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.

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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.

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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

Shadow cities

I wonder to what extent South Africa's emergence from apartheid has let the country's authors look clearly at the divisions that once existed and that still remain.

Here's a bit from "The Meeting," the heart-pounding short story by Margie Orford that opens the Bad Company collection of South African crime writing:

Claire Hart turned off the freeway, the off-ramp sinking her into Khayelitsha, Cape Town's teeming shadow city sprawling unmapped across the sand dunes south of the airport. The houses, makeshift cubes of corrugated iron and wood, roofed with black plastic, homed half a million people, maybe a million. No one was counting.

Roger Smith sees Cape Town in similar terms in his novel Wake Up Dead, where the city's dangerous Flats have resolved themselves into antagonistic territories defined by gang rule:

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.

Dark cities, shadow cities, alternative cities. Sounds something like those dirty towns Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett used to write about, doesn't it?

As always, read up on the latest South African crime writing at the Crime Beat site, including a discussion of Orford's novel Daddy's Girl.

© 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.

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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