Thursday, February 19, 2009

Crime safari

I'm off for a tour of Cape Town crime in the next few days. I just finished Deon Meyer's Blood Safari (more on that soon--for now, I'll only say it's an excellent story about a bodyguard, up to Meyer's high standard of crime fiction), then Mixed Blood, by Roger Smith (born in Johannesburg, but a resident of Cape Town), then Margie Orford's Like Clockwork, published a couple of years ago in S.A. but just now making it to U.K. Anybody have other recommendations for South African crime up to those standards? One further note: ABE just published a list of what they say are the 10 funniest books, according to English readers. One of the books on the list is by Tom Sharpe, who also wrote two of the funniest books ever about apartheid (really! trust me on that), before he emigrated from South Africa, driven out before the end of apartheid, in part by those two very funny novels.

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