/ 23 October 2009

Eminently exportable

Raymond Chandler wrote in The Simple Art of Murder that “the detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder … has a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news.”

South Africa, apart from the odd kvetch from Colombia, is the undisputed murder capital of the world, so real-life murders, like most crimes, are hardly newsworthy. But the fictional crime spree in local fiction is hitting the news.

Southern African crime fiction ranges from Alexander McCall Smith’s genteel Number One Ladies Detective Agency series to Roger Smith’s hard-core noir-crime where the plot (think Mixed Blood) is so tight that there is no space to breathe. There are the police procedurals such as Andrew Brown’s award-winning Coldsleep Lullaby and the cop duo in Richard Kunzman’s trilogy. Jassy MacKenzie’s skill as a gore-meister and chronicler of the meanest streets of Johannesburg is back with My Brother’s Keeper.

Cape Town has produced quite a crop of crime writers. There is the now divorced writing duo of Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens whose PIs, in Out to Score, took on Cape Flats gangsters, perlemoen poachers, drugs and gun running. Since the split, Nicol has produced Payback, as brutal and mercenary a tale of gunrunning and extortion as you could hope to find.

Deon Meyer, the godfather of local crime fiction, is a warm-hearted writer who takes on broad moral issues: vigilantes in Devil’s Peak and the spectres of our military past in Blood Safari. His heroes are cops, PIs and ex-soldiers and he writes in the best crime tradition of the flawed hero who might not do the legal thing but who always does the right thing.

My own series (Like Clockwork, Blood Rose, Daddy’s Girl) is anchored in Cape Town with my forensic profiler, Clare Hart, concerned, as many women are in the Mother City, with sexual violence, human trafficking, gangs, the drug trade, revenge and finding an available straight man.

South African crime fiction, like American, British or Scandinavian crime fiction, is developing a powerful sense of place but it has not been the easiest sell as many book buyers are resistant to the notion that local might be lekker. Here we are in very good company. Mike Nicol on crimebeat.co.za quotes the Irish crime writer, Declan Burke, lamenting that Irish readers also ignore the homegrown product. Burke called it an inferiority complex. So, should one call this spate of novels thrillers or crime fiction or noir or what?

“I’ve got problems with dividing fiction into subgenres,” says Mervyn Sloman, owner of the independent Cape Town bookshop, The Book Lounge. “Whatever genre names one comes up with are divided by rather hazy lines. I don’t like talking about ‘crime fiction’ because I don’t know what fits into it and what doesn’t. Was John Coetzee’s Disgrace crime fiction? If Margaret Atwood’s next novel concerns a murder, are we going to put it in crime fiction? If you walk into my shop and say you’re looking for a detective story, or a crime/thriller/whodunit, we’ll match you with something that you’ll enjoy without having to have a separate shelf of books specially marked to assist us.

Chandler said “the murder novel has a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions”. For this reason, crime fiction gets some critics on to their literary high horses, but it sells. Why?

“Waiting in the queue [car licence] at the appropriately named Gallows Hill,” one reader, a recent convert to crime, emailed me: “I read another 80 pages of Daddy’s Girl and the time just flew. All I want to know is what happens next.”

“Reading crime is cheap bungee-jumping,” another crime fan said.

Crime fiction sells because who can trust the literary novel since postmodernism. You never know if the author will finish the story or if he or she will suddenly infest the book you are reading with an army of footnotes and forget the plot.

You have no such fear with the crime novelist. The average crime novelist will give you what you paid for — plot, character, action, resolution, some good sex. Good crime writers will give you a lot more.

Patrick Anderson writes in the Washington Post that “Deon Meyer’s novels explore the complex reality of South Africa … At the most obvious level, they are exciting stories of crime, conflict, revenge, but they are more than that: ambitious attempts to show us the pain and greatness of a troubled nation that is still being born.”

So, give plot a chance.

“The days are well and truly over when people bought literature because it originates in South Africa,” cautions Rebecca Servadio of London-based Koukla MacLehose Book Scouts. “Now the only thing that matters is that it is good and that it is sellable.” That said, South African crime is selling internationally. As Meyer asks: “Why wouldn’t our crime fiction do well overseas?” He has just hit the 20-language mark. Roger Smith has been sold in the United States, the United Kingdom and will soon be lost in translation in Japan. Mike Nicol has been sold in the US and the UK. Joanne Hichens has been sold in the US. Jassy MacKenzie has been sold to the Germans, as has Andrew Brown’s Cold Sleep Lullaby. My own Clare Hart series is in nine languages and counting.

“I don’t believe that South African crime fiction is developed enough yet to have become a brand in the way Scandinavian crime writing has, or Irish or Tartan Noir are threatening to become,” says Roger Smith. “I got a publishing deal in the States in pretty much the way any American writer would: because they liked my work and thought it was commercial. The fact that my books are set in South Africa is of some interest, but genre considerations outweigh geographical ones.”

Daddy’s Girl (Jonathan Ball), the third in the Clare Hart series, is out now. See www.margieorford.com