Southern Africa is providing an exciting new source of crime fiction. Emerging decades after the work of James McClure, considered the father of its detective fiction, the new writing resonates with his themes.
James McClure
Born in South Africa, McClure moved to the UK, and it was there, writing from about 1971 to 1980, taking a break from journalism, that he produced his cross-cultural, award-winning Kramer and Zondi police procedurals featuring the detective partnership of Afrikaner Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and his Bantu assistant Sergeant Mickey Zondi. McClure explores the relationship of the two men in a time of enforced racial separation.
The Steam Pig (1971) was the first of the series, and this book and the titles that followed were ground–breaking in that they were published in the height of the apartheid era. These works contained a strong message about the inequalities of a society divided along racial lines. Eleven years after his last Kramer and Zondi, McClure wrote The Song Dog, a prequel, which proved to be the most popular of the series.
The New Breed
The writers that have appeared on the Southern African crime fiction landscape since McClure write with a gritty realism. They provided a view of the country today through new and different eyes. And like in many current novels of the genre (Dublin in John Brady's, the Bayou for James Lee Burke ), the authors bring a cinematic reality to their work, so that the landscape becomes a character in the stories themselves.
Deon Meyer
Like James McClure, Meyer gained his writing experience as a journalist, and appeared as a full-blown author in 1996 with Dead Before Dying. Dead at Daybreak followed in 2000, and Heart of the Hunter in 2002. Since then, he has published several more thrillers, and has been widely translated.
With evocative descriptions of his country, Meyer takes readers on trips by plane, motor cycle, and truck to its far borders, but it is the landscape of the Cape that is his main stomping ground: the city of Cape Town with its winding roads under the shadow of Table Mountain, the low-lying expanse of the Cape Flats, the rural byways of the semi-desert Karoo. His 2009 nail biter Thirteen Hours was followed by Trackers (2010), an extremely complex work, beyond the traditional Policier, involving different religious and racial groups, terrorists, the secret services, political intrigue, hunting, smuggling, and the deep personal conflicts of its protagonist.
Roger Smith
Cape Town, where he resides, is also integral to Roger Smith's fast-paced fiction. Mixed Blood (2009), Wake Up Dead" (2020) and Dust Devils (2011) provide insight into the everyday issues that exist in modern South Africa. The title Mixed Blood reflects the predominant population of the Cape Flats area, the Cape Coloureds, an ethnic mix whose ancestors include European settlers, indigenous tribes, and Malay slaves.
The area itself, a flat, sandy expanse on the outskirts of Cape Town, became their home when in 1950 they were forced into a "non-white" area by the then apartheid government. Still largely poverty-stricken, The Flats is known for harboring gang activity, and provides a vivid backdrop to Smith's violent stories of carjacking, gunrunning, and corruption.
Michael Stanley
Botswana, on South Africa's south and south–eastern border, and largely covered by the vast Kalahari Desert, is where Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department solves his cases. Written by Michael Stanley, writing duo of Michael Sears and Stanley trollop, retired South African academics, whose love of Botswana has been translated into thrillers that capture its sense of place and the people who live there. Their first was A Carrion Death" (2008) in which the discovery of a body partly destroyed by hyenas triggers corporate shenanigans around a diamond mine.
Game parks, bush camps, safaris, these are embedded into the fabric of Southern Africa. Deon Meyer delves into it in Blood Safari (2007) and the bush provides the taking-off point for the Michael Stanley novels The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (2009) and the 2011 Death of the Mantis.
In the latter, the authors expand the Kalahari experience to include the nomadic Bushmen, several thousand of whom still live as hunter-gatherers in the desert, and the novel explores their culture and the political issues around its survival.
Caryl Ferey
The French author's award-winning Zulu (2008, English translation 2010), like early McClure, has black and white policemen working together. In the transition period between the old apartheid era and the new rule by black Africans, they deal with crime in disadvantaged areas of Cape Town, where gangs, both local and from other parts of Africa, operate with impunity. An investigation into the death of a young woman in the city's Kirstenbosch Gardens leads to a tale of corruption in high places. Unrelentless in its violence, Zulu at the same time provides an introduction to South Africa's history and takes readers on a guided tour of Cape Town and its surroundings.
More to Come
In addition to the above, more crime writers are emerging from Southern Africa, and given the diversity of the terrain and its people, one can expect a continuing flow of quality crime fiction exploring untapped locales and unusual themes.
Isme Bennie - Ismé Bennie, a well-known Canadian tv executive, is now a media management consultant and non-fiction writer.
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