Barbara Ludman
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, but he has worked 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 Mat Joubert’s Cape Town, but no less interesting. If one were looking for an overseas comparison, it would be Miss Marple vs Lew Archer.
Ramotswe survives a brief but violent marriage, comes home to look after her ailing father, and when he dies starts her detective agency. Staffed by herself and an elderly fusspot as her secretary, it calls on the occasional help of male neighbours when the going gets rough. One caveat: Smith seems to be afraid of dogs. Precious Ramotswe would have better sense.