crimeculture

Dave Zeltserman interviews Roger Smith

Roger Smith made a big impact last year with his Cape Town, South African crime thriller debut, Mixed Blood. Violent, uncompromising, Mixed Blood turned out to be one of the most compulsory reads of the year, and has been optioned for film with Samuel Jackson to star. This year Roger is upping the ante with Wake Up Dead, a book that is receiving starred reviews and accolades from everyone lucky enough to have received advanced copies. Here Roger and Dave Zeltserman talk about his books, crime fiction, and his hometown of Cape Town, South Africa.

Roger, I’m going to get to Mixed Blood and South Africa and Cape Town and movie projects soon, but first I’d like to mention something very cool about the blurbs both myself and Ken Bruen gave you for Wake Up Dead, which by the way, has already gotten a bunch of well-deserved starred reviews. So here’s what I find cool. In different words, both Ken and I are saying the same thing about Wake Up Dead, that it’s dark, brutal, poetic and haunting. Where we differ is only that I sense a strong Elmore Leonard influence, while Ken sees more of a Charles Willeford and James Ellroy influence. So to put you on the spot, which influences, if any, do you see yourself in Wake Up Dead?

Dave, it’s hugely flattering for a newbie like me to be compared to these great writers, all of whom have influenced me over the years. A couple of reviewers have also picked up on the Elmore Leonard thing, and I can only imagine it’s because Wake Up Dead is an ensemble piece like most of Leonard’s books, with the POV shifting between a number of different characters, and there’s something Leonardesque about the attraction/ repulsion relationship between hot American widow, Roxy Palmer, and conflicted ex-cop turned mercenary, Billy Afrika.

What I’ve always loved about Elmore Leonard is that he doesn’t write mysteries: everything is out there from page one and his characters are driven by a weird kind of karmic energy. What’s so enjoyable is the suspense, the anticipation of what will happen when all these messed-up people collide. If I achieved a little of that, I’m a happy man. But the body count in Wake Up Dead is way higher than in Leonard’s books – especially the later ones – hence the James Ellroy comparison, perhaps?

Okay, I’d like to get to more on Wake Up Dead, but first, Mixed Blood, South Africa and movies. You burst on the scene last year with your first novel, Mixed Blood, which is a brilliant debut with a great compulsory vibe to it, and is a book that every crime fiction fan I know who has read it has loved. How’d this book come about?

Dave, thanks for talking me up! The book started writing itself, somewhere in the back of my head, a long time ago. I grew up under apartheid in South Africa. As a teenager in Johannesburg, I watched white cops mow down black school kids my age during the 1976 youth uprising. A few years later I was drafted into a white army fighting a meaningless bush war against older versions of those black kids. Disaster Zondi, Mixed Blood’s Zulu investigator, is one of those kids 25 years on. And my rogue cop, Rudi Barnard, is a relic from the apartheid era, roaming the badlands of Cape Town, still slaughtering people darker than himself.

Around ten years ago I moved down to Cape Town. People say it looks like the south of France, or California, just more beautiful. I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Cape Flats – a sprawling ghetto outside the city – home to millions of people of mixed race, where the rape, murder and child abuse statistics are the highest in the world. The true stories she told me, and the world she introduced me to, changed my view of Cape Town forever.

A few years ago, I went with her to prison to visit her brother. He’s in his thirties, a human canvas of prison artwork. Since the age of fourteen he has spent a total of two years out of jail. He knows if he ever goes out into the world again he won’t stand a chance, will end up where he always ends up: back in prison. Part of that man found his way into my ex-con night watchman, Benny Mongrel.

So, I had these men – products of South African violence – running around in my head, looking for a home. Then I saw a TV news report about an American couple who’d robbed banks in the US and were hiding out in Cape Town. After they were captured they were sent back home to do serious prison time.

This story made me think: “what if?” What if a man with a past, a man on the run – Jack Burn – brings his family to Cape Town, seduced by those images of mountains and beaches and freedom? What if they are building new lives for themselves when they are confronted by a random act of violence – a collision between the Cape Flats and privileged Cape Town – that hooks them into the world of Rudi Barnard and Benny Mongrel and Disaster Zondi? Those “what ifs” became Mixed Blood.

While I saw a strong Elmore Leonard influence in Wake Up Dead, Mixed Blood to me felt almost like a very violent Richard Stark/Parker book, with a Parker-like American fugitive on the run in South Africa.

Man, I love those Parker books! I first read The Hunter aka Point Blank as a teenager, and I was blown away by the book’s stripped-down prose and amoral universe. I still have that dog-eared little paperback on my bookshelf.

But, I suppose I tried to write what I like to read: a fast-moving, multi-character story without too much padding. I get very bored with those flabby, overlong, crime novels that bog down in endless navel gazing and descriptions of the landscape (inner and outer), or spend pages telling you about a character’s taste in wine, coffee or music. Almost as if the authors are ashamed of writing genre fiction, and feel that by fluffing up their manuscripts, they’re making them more “literary.”

Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead both are very visual. You’ve been involved in films and TV in South Africa?

Yes, I have directed and produced film and TV, and worked as a screenwriter, which is mostly a frustrating experience. Anybody in the movie business will tell you that screenplays spend so much time in turnaround that your head’s left spinning. Out here in South Africa, the movie industry is tiny and underfunded, so I have a stack of unproduced screenplays (among them a couple of thrillers) gathering dust. The TV market is more robust, and I have written everything from cop shows to comedies, to dramatic series dealing with the HIV/Aids epidemic. You name it, I’ve written it. Everything except soaps.

I’m writing novels fulltime now, but having a screenwriting background helps with plot, structure, pace – and dialogue of course. It also encourages a certain leanness, stylistically.

You portray the Cape Flats as a violent hell-hole where death is cheap for everyone. Is it as bad as you portray it, or worse?

Worse. I’m been amused by some of the responses to my depiction of Cape Town from the city’s elite, as if I’ve just gone and slapped the prettiest girl at the party! Cape Town is not a mellow, temperate spot. It bakes and blows and burns in summer. The sea rages and the city floods in winter. And two thirds of the population live on the flipside of the Cape Town picture postcard – the Cape Flats – which is about as violent a place as you’ll find outside of a war zone.

In both Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead I was interested in capturing what I believe to be the reality of many people’s lives, without sentimentalizing that reality, even if it’s uncomfortable. I know I’ve got it right when readers from the Cape Flats are astonished that I’m some white guy. They tell me that I’ve portrayed their world with the eye of an insider.

Rudi Barnard is quite a character, one that most readers, at least those unfamiliar with South Africa, probably think is a gross exaggeration. How realistic is he?

Dave, Barnard is all too real, man . . . He’s a composite of a number of thugs from South Africa’s past, some of whom I have met. In the 80s – during the darkest days of apartheid – a group of South African cops, chosen for their brutality, were seconded to a hit squad responsible for assassinating political activists. The hit squad members, mostly white Afrikaners who are now middle-aged, were nothing less than state-sanctioned psychopaths, given complete license to do their worst. These men, often devout Calvinist Christians, justified their actions as the work of God – as fanatics often do.

After Mandela came to power, some of them were offered amnesty from prosecution if they appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and confessed to their crimes. Others were imprisoned. Smaller fish, like Barnard, just disappeared – some back into the police, others into civilian life. But they are still out there. So Rudi Barnard is fiction, but based on fact.

Rudi’s favorite meal is a gatsby. Tell me about those. Do you eat them?

A gatsby – nothing to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald – is the Cape Flats’s contribution to world cuisine: a bread loaf the size of an alligator head, stuffed with steak, baloney, fries, onion and egg, lashed with mayonnaise and chili sauce that can clear backed-up drains.
In my carefree youth I fought down a few gatsbys, but I’d be terrified to go near one now!

Mixed Blood has been optioned, with Samuel Jackson to play Disaster Zondi. How’d this come about, and any news on its development?

These movie deals are very exciting, as you well know, Dave. My agent, Alice Martell, has an association with Jody Hotchkiss, who was instrumental in selling properties like The Kite Runner and American Gangster to Hollywood studios. Jody got Mixed Blood to Samuel L. Jackson, who loved it and immediately wanted to play the Zulu detective, Disaster Zondi.

The book is in development with GreeneStreet films. Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) is adapting, and Phillip Noyce (The Quiet American, Patriot Games, Salt) is on board to direct. Shooting is scheduled for late 2010 in Cape Town, so I’ve got my autograph book at the ready.

If you could cast the rest of the film—Jack Burn, his wife, Benny Mongrel, and of course, Rudi, who would you pick?

Okay, I’ll play! For me there is only one Jack Burn: Viggo Mortensen, with his tough/ vulnerable, brooding quality. Naomi Watts looks a lot like the Susan Burn of my imagination, and she’s a fantastic actress. Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard is a man-mountain of flesh, so casting him would be interesting! John Goodman (of course) comes to mind, but he may be a little old. Dave, you once suggested Brendan Gleeson, and though he’s not quite built to the scale of Goodman, he could definitely play Barnard. Benny Mongrel, a one-eyed, mixed race, ex-con – covered in gang tattoos – is another challenge for the casting director. For some reason I see Giancarlo Esposito in the role. Now, Esposito is a very debonair, handsome man, but he has the compact leanness of Benny M., and with state-of-the-art FX make-up, he could pull it off.

I understand Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead are very hot in Germany. Any touring plans?

Mixed Blood (translated as Kap der Finsternis) did really well over there last year, attracted a lot of great press, and was number one on the influential KrimiWelt 10 Best, the choice of 19 top German, Swiss and Austrian critics. It also made a bunch of “best of 2009” lists in the German-speaking countries.

Wake Up Dead (Blutiges Erwachen) is out this February, and my publishers have invited me over in early March for appearances at a series of high-profile crime fiction events in Germany and Austria. The Germans take their crime writing seriously, so I’m really looking forward to this trip.

Roger, getting back to Wake Up Dead and Elmore Leonard’s influence, the large ensemble is part of it, but also the leanness of the writing and the way the characters violently collide. Also, the desperation of the characters brought Rum Punch to mind.

Elmore Leonard famously said: “Cut out all the bits that readers skip.” Words to live by.

South Africa is a society still divided by race, and increasingly, wealth. Predatory crimes like home invasions and carjackings frequently bridge that divide. Both Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead begin with violent collisions between privileged Cape Town and the Flats, incidents so commonplace that they often don’t even make the local news. What fascinates me is to look beyond the statistics, to get into the people who are flung together by these violent events, and the impact on their lives.

Something that I’ve always admired about Elmore Leonard is how he – unlike many other male crime authors – writes great female characters. His women aren’t bimbos, happy homemakers, or psychotic femmes fatale, they’re ballsy, vulnerable, conflicted and real.

In Wake Up Dead I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a female protagonist, and Roxy Palmer, the American ex-model, just seemed to jump fully formed onto the page. I loved writing her, and enjoyed the fact that her good looks and street smarts catapulted her from a Florida trailer park to the runways of Paris and Rome, and then to Cape Town where she married a South African gunrunner for his money. It’s great to have a foreigner, an outsider, in my Cape Town mix, because I can use her to highlight bizarre elements of South African culture. The conversations Roxy and Billy Afrika have about race, apartheid and African voodoo were fun to write.

Billy Africa is a great character. Is he coming back?

Yeah, I had a good time with Billy! I have no immediate plans for him, but you never know . . .

A couple of bloggers have already commented on the opening line for Wake up Dead:  “The night they were highjacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukrainian whore.”  That really is a great opening line. How’d you get the inspiration?

Cape Town is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Africa. Eurotrash rub shoulders with gangsters and hookers from the old USSR. Leaders of dubious African “liberation movements” live in lavish exile on the slopes of Table Mountain, while plotting coups in their home countries. I wanted to show that side of the city, to dig beneath the veneer of glamor and sophistication.

A few years ago I watched a documentary shot by a South African crew in some central African country. The leader of some ragged-assed militia, high on weed and bloodlust, cornered an enemy and – while the poor bastard was still alive and conscious – hacked out his heart with a machete and ate it while he grinned for the camera. An image that for me is uniquely African. I hope the opening line captures something of that.

Saying you don’t shy away from violence in your books is a massive understatement. The violence in your books is horrific, brutal and real. This is risky, especially when so many thriller readers seem to want over-the-top cartoons as opposed to anything approaching reality. You also step over another taboo for many mystery readers where you have children dying violently.

As I’ve said, I live in – and write about – an extremely violent country. I don’t write about anything that doesn’t happen every day in South Africa. I loathe the comic book porno-violence of a lot of European and U.S. crime writing (and movies, TV and video games, for that matter) where bloodshed is used to titillate. People aren’t turned on by what I write – they’re shocked. As they should be. Each day children are raped and slaughtered out on the Cape Flats, just miles from where I live. My girl friend counsels abused children, and tells me stories that give me nightmares. If this was happening anywhere in the West, there would be an outcry. Here it barely makes the newspapers. I write about this stuff because it freaks me out. Writing about it seems the only way to stay sane.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading your third novel, Dust Devils. I know it’s a bit overused these days to say a novel transcends the genre, but while Dust Devils is still a page-turning thriller of the highest-order, you have certain themes running through the book that does make it seem to transcend the thriller genre, including the sad history of South Africa.

When apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela came to power, there was a period in South Africa where we went from being the pariah of the world, to a role-model for transformation. A giddy time. Then Mandela moved on, and the rulers of the country became ever more self-serving and corrupt, as politicians tend to do.

Apartheid is over, but crime, poverty and the highest incidence of HIV/ Aids in the world present new challenges that are left largely unaddressed. Our constitution is glowing testament to enlightenment and individual freedom, but teenage girls are sold into slave marriages and our president has just tied the knot with wife number five (or is it six?). The South African commissioner of police is on trial for corruption, and a trail of cover-ups leads straight to the presidency. This is the background against which Dust Devils is set.

This book also seemed very personal to me, as if there was a bit of you in the hero.

There is a little of me in Robert Dell, a forty-something white liberal journalist who goes on the run when he is framed for the murder of his wife and children. Dell and I both came out of the Left, the anti-apartheid movement, but Dell was a lot braver, more of an activist – I was one of those dinner party lefties, filled with loathing for apartheid but I didn’t have the balls to get locked up for my beliefs. Or go into exile. But the loss of Dell’s idealism mirrors the experiences of a lot of my generation.

Roger, it’s been great talking with you. One last question, anything exciting in the works?

I’m working on a new book, which goes deep into the world of child abuse and murder in Cape Town. It’s not an easy or comfortable book to write, but there’s no way I can dodge this subject. Not if I want to sleep at night.

Dave, thanks for taking the time out to interview me. I am honored.

Dave Zeltserman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and still lives in the Boston area where he writes crime fiction, occassionally a blend of horror and crime, and every once in a while a pure horror novel. His next novels, Killer, The Caretaker of Lorne Field, and Outsourced are all scheduled to be published in 2010. His novel, Essence, will be published in 2011.  Read Roger Smith's interview with Dave Seltzerman.