Daddy’s Girl by Margie Orford (Jonathan Ball)
Margie Orford is to Cape Town what Val McDermid is to the north of England, capturing the seamier side of the Mother City: drugs, prostitution, gangs, police corruption and the clash between policing and political correctness. It is not a vision the Western Cape Tourism Board would like to share with prospective domestic and overseas tourists, yet — given the statistics we know — it is part of the city reality as much as Table Mountain and the wine route.
The story begins with the release of an ageing gangster from prison. Next the bodies of two young girls, with no apparent gang connections, are found shot dead. The police, particularly Captain Riedwaan Faizal of the crack Gang Unit, suspect the arbitrary killings are gang-related, possibly signs of an imminent gang war. Meanwhile, Dr Clare Hart, journalist and profiler, is investigating the disappearance of another child as part of a television documentary she is making to highlight the terrible cost of organised crime in the Western Cape, particularly as it affects women and children.
Before Faizal can take his investigation further, his young daughter Yasmin is abducted after her ballet classes. His estranged wife and sections of the police force start to suspect he is the culprit because he has been resisting signing the release papers that will allow his ex-wife to take his daughter with her when she emigrates to Canada. This fact, Faizal’s tough approach to gangs, and his consequent popularity in the press, has caught the attention of painfully PC “civilian” overseer special director Salome Ndlovu. She immediately assumes he’s guilty and tries to stop him from pursuing an investigation.
Faizal’s fellow police are divided. Some, like colleague Rita Mkhize, support him. Others want him to turn in his badge and gun, pending further investigation. His supporters, deliberately blocking the plans of Ndlovu, suggest he ask Clare Hart for help. They embark on a search and investigation that brings them into the world of prison-based Number Gangs, one of which — under the sadistic Voeltjie Ahrend — is moving away from the old structures and forming a business alliance with Russian mafia interests. And all the while both Hart and Faizal know that the longer they take to find Yasmin the more likely she will turn up dead.
It would be a crime to give away any more of the fast-paced plot. Suffice it to say that Margie Orford moves the story along at a fast pace, yet with an attention to detail — rendered in fairly sparse yet effective prose — that contributes to an atmosphere that is tense, uncertain, always ambiguous, sometimes decidedly unsettling. Orford conveys the extent of gang influence in the city, one that feels at first unbelievable, but which seems to be based all too accurately on what studies have shown is going on.
We get to see Cape Town from its grimmest side, one of the most violent cities on the planet. Visitor and resident beware! You never know when you might get attacked, murdered or disappear.
Our two protagonists serve as agents of social commentary. Clare Hart, the campaigning journalist, represents those who wish to see the gangs curtailed by exposure of their workings and public pressure to normalise whole areas under their control. In particular Hart presents through her eyes the brutal mistreatment of women in societies undergoing gang rule. She and most of the other female characters epitomise the struggle for a normal and dignified life amid the “war”. They also represent the fighters and victims of what sometimes in this novel feels a bit like a gender war, a war on women and using women as part of organised crime.
Faizal represents the often physically besieged, politically manipulated and psychologically battered police force, struggling against the odds to keep a semblance of normality. Through his eyes we see the whole spectrum: bent cops, cops tempted, police who have thoroughly imbibed the socio-babble of their political minders (some of whom, it is hinted occasionally, may not have spotless hands either). It’s tough enough hunting down criminals, particularly when they may try to “get at you” through your family, but worse when one cannot trust allies who just may be seeking favours from the bureaucrats and their laughable “policies”.
The overall result is a thriller that, while fast moving, is also likely to provoke some fairly important questions about policing in Cape Town, in South Africa and beyond, and the extent to which organised crime may actually have tame politicians in their pockets.
We know this happens in many other countries in Africa, Asia, parts of Europe and the Americas, as well as here. And we know that organised criminals with political connections have tame police in their pockets too.
Thriller fans will be delighted by this, the latest Clare Hart novel. But, as I said before, the Cape tourist industry, and sections of the South African police, I suspect, will not.
Refuge by Andrew Brown (Zebra Press)
Andrew Brown is probably one of the best of the new generation of South African writers. His earlier work, Coldsleep Lullaby, combining social commentary with classical detective fiction motifs, deservedly won awards. Street Blues, his grim and gritty memoir about being a police reservist in Cape Town, was also a fine work that offered many insights into the dilemmas of crime and policing in contemporary South Africa.
His new novel — in some ways a crime novel with social commentary — seems a portion of what one can only suspect is a sort of literary project on the author’s part: a critical yet compassionate investigation of contemporary South African life.
On one level it’s clearly a thriller, not so much a “whodunit” in the classical sense as a “who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why?”.
Richard Calloway is a successful lawyer in an ambitious Cape Town law firm under stress. He has taken on a sleazy client — Stefan Svritsky, a Russian gangster plying his various antisocial trades in the Mother City — much to the unease of his partners who are desperately pursuing the lucrative BEE trade.
His marriage is dull and he looks for satisfaction elsewhere, in the city’s massage parlours, and particularly in the person of Abayomi, a Nigerian refugee. Her skill as a masseuse and her beauty affect Richard, who develops what can only be called an obsession for her.
Meanwhile, Abayomi and her family are under strain from simply being refugees in a city and country where they are not welcome. They are harassed by the police. Ifasen, her husband, is trying to make a living as a street trader — a step down from his profession in teaching — and is deeply unhappy with his wife’s work as a masseuse. His vulnerability as an immigrant, though legally in the country, is highlighted by his being wrongfully arrested as a drug dealer.
Abayomi plays on Richard’s obsession with her to convince him to take Ifasen’s case. Meanwhile, Richard is once again dealing with Svritsky, who has been charged with a hit-and-run. Though the evidence, strictly speaking, is tenuous — one witness who gave a false name and address to the police and disappeared is hardly a solid case — the prosecuting authority is determined to use it to convict his client.
Richard finds himself moving between two or three worlds, that of his law firm, his circle of middle-class friends and the world of Nigerian refugees that Abayomi shows him. Ifasen is introduced to the brutal world of the prison system and a judiciary that is at best incompetent, at worst totally indifferent to his situation.
Brown skilfully weaves together these multiple worlds, multiple stories, highlighting through his characters the way in which we all, living as we do in one or two worlds, miss what’s happening in the rest — though they are often under our noses. As one might expect of the thriller genre there are numerous twists and turns, but what remains in the reader’s mind and imagination is how little we really see or know (perhaps choose to see or know).
I am reminded of a comment by detective novelist Nicolas Freeling who once commented that the only two things worth writing about are crime and class struggle. In Brown we have a novelist who writes about both crime and social conditions that, from a Marxist perspective, one might call issues of race and class.
He is certainly an uneasy writer to read if we approach his work from more than the desire for a good story (though he gives us an undoubtedly good story). What is most pleasing about Brown is that he sacrifices neither a good plot nor social commentary. With writers like him, the South African crime novel is both coming of age and becoming a serious contender on the global literary stage.