What crime novel would you most like to have written?

WOLVES EAT DOGS by Martin Cruz Smith.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?

Arkady Renko (goes with the above). But some days I feel more like Cruella deVille. I never want to be Bambi’s mother.

• Complete interview: Crime Always Pays

The forced passing of the “secrecy” Bill – it would be ridiculous if it was not so frightening – briefly derailed my ambition to be a wallflower. However, South Africa’s grasping rulers have underestimated how pissed off the electorate is with them. Those in power, sheltered from reality as they are, seem to have swallowed their own Orwellian doublespeak and that South Africans have experience at fighting injustice, mendacity and state crime. They will get their come-uppance as people who do wrong sometimes do.

This is one of the things I have learnt during the time that crime has absorbed my writing attention and these column inches for some time. And this column has taken me places. A year ago I was sailing with my family off the Tanzanian coast. We had planned a route further out into the beckoning, blue Indian Ocean, but because of raiding Somali pirates we kept inside the reef that protects Zanzibar. It was fabulous, but the limitations caused by the collapse of the Somali state irked me, although I see that Wilbur Smith – never a man to miss a moment – already dashed a book out about piracy, a distressed, blonde damsel rescued by manly men in khaki.

• Keep reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

But be that as it may, last Friday was the day the Mail & Guardian did the time warp. They blacked out of a story about arms, secrets and lies that they had been prevented from publishing. The reason? The journalists were threatened with arrest for publishing a story that was clearly, fairly and squarely in the public interest. The censored pages were an instant flashback to the 1980s when censorship by a vicious and paranoid state, aware that power was slipping from its bloodied hands, reached a feverish pitch.

The laws governing freedom of expression and the press were draconian then. They were designed to silence the public and to keep secret what officials were doing. That was all swept aside in the euphoria of the early nineties, and freedom of expression – the right to the truth, I suppose – was enshrined in the constitution. We all should have lived happily ever after but there was to be a twist in the ending of this tale.

It was called The Arms Deal. Despite a lot of complicated detail, the story is mind-numbingly simple in essence. Senior party and government fleeced a trusting and hopeful nation by ordering obsolete, unnecessary weapons at inflated prices. Kickbacks from arms manufacturers were brokered and money flowed into Swiss bank accounts. It has felt a bit crazy for a while. They know they did it. We know they did it. They know we know they did it. We know they know we know they did it…

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

John Grisham is the undisputed king of the fictional courtroom drama and his books capture the socially agreed voodoo that is necessary for a justice system to work: the rigmarole of the robes, the standing and rising for judges, the wood paneling, the gavel, the hand on the bible stuff, the swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth – as if that were remotely possible. All this ritual makes us believe the justice system is rational and fair and real in fiction.

Reality is altogether another matter and, seeing as I am not writing a book at the moment, it has diverted me from the plausible world of fictional justice. The cases currently before bemused-looking judges presiding over South African courts belong more to the world of Stephen King than jurisprudence. For example, there’s the case of the high court judge murdered in his luxury apartment Cape Town. His hell-hath-no-fury wife is on trial his brutal slaying alongside with a young man who seems to have confused the roles of toyboy/handyman with hitman. The presiding judge is looking nervy. My advice to him would be that he buys his own wife flowers on the way home.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

Johannesburg rushes up at you as the plane banks and circles where the township houses are corn-rowed over the stripped, red earth. As you drop down towards the airport the traffic glints in golden ribbons in the afternoon sun. The swimming pools are blue squares in suburban gardens. The sky is hazed with dust, smoke and pollution. A comforting reminder that the gritty engine of South Africa’s economy is still working.

We slip into the traffic. Jo’burg drivers, by the way, are much better than Capetonians who have a frighteningly creative approach to the rules of the road. The city, the biggest manmade forest in the world is gorgeous in spring. All the jacaranda trees have flowered at once, purpling the streets with blossoms. Even the man-eating potholes look pretty. I am enchanted by the combination of concrete and this extravagant and ephemeral beauty.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

Crime writers generally have taken the easy way out of this dilemma. Killing fictional people is our core business, as is the restitution of fictional law and order. Few readers are willing to wait out the length of a trial to see a violent criminal get his come-uppance, which probably explains the high numbers of killings of the bad guys in the final chapters of many crime novels. There is of course that visceral, Old Testament thrill we feel when someone truly bad pays the ultimate price for their sins. This is an unofficial death penalty, a kind of literary vigilantism, that elides the complexity of a democratic society’s desire for punitive and its simultaneous aspiration towards restorative justice.

The spectre of judicial murder has never left South Africa. This is a country that executed a vast number of people. Between 1921 and 1989 at least 4003 convicted murderers, rapists and political prisoners were hanged at Pretoria Central Prison. According to a report in the Sunday Times, at least 130 political prisoners were executed there. But calls for the return of the death penalty are frequent and loud.

South Africa’s constitution outlawed the death penalty and in 1996, two years after the first democratic elections which ushered in Mandela as president, the notorious gallows were dismantled. They have now been restored and will be unveiled on the 8th of December. The Minister of Correctional Services Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, whose department has been driving the initiative, says that the restoration and the unveiling was her department’s ‘small contribution towards paying homage and tribute to all South Africans who were executed. I would want SA to see this as part of a healing process and part of nation-building.’

The names of all the executed prisoners – common-law and political – will be commemorated. “We don’t want to leave out the names of common-law criminals who were also executed,’ the minister said, ‘because we are saying that this [apartheid] was a system that was unjust, cruel and inhumane.’

This attempt at bringing ‘closure’ bears witness to the bureaucratic horror of the state’s killing of its citizens. The cupboard with its seven ropes, the yardstick for measuring the height of those about to be hanged, the fan to cool sweating officials as they prepared the prisoners for death. Because, according to this report, up to seven executions used to take place simultaneously.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

Many of them have made money hand over fist during the prolonged fiscal crisis of the last couple of years. They have been bailed out by the American treasury and now European governments are trying to stave off defaults amongst the poorer members of the EU. It looks to me like the money-emperors are stark naked. And it looks like they don’t give a toss.

How to right this situation? How to write it?

My money is on John le Carre. He is able to hold together tales of corporate greed, think The Constant Gardner, as deftly as he held together the moral ambiguity of the Cold War in Smiley’s People.

I even have a title for him – The Men Who Crashed the World. Nicked, I confess, from Al Jazeera. They have run a brilliant series of analytical pieces on the wave of indignation that has swept protesters from every walk of life into their city squares.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers Weekly Column

The reason for this sporting torture is that I’ve been at SheKilda in Melbourne, a crime writers’ festival hosted by the Sisters in Crime, a bloodthirsty group of Australian women who seem to have an infinite capacity for gore, alcohol and crime fiction.

The endless flight to this remote part of the globe has introduced me to a whole new world. Australia, like Sweden and Norway, is an astoundingly law abiding country by my rather jaded standards. Drivers wear their seatbelts, the stop at red lights, and they don’t seem to kill each other all that much. There was a mini-spate of mob killings in Melbourne recently, but that seems more like a service to humanity than a crime. And a great saving for the taxpayer too.

There would appear to be an inverse proportion of crime writers in a country to the numbers of actual crimes committed. Consequently, South Africa, with its spectacular display of crime has produced a handful of crime novelists, while Australia is bursting at the seams with them. Perhaps an increase in the number of crime novels in South Africa will bring our crime stats down. I find it difficult to commit crimes while typing. However, a crime reduction in South Africa seems as unlikely as a sunny day in Sweden.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers Weekly Column

‘Ham savage or cheese savage?’ he barks.

I go for the cheese, some strong coffee. Awake now, I watch the plain that the Danube snakes through roll beneath us. Europe, with its frenzy of little squabbling countries is so tiny. It took the same time to fly from London to Belgrade as it does to fly from Cape Town to Johannesburg.

Serbia is a country where everyone seems to drink as much as possible. Everyone smokes too, everywhere, all the time. The taxi drivers don’t wear seatbelts. This cavalier approach to what the British call ‘health and safety’ is a relief after the fussiness of London. A week of apricot brandy, surprisingly good Balkan wine and no sleep has left me feeling fragile. Some nanny-state care is appealing.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers weekly column

This is why I am here in a dimly lit room filled with odd-looking machinery. I am wearing a hospital gown that covers little, but there is a pile of fashion magazines on the table so I pick one up. I think again of Mark Twain’s assertion about naked people having little or no influence on society. This is true. Nakedness is something that must be covered up.

My book is done, book tours loom. I must buy some frocks. They are an essential part of this writer’s recovery programme so I phone Cheryl Arthur of Hip Hop Clothing and say ‘please, dress me again.’ I worked for her twenty years ago and she is someone who knows how to make a woman look fabulous. Nipped in waist, full skirts, all very Mad Men. So one phone call later and my future is all frocked up.

But here I am still, waiting for the radiographer. I think about being nearly naked in a public building and how docile it makes one. I think about fashion and crime. Clothing is crucial in crime fiction and it has given me a lot of trouble in my writing career. Dressing in crime fiction is utilitarian and ostensibly peripheral, like all that takeaway food that is consumed in such vast quantities in the genre. Despite the fact that so many women read crime, it remains a masculine genre and much of the action takes place in the public domain where clothes and shoes do cover the men. But men rarely need to about what to wear.

• Continue reading at my International Crime Writers Weekly Column