; neither aspires to the heights of JM Coetzee nor to the absurd depths of Wilbur Smith; and although they’re very different, both are eminently readable.
Dead Before Dying, published in Afrikaans as Feniks, was translated by journalist Madeleine van Biljon, and the team of Van Biljon and Meyer – a former journalist who’s gone into advertising – is one to be reckoned with. The book is the story of Cape Town policeman Mat Joubert whose fight against his own personal demons looks like getting in the way of solving high-profile cases – a series of murders, what else?
Alexander McCall Smith is not a South African; a law professor at the University of Edinburgh, he was born in Zimbabwe and has worked for many years on and off in Botswana and Lesotho. The Africa we travel, case by case, with Precious Ramotswe, who has opened her own private-eye firm, the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, in Gaborone, is rather more gentle than the Cape Town we trawl with Mat Joubert, but no less interesting. If one were looking for an overseas comparison, it’s Miss Marple vs Lew Archer.
***
INDIANA GOTHIC by Pope Brock (Review)
Anyone who hasn’t a skeleton in the family cupboard isn’t looking hard enough. Pope Brock didn’t have to look far – there had always been rumours of something funny about Grand-Grandmother Maggie, something weird about the sudden death of Great-Grandfather Ham. Eventually, an elderly great-aunt steered Brock in the right direction – a crime of passion, illicit sex, a sensational trial – all deep in the cornfields of the American midwest.
A murder, a trial : some critics have compared Indiana Gothic to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but it’s not nearly as slow-moving, not nearly as boring as that interminable book set in Savannah, Georgia. Like Midnight, however, Indiana Gothic delves deeply into another place, another time – Indiana at the turn of the century – recreating in painstaking detail the minutiae of a world we are all lucky to have avoided.