/ 12 May 2006

Like Clockwork

Describe yourself in a sentence.

I am hard-working and lucky and, for inexplicable reasons, the universe has not picked on me (yet).

Describe your book in a sentence.

Like Clockwork is a thriller that tells the story of profiler and investigative journalist, Clare Hart, stalking a sadistic serial killer while trying to work out a relationship with her on-off lover, a troubled-but-sexy cop called Rediwaan Faizal.

Describe your ideal reader.

My ideal reader skips work to finish my book. In fact, my ideal reader called me the other day — I don’t know him, which makes him even more ideal — to say that he had loved the book, but that he now slept with the light on.

What was the originating idea for the book?

Malevolence: the existence and nature of evil. In 2003 I did an investigative story for Marie Claire about the trafficking of women and children into Cape Town’s sex industry. I was horrified by the stories that the victims told me. Their accounts echoed in my mind … I turned to fiction to quieten those living ghosts.

Describe the process of writing and publishing the book (research, editing, et cetera). How long did it take?

It took a year to get from first jittery spider diagram to published book. I sent a synopsis of Like Clockwork to Oshun in early 2005. They loved it and gave me the go-ahead. I spent time with a wonderful professor of forensics at Tygerberg hospital, drove around Cape Town a lot working out how to get bodies from A to B, and then sat down and wrote in a headlong rush.

Name some writers who have inspired you, and (briefly) tell us why or how.

Ian Rankin for making Edinburgh a tandem main character with my ultimate cop, John Rebus. Cormac McCarthy — perfect control of language that makes the most gruesome violence sound like ballet. JM Coetzee for being so sparing with adjectives, adverbs and emotions. Pat Barker for surfacing the darkest thoughts of her characters and making you feel that they are yours too. Jeannette Winterson for writing the nuances of the politics of touch and sex and desire and power. Deon Meyer for his beleaguered and booze-soaked cops who stay true to their women, despite the fact that the sexiest Scope girls fling their nearly naked selves at them.

What are you reading at the moment?

Fred Khumalo’s Touch My Blood, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which prompted me to reread Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which is also the events of one day. Hannah Arendt’s Eichman in Jerusalem.

Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?

I write by hand. Then I type it up on my laptop. Then I print it out and make all my corrections by hand. This drove my editor mad. But it is the only thing that works for me.

What is the purpose of fiction?

Fiction is stories for grown-ups. But stories weave the social and emotional fabric that binds us together; that we use to make sense of ourselves, of the psychic geography of where we live. Stories — fiction — allow us to say what we fear most and to then order it in a way that allows us to feel safe at the end.

Is there anything you wish to add?

It is exhilarating writing in the crime-fiction genre. It is so new in South Africa but so apt given the ropey state of our nation. Writing crime gives me the sense that I can write about how it feels to be living here now.