The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth, A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley and A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn
Just in time for long, cold winter nights are three engaging crime novels, all with a Southern African connection, however tenuous.
Fans of Alan Furst’s novels set in Europe during World War II might well appreciate Rennie Airth’s newest police procedural, The Dead of Winter (Macmillan), set in the United Kingdom in 1944. South African-born Airth was a foreign correspondent for Reuters before he took up crime writing, and he’s good on the atmosphere of faraway places in times of trauma — whether it’s Parisian suburbs a day or two before the Nazis take over the city or London’s cold, deserted streets at night during the Blitz.
His novels feature Detective Inspector John Madden, an introspective sort of chap given to lightning flashes of inspiration. In the new one, Madden has retired to the Surrey countryside while his colleagues wrestle with a seemingly senseless murder: a young Polish refugee whose throat was slit as she made her way during the blackout to a relative’s flat not far from the British Museum. The basket found next to the corpse is full of veggies and eggs — the fruit, as it were, of her labours as a land girl on Madden’s farm, so he becomes involved in the case. The killer weaves his way through the book, turning up here and there in different guises, and generally half a step ahead of the coppers.
The team of retired academics, Michael Sears (Wits) and Stanley Trollip (Minnesota), writing as Michael Stanley, have published a sequel to A Carrion Death, this one titled A Deadly Trade (Headline). Second novels are supposed to be a letdown, but this one is better than the first. Like its predecessor, it is a bit longer than it needs to be, but its secrets are better kept, if not entirely hidden.
A Deadly Trade features the larger-than-life Detective David “Kubu” Bengu of the Botswana CID, whose nickname comes from his bulk and a shape supposedly reminiscent of a hippo. Kubu, the cricket- and opera-loving product of a private school, is teamed up with one of his protégés — tall and thin, rather like a giraffe — to investigate the killing of two guests at a game lodge.
One victim is a South African, the other a Zimbabwean; when the prints of the latter are identified in Harare, it appears he’s been dead for 30 years. Zimbabwe looms large in this book, as does the Rhodesia it used to be, with the lodge owners and much of the staff consumed by memories of the war.
The best so far this year is Malla Nunn’s A Beautiful Place to Die (Picador), a breathtaking look at a small country town in the 1950s, where one family — the Pretorius clan — owns just about everything, the natives know their place and what passes for serious crime is a peeping tom — until police Captain Willem Pretorius is found floating face down in the river.
City cop Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, working a case nearby, is sent to check what HQ thinks is a hoax and becomes entangled with the denizens of Jacob’s Rest: the refugee from Nazi Germany who runs the local dry goods store, the coloured seamstresses his wife employs, the half-Zulu, half-Shangaan constable who is probably Pretorius’s closest friend, and the rest of the Pretorius family, from the rigidly religious mother to the five sons, who range from thuggish to fey.
Meanwhile the Special Branch gets wind of the case and sends in three heavies convinced it’s a political killing and determined to beat a confession out of somebody — anybody — to prove their thesis and secure their promotions.
Nunn, a documentary filmmaker, was born in Swaziland and educated in Australia, and her book is very nearly perfect.
It is beautifully written, the characters are wonderful and the puzzle is not easy to solve. A warning: the language, accurate for the time and place, is often politically incorrect.
And a caveat: the ghostly Scottish sergeant who haunts Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge in post-WWI London seems to have moved on to Jacob’s Rest.
He’s irritating enough when he’s chatting with Rutledge; in Cooper’s head, where he issues advice and provokes a migraine, he’s irrelevant. Just ignore him — Cooper does.