Black Heart, or Why you should spend your pennies on a book by Mike Nicol

Oh, man, did I like Mike Nicol's 2011 Cape Town thriller Black Heart. Here are a few of the reasons:

1) It is quite literally impossible at times to say who--the protagonists or the principal villain--is chasing whom. That's because each is chasing the other, and has good reasons for doing so.

2) And that's leaving aside the secondary villains--or are they secondary good guys?

3) The main good guys, a pair of security-company owners named Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso, are very clearly good, yet they have done dreadful things.

4) The principal villain, one of the more memorable in recent crime fiction, is evil beyond all doubt, yet she is given a chilling back story rooted in South Africa's recent past:

"Mace had watched her taken away to the Membesh camp. Nights of rape ahead of her as the big boys had their way. The big boys now MPs, government men, oligarchs. Was hardly a wonder he and Pylon went off to run guns. The camps weren’t a picnic."

One could discuss that passage at some length. For now, suffice it to say that Nicol avoids the easy temptation of making her horrible past an easy pop-psychological excuse for her evil present. Oh, and has any villain ever had a better name, with a more resonant first syllable, than Sheemina February?

5) The Hammett-like terseness that bursts into occasional rueful Chandlerian acid, as in this observation about Sheemina February's building:

"a cliff of expensive caves owned by film stars, rich business machers, trust babies, highflying models with too much money too soon."

6) The reference to "Government men, all the old strugglistas" who "get fatter by the minute with their deals and schemes." Strugglistas is my word of the week.

7) The humor:

"‘That’s your name? I call you Dancing Rabbit?’" 

 "‘That’s what I answer to. Also Veronica.'"

8) The humor at the tensest moments, as here, when Mace and Pylon confront Dancing Rabbit and her husband who, it turns out, are Native American casino entrepreneurs eager to swing a deal in South Africa:

“‘Maybe you should have told us. Sort of thing puts you in a different category for us … `In our books,’ said Pylon, ‘you were rich and famous coming here for a good time. Just needed the edge taken off the street life. No big deal.’” 

“‘Still not,’ said Dancing Rabbit. ‘In our experience people say they’re going to scalp you, they’re generally blustering.’  

 “‘Not here,’ said Mace. ‘People here say that’s their intention, most often it is exactly.’”

9) A comic set piece that does extra duty as local color and entertaining lesson in how vernaculars mix in a multi-ethnic country:

 "He rapped his knuckles on the lid. ‘Ja, hell man, this old biddy, this’ – he shook his head – ‘I’d say, hell man, I’d say, ja,’ – he folded his arms – ‘I’d say the way it is with your car, ag man, short and sweet like a beet, the fucking fucker’s fucked, ek se. Finish ’n klaar. Know what I mean. End of story.’"

In short, if you like your thrillers drum-head tight, sharply observed, with a keen satirical edge, thoroughly entertaining even as they offer serious commentary on the countries of their setting, you want to read Mike Nicol.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

MCM

Welcome to Detectives Beyond Borders' 1,900th post. I celebrate the occasion with an homage to beauty. First up are two bits from Roger Smith's new novella, Ishmael Toffee, the title character freshly out of Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison and surveying his new surroundings:

"When he leaves the shack in the morning the sea of rusted iron that is Tin Town sprawls out into so much space that it robs him of his breath and he almost runs back inside."

 and

"Distant Table Mountain and its cloth of cloud rises up clear and sharp over the endless shanties and box houses of the Cape Flats ..."

The Cape Flats, "apartheid's dumping ground," must be one of the most hellish places on Earth ("Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steam-punk Victorian hell hole," I wrote after reading Wake Up Dead.) Yet the image of a sea of rusted iron sprawling "out into so much space" has a certain desolate beauty. One secret to good noir is keeping the beauty and the dread in perfect tension so the reader is attracted and repelled at the same time. Smith does it.

***

Vicki Hendricks' beauty is of a different kind: hot, steamy, sexy,  and doomed, what the movie Body Heat wishes it could have been on its best day. Everyone's headed downhill in Hendricks Edgar-shortlisted Cruel Poetry, but on their way, Hendricks gives them some lines as funny as Allan Guthrie's:

"He can’t imagine that a woman living at the Moons could write anything, but who knew? Maybe a female Charles Bukowski—frightening thought. He hopes she never asks him to look at her work."

and

"Despite the cold air conditioning of the office, he’s beginning to overheat. He scoots his chair closer to the desk to skim the last essay. He’d shuffled it to the end of the stack, in case he might die and never have to grade it."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dust Devils

Roger Smith knows how to play up the good, old-fashioned virtues of honor, persistence, redemption, and love of adventure. He also keeps the bullets flying, the blades flashing, and the spinning tires kicking up dust on sun-baked South African roads.

The result in Dust Devils, Smith's third novel after Mixed Blood and the superlatively good Wake Up Dead, is as much unabashed fun as I can remember having had reading a crime novel.

This book offers one protagonist driven inexorably back to his home and another wrenched irreversibly from his. It's a tale of father and sons, and just maybe of daughters. It's a tale of the old South Africa and the new, and of the striking, amusing, touching and tragic ways the two intersect.  It's a tale told in the sights, the sounds and, far more than in most fiction, the smells of its setting.

It also may blaze a bit of a publication trail. It's available as e-book now, three months ahead of its publication in hardback from Serpent's Tail. Whatever the format, I can see massive popular and critical success for this guy. You should be reading him.

***

Roger Smith talks about Dust Devils, contemporary South Africa, and e-book pricing on Allan Guthrie's Criminal-E blog.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Dust Devils: An early look at Roger Smith's latest

Roger Smith has a thing for dust, grit, and sand, usually baking under a searing sun and driven by a hot, dry wind.  Here's a bit from his first novel, Mixed Blood:

"The wind howled across the Flats, picking up the sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses."

Smith's Cape Town is a gritty place, literally and figuratively.  Wake Up Dead, Smith's grim, funny, hyper-violent thriller of a second novel, was one of my favorite books of 2010, and it was pretty gritty, dusty, and sun-basked, too.

His third book elevates the dust to a title position. I haven't read enough to know how the dust figures in Dust Devils, but the early chapters are full of grit, violence, and a pace that's breakneck and touchingly human at the same time. One early highlight: a Zulu tourist village that's a loony melange of past and present and a zinger of a comment on contemporary South Africa, with a spot of menace to keep us from chuckling too hard.

(Smith owes his depiction of hot, dry, nerve-crackling weather principally to Cape Town's climate. But he owes a bit to Raymond Chandler, too. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Meet the man behind crime fiction's most despicable character

Some good miscellaneous material in recent days, including this video interview that Roger Smith did with the man he says inspired the character Piper in Smith's novel Wake Up Dead.

Piper is the worst fictional human being I have met, a killer, a rapist, an utterly callous gang leader, and a perpetrator of the most despicable acts.

He does most of his fictional thing in Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison, as close to an earthly hell as anything in crime fiction. And the man whose prison tales inspired his creation, who says he committed in real life acts as horrific as the fictional Piper's, looks and sounds like the kindliest old man you'd ever want to meet.

***

From Bob Cornwell comes word that Crime Scene: Italy is now available, following on similar comprehensive portraits of the crime fiction scenes in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. These are thorough and compact packages, covering authors, publishers, magazines, Web sites, bookstores and history. And all are available free to view online or download as pdf files.

High fives to Cornwell and the International Association of Crime Writers. They deserve a public service award of some kind.

***

And, from Jeff VanderMeer, a proposal for funding translation of “non-realist" fiction into English — "non-realist or whatever term denotes the totality of fantasy/SF/horror/surrealism/magic realism/etc. without dividing things into the false camps of genre and literary."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Wake Up Dead reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The thriller," I write, "the second novel from its South African author, is chock-full of types from those movies. An adventurer who comes home looking for what’s his. A woman in trouble and living by her wits. A crook who tries, too late, to make good. A hint of redemption. Even, after a fashion, a doomed story of obsessive love.

"Only the scene is not New York, San Francisco, or some nameless Midwestern town; it’s violent, deeply divided Cape Town, mostly the deadly slums known as the Flats. The setting recaptures all the blood and menace that time and nostalgia have effaced from Raymond Chandler’s mean streets — and redoubles them."

I also sneak in a plug for two more of my favorite crime authors, list a few more names from South Africa's flourishing crime fiction scene, and point the way to a good source for even more information. Read the complete review here after 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and, in the future, on a good database near you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Roger Smith's urban dystopia

I've come under the sway of graphic-novel readers and urban-fantasy lovers in the past year, and I've dipped into a dystopian comic or two myself. Maybe that's why I pick the following as an emblematic sentence from Roger Smith's South African thriller Wake Up Dead:

"A woman in a Muslim headscarf scuttled across the road, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a tub of Kentucky chicken, and disappeared into Dark City. Otherwise the road was empty and silent."

Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steam-punk Victorian hell hole, and none of his characters ー rich, poor, black, white or colored ー has anything better than a bleak present and an infernal past.

The novel's flashbacks, narrative asides and occasional political jabs, even the inflections of its characters' speech, contribute to a vivid sense of place. The only question is whether that place is Cape Town or hell.

==================

Here are two more bits I like:

"But he would rather give his life for that dream. ... Or, rather, the lives of the ragtag army of boys who had come to believe in him as some kind of hip-hop Selassie."

and

"Two years before, Billy Afrika had stood there, over Clyde Adams's gutted body, and made another promise. Swore he'd take care of his friend's family. He'd handed in his badge and become a mercenary. No one had used the word mercenary, of course. You were a contractor, skilled in close protection."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

South African thriller opens with a barrage of good lines

The thumbs-up on Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead comes once again from the energetic David Thompson of Houston's Murder By the Book. He recommended this South African thriller, and I think I'll like it because the opening pages are full of quotable lines. Here are some of my favorites:

"The night they were hijacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukrainian whore."

and

"The cannibal elbowed her beneath her plastic tits. `Go and piss.' Coming from his mouth it sounded almost like a benediction: Go in peace."

and, maybe best of all:

"They walked into the tiled and scented bathroom, Michael Bolton dribbling from the ceiling speakers."

The challenge will now be whether Smith can sustain and whether the story can bear that much verbal panache for 290 pages. I think I'll have lots of fun finding out.

(Wake Up Dead is Smith's second thriller. Read more about the author here. Read more about South African crime fiction at the Crime Beat Web site. And does the prose in these brief excerpts remind you of anyone?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009