New South African crime fiction
Keeping bad company
Here’s a thing: since April last year there’ve been a healthy number of South African crime novels/thrillers published in English. And here I was thinking the genre wasn’t pumping them out. But there’s new work from Peter Hain, Kurt Ellis, Gareth Crocker, Natalie Conyer, Tony Park, and Joan de la Haye. Plus, later this month, a translation of Deon Meyer’s Leo.
Next week, I’ll post the updated list of Who’s Who of South African crime fiction.
The Who’s Who features crime novels by writers working in English, or translated into English, who set their novels in southern Africa. Under the broad category of crime fiction, I have included a number of adventure and thriller writers – Wilbur Smith, Geoffrey Jenkins, Alan Scholefield, Siegfried Stander, Jon Burmeister, Tony Park, Joan de la Haye – although not all their book titles. The southern African setting and the thriller label have brought a few writers who don’t live locally onto the list. Not on the list are three writers who set their novels elsewhere. These include a number of cosies by Gail Schimmel and Kate Sidley, writing as Katie Gayle, and a psychological thriller by Amy Heydenrych.
Afrikaans crime fiction flourishes with a number of writers producing new works regularly. Among them Riana Mouton, Irna van Zyl (who is also published in English), Rudie van Rensburg, Irma Venter (another one with a list of titles in English), Quintus van der Merwe, Bettina Wyngaard, Martin Steyn (also with a title in English), and Piet Steyn. As you can see, mostly, their work is not translated into English; whenever it is the writers are in the Who’s Who. Of course, there’s also that other oke, mentioned above, Deon Meyer.
In Zulu, Meshack Masondo wrote and published a long list of crime novels. A short story of his in English can be found in the anthology Bad Company (2008), as is one by Dirk Jordaan.
The Who’s Who list includes writers who are published by conventional publishing houses and those who have self-published.
A note about the cartoon: when the SA crime fiction wave started some 15 years ago, the late Gus Ferguson did this cartoon for one of his many publications. He kindly let me have it and it now hangs in my study.