The history of South Africa is proving to be some of the most fertile soil for crime novelists today and is threatening to edge Scandinavia, (and formerly what Ireland, Los Angeles) out of the top spot for setting dark tales of corruption, survival, revenge and redemption, (I know they're out there, but Latin America and Mexico have got to have some top representatives out there outside of
Roberto Bolano, Paulo Lins and
Rolo Diez - please clue me in. And Balkans - you're next.) But the recent past is nothing but a rich starting point. What makes a movement out of it is the participation of master stylists the caliber of
Roger Smith, a native of Johannesburg, but now living in Cape Town, and whose
Mixed Blood and
Wake Up Dead will leave scorch marks on your bookshelves, constructing what will most likely come to be recognized as the blueprints for writing about life in the Cape Town Flats for a decade or two or three. Still, what you just can't get away from are the nearly unbelievable conditions and realities that existed and continue to persist today for much of the country's poor. (And just like good science fiction, the microcosm of social crime fiction is never really about somewhere or somebody else living in some other time. It's you and me right here and now.) The disparity of life quality and the contrast between the natural beauty of the land and the squalor of the slums... well, you just don't get more potent places to launch a story from.
Wessel Ebersohn's The October Killings is only the latest tale of life in the new post-apartheid reality and of the fallout in the moral-social-economic-chaos, but if you can lay your hands on it (and I know you can - ordering is easy) pick up Caryl Ferey's blister-bomb Zulu. Or catch up with some films first. Try Ralph Ziman's Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema, or Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, or the true story of South Africa's apartheid era cop turned bank robber Andre Stander, Bronwen Hughes' Stander. Just dip your toe into these dangerous waters and then try to get out without succumbing to the depths. I dare you. New York, L.A., London and Stockholm will still be there when you want to come back, but I'm betting you become a Cape Town regular awful quick.
What am I missing here?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
