There are more flavours of crime novel than colours in a box of Smarties.
Protagonists in police procedurals range from tough American cops to highly civilised British policemen, from deeply depressed Scandinavian detective inspectors to the Italian inspettore who tracks down the bad guys in a world where nearly everyone is corrupt.
Novels featuring private detectives have equally many sub-genres: the cosy (featuring ladies, usually; think of Mma Ramotswe or Miss Marple); hard-boiled thrillers with tough-guy PIs (usually American); courtroom dramas with crime-solving lawyers; books about forensic pathologists who can tell from a few nicks on a bone how the victim died, and when and who wielded the knife; historical crime novels that go back to the Roman empire or ancient Chinese dynasties.
And, as the TV infomercials go, that’s not all: a reader looking for a book with an actual plot can choose from among whodunits, howdunits and whydunits.
With all these options, why is it that slasher fiction appears to be the flavour of the year in the local publishing world?
In slasher fiction blood, pain and degradation are the point of the book; the plot is a side issue. Of course there’s some gore in crime novels — we’re talking murder, after all. But in slasher fiction it’s repeated, over and over — a wallow in the worst of it for the fun of it.
Think of Jeffrey Deaver or James Patterson or — the list goes on. See if you can find a touch of humanity in their books, a character you care about, the odd bit of humour — anything besides blood and torture, which take centre stage.
In the past three or four years, a number of locally written books, many of them set in Cape Town, have joined the flood of foreign slasher fiction.
Mixed Blood by Roger Smith (Henry Holt/Macmillan) is a typical Cape Town thriller: you slosh around in so much gore the plot is practically submerged. Bank robber Jack Burn is on the run; some luckless hoods who try to rob his rented home on the slopes of Signal Hill don’t know who they’re dealing with; and after killing them, Burn goes on the run again.
There are some interesting characters, especially the young, battered and guilt-ridden widow of one of the hoodlums, whose son suffers so badly from foetal crack syndrome that he is little more than a vegetable. There are also some less interesting ones, for example a churchgoing crooked cop who likes shooting people.
Why write this stuff? The answer is clear: Smith has found an American publisher, and apparently there’s an option for a film — Samuel L Jackson has been mentioned.
Dark Video by Peter Church (Two Dogs), on local shelves, will soon be published in Australia. There’s plenty of gore in this book too — wait for the shark attack — but at least there’s an interesting plot, especially if the reader happens to be a university student and has a lot of patience and time on his hands.
A privileged University of Cape Town student falls in with three guys living in the usual squalid student commune. The three are completely caught up in the internet, and with good reason — that’s how they make their money; they sell weird, racy videos to private customers. It’s when they go from sexy to snuff that the outsider starts to pull away, but it is much too late. Some friendly advice to the author, who is on his second book: he could use a good editor.
So could a few self-published works, but they’re no worse than many thrillers that have gone through the usual channels.
In Purgatory Road by Peter J Earle (PJE Publishing), a travelling salesman with a terrible temper is caught in a midnight speed trap by a few crooked policemen. He mows them down, goes back to his smallholding, gets drunk, then realises no one is likely to connect him to the murder. Except — one bullet has gone through the victim and lodged in a tree, and his friend, the local policeman, has dug it out and sent it for analysis. Time to go on the run and he heads north, over the border.
Pop-Splat by Ian Martin (Hubris) is based on a clever notion: Hamlet, brought up to date. The king is wealthy businessman Bruce Dreyer, killed in a hijacking; his widow, Trudy, is involved with Dreyer’s brother, Claude; the modern-day Hamlet, Trudy’s son Matt, hates them all.
His good friend Horry Horowitz, a muscleman who finds religion, explains the situation to an SABC reporter after Matt has gone on a killing spree: “His father was killed; he came to believe that his mother and uncle had murdered his father; he was the victim of a violent break-in, in which he killed two of his attackers with a garden spade; he was also accidentally responsible for the death of his ex-girlfriend’s father. And then there was his psychiatric condition, which had been misdiagnosed and incorrectly medicated.”
And now for the good news: a collection of short stories that includes, among other pieces, contributions by some serious slasher fiction practitioners, is not bad at all. In Bad Company (Pan Macmillan), Mike Nicol offers a well-written, entertaining tale of corruption and deal-making; there’s not a tortured animal in sight. Jo’burg’s Jassy Mackenzie, Queen of the Slasher, gives us an interesting story of revenge, with only one killing, and that one well-deserved. The book’s editor, Joanne Hichens, writes about S&M gone wrong.
There are many highlights: a moving piece by Tracey Farren (author of the novel Whiplash) about child rape; a brief curtain-raiser by the excellent Margie Orford; stories of crooked cops who go too far by the best of the best, Deon Meyer, and by newcomer Diale Tlholwe, as well as private eyes who cross the line in a story by Meshack Masondo, who generally writes detective novels in isiZulu. Altogether, Hichens has put together a collection featuring most people who have published crime novels locally of greater or lesser quality — and Lee Child, no less, has written a foreword.