Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine by Arno Görgen & German Alfonso Nunez & Heiner Fangerau

Author:Arno Görgen & German Alfonso Nunez & Heiner Fangerau
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319906775
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Crime Fiction in Africa, in Particular, South(ern) Africa

Crime fiction retains an intermediate position in consumer literature today but is less undervalued than other genres to some extent. This may be because the style and content of writing appears relatively “masculine” and more serious than other genres on the one hand, as Reuter (2007: 97) contends, while on the other hand, it parodies the novel in general, or perhaps even because it maintains and works to undermine traditional literary objects, such as the hero, intrigue, realism or the end of the story. Within this intermediate position, the crime novel is probably one of the most diverse genres that can be sub-divided into serial killer thriller, hard- and soft-boiled private eye, noir, caper novels, scientific detective, medical detective, historical detective, psychological thriller, techno thriller, legal thriller, classical whodunit, police procedurals, courtroom dramas, women in peril, and other categories.

In African literature, crime fiction is a very new (para)literary2 phenomenon. Critics contend that the first Anglophone and Francophone detective novels were published in the 1970s, while the reader had to wait for the start of the third millennium [until to 2000s] for the first publication of Lusophone crime fiction. Detective stories and crime novels have long had a negative connotation in Africa. Fanny Brasleret (2007: 10) gives two potential reasons: on the one hand crime fiction was considered sub-literature in Francophone countries and on the other it as seen as bourgeois entertainment for the African intelligentsia. Nevertheless, their emergence and popularity are now established, as noted by Ambroise Kom in “Littérature africaine, l’avènement du polar” (1999: 36).

Crime fiction in South Africa by authors such as Jassy Mackenzie, Margie Orford, Wessel Ebersohn, Diale Tlholwe, Rob Marsh, Angela Makholwa, David Dison, Andrew Gray, and Lauren Beukes3 emerged swiftly in the marketplace at the start of the new constitutional democracy in 1994 (although the first crime novels were written a few decades earlier). Besides changes in the “gendered ordering of society” (in reference to Michael Kimmel’s 2000 title The Gendered Society) and the slow abolition of former colonial and apartheid patriarchy, gesturing towards an outside world of criminal affiliations involving the import and export of illegal goods, foreign travels and the evolving tourist industry in literature has drawn attention to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban as very masculine and heterosexual cities of substance and modernity, which reflect the petty dream world of the aspiring criminal. Authors such as Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky (2010) have argued that crime writing often reduces the complex questions regarding historical truth to generic devices and conveys a type of resignation to routine criminality and corruption.

In general, South African crime novels are not particularly explicit in terms of medical narratives. Further analysis of the elements of witchcraft and ritualistic “medical” accounts and portrayal or classification of doctors and medical staff in contemporary South African crime novels is warranted, but has not been attempted in this article.

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