Counting the Coffins by Diale Tlholwe Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2011.

The Lazarus Effect by H.J. Golakai Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2011.

Many South Africans currently find themselves articulating their thoughts about crime – at the office, in pubs and shebeens, on the evening news, in the daily papers, around the dinner table. Crime-talk is everywhere. At the same time, seventeen years after our democratic dispensation began, South African readers are satisfying their desire to know more about crime, as well as a hunger for “state of the nation” narratives, through the consumption of crime fiction.

Deon Meyer’s hard-hitting crime novels have enthralled many readers. Additionally, English crime fiction authors such as Mike Nicol, Richard Kunzmann, Roger Smith, Margie Orford, Jassy Mckenzie and Sifiso Mzobe (who recently won the 2011 Sunday Times Prize for Fiction) are being widely read.

The scarcity of crime fiction by black authors was recently broken by Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink and Mzobe’s Young Blood. Now, Diale Tlholwe and Hawa Golakai have joined the team.

Tlholwe’s well-received debut novel, Ancient Rites, revealed the author’s view of a South-African nation “entangled in a myriad of complexities and bafflements”, caught between “old certainties and new truths” (23, 47). His latest, Counting the Coffins, is set to cement his place as a strong voice in a genre that deserves greater scholarly interest. Golakai’s debut, The Lazarus Effect, has already started to attract critical attention.

Both novels engage with generic conventions as they deliver page-turning, accessible and eventful narratives that grip the reader with good local stories. Tlholwe and Golakai offer personal quests for redemption matched by larger investigations into crimes against women, human trafficking and sexual abuse.

Set in Johannesburg, Counting the Coffins is less a novel of conventional detection than a sobering assessment of post-apartheid disorder. By focusing on the “feral corruption” and “depravity” of nouveau-riche businessmen almost two decades after the armed struggle, Tlholwe scrutinises the “metaphysics of disorder” (Comaroff 2004) that manifest themselves in Johannesburg.

Some months after the point at which Ancient Rites ends, private investigator Thabang Maje now works at Thekiso and Ditoro: Security Consultants and Private Investigators, a “highly elastic and useful tag that encompasses everything from providing bodyguards to minor celebrities and politicians with delusions of grandeur, to investigating dubious business people on behalf of suspicious associates”.

After an initial diagnosis of the “virulent human viruses polluting the ethical bloodstream of this city, if not the country”, the “disillusioned hero” must look into the shady dealings of a group of powerful men, exemplified by the “grizzled” Sandile Nkosi, and get to the bottom of pyramid schemes, drug deals and human trafficking, all in a day’s work. Aiding Thabang in his quest for truth is Tokoloho Mohapi, a journalist and Thabang’s one-time flame, now friend.

By contrast, Golakai’s The Lazarus Effect is set in Cape Town. Far more conventional in its approach to the mystery-novel skeleton of murder, investigation and resolution, its subversion of the genre’s most obvious patterns make it equally compelling.

Golakai presents us with a Liberian, female protagonist, Voinjama Johnson, a 28-year-old investigative journalist at Cape Town magazine Urban, who goes by the shortened name of Vee. She suffers from panic attacks and has repeated visions of a teenage girl in a red hat. After Vee views a photograph of the girl, Jacqui Paulsen, at a local hospital, and hears about the girl’s disappearance, Vee uses an article about missing children in the city as a ruse to investigate the girl’s disappearance.

This brings her into the middle of a fractured and complex relationship between the Fourie and Paulsen families, and she is drawn into a labyrinthine history of secrets, lies and possible murder.

Both Counting the Coffins and The Lazarus Effect open with stark and disturbing prologues (Lazarus also features an epilogue). Counting the Coffins starts with morose, insistent refrains of “things that should not be”. This gives us a glimpse into the “small, cold relic” of a deceased child that haunts the protagonist, following the irresponsible driving and death of the “drugged, misbegotten” teenage son of businessman Sandile Nkosi, “now just another body in another coffin” in a “country of coffins”:

It should have been cold, dark and gloomy. It should have poured slanting sheets of rain and hard hailstones. The wind should have been demented and howling bitter curses. Memorial stones vast and small should have been bowed in pensive melancholy …

This passage from Counting the Coffins is eerily similar in tone and texture to the more graphic depiction of violent death that confronts us in the prologue of The Lazarus Effect: “The teenager broke the bones of her neck and wrist and felt no pain ... Stinking, litter-strewn, muddy water, swollen by heavy rains and the effluent of other people’s lives and carelessness, pushed the remains back and forth.”

Whereas Tlholwe’s prologue sets up a frame of private pain and personal torment, Golakai’s prologue speaks directly as a metaphor for the “faceless” and “nameless” in Cape Town that live under the bridge of society, so to speak, those who slip through the cracks and have no recourse to or shelter from harm.

Counting the Coffins offers a methodical quest to bring a group of clearly identified and well-sketched perpetrators of economic and violent crime to justice. Unhurried in his exposition and pace, there is much to admire in the way that Tlholwe slowly but surely draws the reader into the serpentine world of the private eye, one with a family and nagging memories of the past. The writer renders his investigator, Maje, all too aware of the contingency of truth, the danger of preconceived ideas and hasty judgements, and of the many different faces of evil.

Critical of the “power hungry” elites in Johannesburg, Tlholwe casts a jaundiced eye on the class of nouveau riche in that city. An uncompleted shopping mall at Thokoza, built by “colourless and indistinct men”, is the main site of Maje’s investigation, and it stands as a telling metaphor for social collapse. At one point, the distraught yet resolute Maje notes that “there were just too many coffins connected to that mall. It was time somebody started counting them, adding up the costs and sending someone the bill”.

Tlholwe makes it clear that women are often victims of male rage and violence, seen as dispensable commodities and “cheap sluts”. In the city, they are doomed to perish “in the gutters, dustbins and early unmarked graves. Free at last and very dead.” Such acts of violence against women are all the more possible since “the law is silent on this matter … at best, it is in hiccups”, and because of the country’s “moral stagnation”.

Accordingly, we hear that “[s]tonewalling” and “polished knavery” have become the currency of choice for the ruling elites, “covering the spectrum of human depravity”. While noting a great number of rats in the abandoned mall, a wonderful metaphor for the “scurrying” people in a “whimsical play”, Maje recognises how “once dearly held, precious things – honour, pride and principle – were suffocating to death, with their cold, numberless coffins ready and waiting to receive them”.

This mention of “cold, numberless coffins” neatly crisscrosses with the framing factual assertion in The Lazarus Effect that “[o]ver one thousand six hundred children go missing every year … three hundred of them are never heard from again”. Golakai’s sensible and tough protagonist Vee is a solo jogger suffering from episodes of “idiopathic illness” and “psychosomatic manifestations of pain”. The root of her trauma lies in the miscarriage she suffered previously, with the loss of an unborn child another similarity between the two texts.

In Ancient Rites, Tlholwe alludes to the fact that “[s]ooner or later everybody gets involved, including not-so-innocent bystanders”, and Counting the Coffins returns at various moments to the fact that inspector Maje is a changed man after his killing of a “pious man” in the mountains of Botswana. Conversely, The Lazarus Effect delays our insight into the trauma of Vee’s past — and indeed the collective trauma of a Liberian nation — until a significant part of the novel has passed. In harrowing passages near the end of the novel we hear of the cold-blooded murder of civilians, and how Vee must kill a young soldier who wants to rape her in order to survive, before emigrating to South Africa. The writers thus add to the investment readers have in the protagonists by virtue of their status as fallible human beings with a strong sense of moral justice rather than a belief in the fact that the law will take its course.

In their respective approaches to detection and “detectives”, both the male private eye Thabang Maje and the female investigative journalist Vee Johnson apply street-smart knowledge, as well as deductive reasoning, to solve their mysteries. We are offered a pleasing amount of interiority and complexity of character without getting the impression that the writer uses his or her protagonist as a mere cipher. Tlholwe imbues Maje with the same sense of emotional vulnerability and moral indignation as Deon Meyer’s detective Bennie Griessel, and it is hard not to side with a hard-nosed, kickass black man with an unerring moral compass in an age where so few works of fiction present hard-boiled men of colour operating on the right side of the law.

Vee Johnson is cut from the same cloth as Margie Orford’s Clare Hart and Jassy Mckenzie’s Jade De Jong, tough-as-nails women who refuse to stand by while criminals prey on the innocent and vulnerable. Like Hart and De Jong, Vee is the antithesis of the often powerless and exploited female figures one encounters all too often in crime fiction. She is physically able to defend herself, determined, highly intelligent and very likeable, but she is also rarely represented as anything but a working woman, earning our respect through an often painfully slow process of investigation.

Whereas Maje is repeatedly figured as an outsider, one with considerable inner strength and uncanny insight into a nation seemingly out of touch with its traditions and moral values, Vee is the perfect foil as a dislocated “foreigner” for Golakai’s writerly instincts, making visible the plight of the invisible. By making her heroine a woman of colour, and by deciding to partner Vee with a white, lesbian woman in Chloe, Golakai gives us a refreshing crime-fighting combo.

Tlholwe allows us the comfort of following Maje on his quest to mete out his own brand of moral justice to a clearly identified cohort of wrongdoers, while Golakai expertly utilises the considerable suspense of her murder mystery to delay the revelation of the killer’s identity. Equally impressive is the way both of these writers tackle big issues in a style that never collapse into trite grandstanding or melodramatic, tinny moralising. Tlholwe is a thoughtful writer and his social responsibility is reflected in his overarching focus on the poor and helpless, particularly women. Both novels appear to embody what Tlholwe states in Ancient Rites, that “people want to see other people”. Guilty parties and perpetrators are defamiliarised, while supposed power players are ridiculed and revealed as morally vacuous. This is achieved without reverting to simplistic caricatures and broad-stroke demonising.

The Lazarus Effect avoids the sensationalist brutality that to which female bodies are often subjected in crime. While we are able to tap into a sense of vicarious victimhood, the novel avoids cheap shock value by not making the central victim yet another silent rape statistic or the target of pornographic cruelty. By rooting the mystery deep inside the recesses of hidden family trauma, the anguish of victim and the humanity of the violator are both brought to light, a welcome subversion of stereotypical exposition.

Tlholwe’s writing is refreshing, unlike the predictably hard-boiled approach in Nicol’s Revenge Trilogy or the works of Roger Smith. Rather than adopt the ultra-violent, no-holds-barred thriller character of these texts, Tlholwe chooses to write a limited yet memorable number of high-impact set pieces in which the skill of the writing instead of violent content grabs the reader. While the writing is consistently tight, the story and characters have plenty of room to breathe. This lets the reader soak up the adamantine atmosphere, the lacerating descriptions of the state of the nation, the slowly accumulative sense of menace and foreboding, and the sharp quips from Maje as he works his way through a maze of “snakes” and “rats” in a concrete jungle of corruption in the city of gold.

The novel ends with a sense of open-endedness as Maje questions his sense of place and belonging in a “mad screwed-up country” while singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. This ending typifies Tlholwe’s resistance to all-encompassing restorations of order, while gesturing towards a sense of community he appears to deem vital.

The Lazarus Effect is less allegorical than Counting the Coffins but no less effective in the way its writing draws attention to the plight of children who go missing in Cape Town every day.

The crime fiction novel is here employed to offer sharp social commentary. Having a non-white, female, Liberian protagonist with strong connections to African men from elsewhere on the continent adds another layer to the motif of displacement and dislocation in the novel’s internal logic.

Tlholwe and Golakai deserve praise for their ability to match style with substance. Ultimately, the titles of both texts speak to a shared anxiety over the alien state of the nation. Without being obtrusively self-conscious, Counting the Coffins and The Lazarus Effect are valuable additions to South African crime fiction.

Works Cited

Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. 2004. “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 800-824.

Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. L, eds. 2006. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

“Crime Lit in SA – a New Phenomenon” Report written by International Marketing Council of South Africa and published to the web 4 January 2011. Available online at http://www.imc.org.za/news/595-crime-lit-in-sa-a-new-phenomenon.html

Fletcher, Elizabeth. “Why do we read crime fiction?” Available online at
http://crimebeat.bookslive.co.za/blog/2011/08/15/crime-beat-why-do-we-read-crime-fiction/

Nicol, Mike. “A short history of South African crime fiction.” Available online at
http://crimebeat.bookslive.co.za/a-short-history-of-south-african-crime-fiction/

Orford, Margie. “Eminently exportable”. Available online at
http://mg.co.za/article/2009-10-23-eminently-exportable