Every tourist loves sunny Cape Town and its mountain. But Table Mountain also casts an ominous shadow on the Cape and the people who live there, creating an ideal place for sinister characters to play hide-and-seek. And in these three crime novels, set in Cape Town and the surrounding areas, there are numerous characters from the rest of the world, all with nasty agendas.
Dark issues, such as human trafficking, woman and child abuse, prostitution, gang initiations and perlemoen poaching are touched upon in the thrillers. Unfortunately these are not the creations of the authors’ lively imaginations, but very real issues that the region is struggling with under the veneer of its tourist attractions.
Coldsleep Lullaby (Zebra Press), which earned lawyer Andrew Brown a nomination for this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize, paints two story-lines, one set in present-day Stellenbosch and the other in the time of governor Simon van der Stel. In his chilling depiction of the cheerful student town, Brown asks whether there is a dual justice system, one set of rules for marginalised illegal immigrants and another for the professors. In linking the two storylines, he even takes a jab at the racial purity of some of the town’s right-wingers.
The author’s beautiful prose sometimes undermines the dark setting of the story. Its sudden climax wakes you from the slumber that Brown’s lullaby-like prose has induced. While everything is abruptly explained, the book still leaves you with your own set of questions to mull over.
Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens’s Out to Score (Umuzi) is more frenzied. From the start it is clear that there is no place for angels in this story. The good guys have good hearts, but they have their own rules, which might not appeal to everyone’s morality.
Mullett, the main protagonist, deals drugs through contacts he blackmailed out of a suspect when he was still part of the police force. His PI partner has alcohol-dredged dreams of revenge starring a gangster with studs in his teeth.
There are lots of side stories; sometimes it is difficult to decide what the main thread is. Is it the Chinese triads’ bid to dominate the perlemoen trade, the characters constantly haggling to get one over the other, or the plight of street children being hunted like animals?
After building up tension, the ending is a bit flat and actually leaves one wondering if the antagonist was one of the bad guys at all.
While Out to Score only briefly touches on serial killings, the main theme of Margie Orford’s Like Clockwork (Oshun) is the serial killing of young girls. The cover touts the book as a Clare Hart novel, suggesting either that there have been earlier thrillers (there haven’t) or that this might be the first in a series featuring Hart, a psychologist/documentary maker.
Hart has certainly got a full plate to finish each day. When she is not interviewing prostitutes for a documentary on human trafficking or researching dangerous gang leaders, she helps the police as profiler in serial killer cases. Alongside that, she battles the scars of her own past, including making peace with her disturbed twin, who was gang raped when she was a teenager.
Although her main character’s busy schedule sometimes leaves you gasping in disbelief, Orford has spun a well thought out tale that ties up all its knots in the end. Seasoned thriller readers might sniff out the killer long before Orford is prepared to let the cat out of the bag, but her book is more than a whodunnit. Between the cat-and-mouse games, she cleverly depicts a world where women are nothing more than sexual objects. Orford brings this startling real world home to the reader, who has no inkling of what happens in the murky world of prostitution and gang rituals.
When Hart traces the scars of her sister, a gang initiation victim, you know that there are real sisters out there crying for their siblings.
There are other realities in Out to Score, such as dagga-smoking ex-policemen who try to make a living as PIs because they can no longer handle the police service; and perlemoen smuggling, which is widespread in the Western Cape. Brilliant cops who lose their minds because of the naked violence they deal with every day are present in Coldsleep Lullaby, as are fathers who sleep with their daughters.
These three novels paint a sinister world of gangs with little humanity, out only to make a quick buck and drive fear into the people they rule over. In addition, Coldsleep Lullaby and Like Clockwork delve into the world of refugees in Cape Town, where they have to fight tooth and nail to survive. In all, the flip side of the fairest Cape.