Titel: Of cops & robbers
Skrywer: Mike Nicol
Uitgewer: Umuzi
ISBN: 9781415203767
Koop Of cops & robbers by Kalahari.com.
For a writer of fiction, let alone crime fiction, South Africa is a wonderland, brimming with creative possibilities. The reality of what transpires here on a daily basis is so otherworldly, so pluralised, so distinctly us, that it is enough to make one question the need for fiction. This is precisely the point raised by Marlene van Niekerk when she reviewed Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree a few years ago. If the need for fiction is questioned in such a particularly wraithlike South African context, the answer comes most readily these days in the form of genre.
While the romance novel has gained in traction in recent times, along with dystopian science fiction and speculative fiction, a variety of local authors such as Imraan Coovadia, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Michiel Heyns, Diane Awerbuck and Eben Venter all incorporate an element of crime or illegality into their fictions. Yet few, if any, of these writers would call themselves writers of crime fiction, that sticky signifier that caused quite the brouhaha in local literary and academic circles partly because of the indiscriminate manner in which the term was bandied about like the name of new-born baby without its sex being determined first.
Recognised as bona fide writers of crime fiction (Andrew Brown, for instance, is still ambivalent about being labelled an author of crime fiction), Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Roger Smith and Mike Nicol, on the other hand, are the most prolific crime fiction authors at present. One cannot forget the likes of Diale Thlolwe, Jassy Mackenzie and Angela Makholwa. And the list is growing.
Drawing parallels between the rising number of crime fiction authors and the seemingly ever-rising rate of crime would be a cop-out, though. It’s more complicated than that.
While Meyer’s Cobra is due before year’s end, Orford has recently delivered her most impressive Water Music. Orford’s scopic eye delves ever deeper, centred upon the violence visited on the vulnerable and defenceless. Smith’s Sacrifices furthers his claim as the unchallenged lord of the South African dystopian noir. His crime fiction is Grand Guignol for a dedicated fan base, slashing through normative assumptions about race, class and masculinity.
What the aforementioned authors all manage to do in a variety of ways, then, is to appropriate the form of crime fiction, its readability, its concern with forms of transgression and illegality and ability to occasion socio-political commentary without sounding forced or contrived to produce commentary on the state of the nation. Meyer and Orford, in particular, have placed a premium on the recovery or recognition of the structural, symbolic and physical violence of the apartheid past and beyond as it continues to manifest and influence the present. More and more, the question raised is one of function, rather than merely focussing on entertainment value. Dip into any of the novels by Meyer, Orford, Smith, Nicol, take your pick – their entertainment value is beyond question, believe me.
I would certainly add Nicol to a conception of writers where the past, and past traditions of hardboiled writing, figures very strongly. Nicol knows the form inside out; he knows the tics, the tricks, tailor-made for a kind of socio-political commentary.
But what kind would that be?
From Nicol’s literary perspective, the past work of the American hard-boiled pioneers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler is inexorably enmeshed into the DNA of the present, South African form. How to best deliver scathing commentary on a nation under siege of corruption and maladministration becomes a matter of picking the form that most adequately measures up. I use the word “adequately” because the novel form can never reproduce any actual realities, it can merely present a mimetic capturing of a kind of reality, the kind Lukacs and Bakhtin and Auerbach and Watt write about in their studies of the novel and its rise some hundreds of years ago.
With Nicol’s choice of the hard-boiled form as a vehicle for engagement in his Revenge Trilogy, readers hungry for works that dealt with the state of the nation got stuck into an over-determined landscape where everyone is on the take, grafting as hard as they can. Welcome to a late-capitalist world of death squads, dirty politics and drug deals.
In these novels the contaminations of the present have their roots in apartheid evils. One encounters a blurring of the lines between the tragic and the comic, inside and outside, fantasy and reality, strength and vulnerability, while the hyper-masculinity of the antiheroes Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso marks the action.
There are no clean getaways; second chances are all too rare; greed as much a virtue as a vice. It is a world eminently readable, brimming with style, high on suspense, low on moralising.
The basic outline of South Africa as a country where the grammar of criminality flattens out attempts at legible analytic investigation is thus at the forefront of Nicol’s narrative economy. Whether you see Nicol pursuing an ultra-conservative agenda on crime depends on your take on the current socio-political climate.
Anticipation has been high for Nicol’s latest novel, Of Cops and Robbers, where crime seems to penetrate, and interpenetrate, every sphere. Crimes against humanity, white-collar crime, petty crime, it’s all here.
As law supposes the correlative of order (or a lack thereof), crime flirts with punishment, cowboys require Indians to join the party, and cops generally try to apprehend robbers. But this is the New South Africa, after all. It goes without saying that boundaries cross, that categories become unsettled. Telling the difference between fact and fiction is a mug’s game: The only certainty is uncertainty.
Only the brave or the foolhardy would bet with any kind of certainty as to who the cops and the robbers are. You just can’t tell anymore. To “be a cop” is to work in service of the law, yes, but to “cop” is, of course, also to “steal”, “take”, “rob”, “pilfer”, “snatch” or “pinch”. The word also implies the consequences of a certain course of action: to “cop” a punishment or a beating, for instance. Conversely, to rob is to “raid”, “pickpocket”, “mug”, “steal from”, “take from”, “hold up”, “stick up” or “deprive”. By conjoining cops and robbers in his title, Nicol not only recognises the blurred lines between those supposed to enforce the law and those that flout it, but also places the two groups of agents in a single realm, devoid of distinctions. Cops are both able to steal or raid, just as robbers have their own implicit code of conduct as thieves. Their universe is one and the same.
In Nicol’s game of cops and robbers, good guys and criminals, the reader must enter into the spirit of the game, which is one of imagination, play-acting and pretence: in order to find pleasure in the narrative, to share in the fun Nicol is clearly having, we must suspend disbelief and be game. Fiction becomes the vehicle of remaking the past into something legible, into a textual object that denies the final arbitration of meaning to the historian. The genre novel can offer a kind of play in its form that the dry, more empirical historical text simply will not and cannot offer. Instead, the arbitration of meaning is deferred to the reader. The reader then acts as the referee, “policing” the game of cops and robbers through story.
The novel’s Author’s Notes offer insight into the history that inspired much of the novel’s events. While quotation of the entire section is not possible, I have here included a shortened version to familiarise readers with the events fictionalised in Of Cops and Robbers:
The killings conducted by the Icing Unit are loosely, very loosely, based on real events. The murders of Dr Robert Smit and his wife Jean-Cora occurred on 22 November 1977 in their rented house in Springs. Smit was due to stand for the ruling National Party in a coming bye-election. Speculation has it that he had information about bullion held in foreign banks and planned to go public with his information, which would have been damaging to some members of the party. Because of this it is believed that the government contracted the hit. The letters RAU TEM were sprayed on the couple’s kitchen wall. No one knows what or if these letters have any meaning.
In 2006 three security branch men were fingered as responsible for the hit. One, Phil Freeman, committed suicide in Cape Town in 1990. A second, Dries Verwey, was found dead in Port Elizabeth. He had been shot in the left side of the head. Although it looked like a suicide he was right-handed and investigators believed he had been killed. The third man, known only by the initials RA, lives in Australia. No application has been made to extradite him.
The killing of the three men on a farm alludes to the murders perpetrated by a death squad under the command of Eugene De Kock – nicknamed Prime Evil – that operated on Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria, during the 1980s. In 1996 De Kock was sentenced to two hundred and twelve years in prison for crimes against humanity. The eighty-nine charges included six counts of murder, as well as conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, assault, kidnapping, illegal possession of firearms, and fraud. De Kock is serving his sentence in the C max section of the Pretoria Central Prison.
A unit known as the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a government-sponsored hit squad, conducted killing missions in the countries around South Africa, including Swaziland, during the latter years of National Party rule.
The incident on the mountain pass in the Eastern Cape where the Icing Unit intercepts a car refers to the assassination of the Cradock Four: Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauhli. On the night of 27 June 1985, security forces set up a roadblock to intercept their car. They were murdered and their burnt bodies found later near Port Elizabeth.
The assignation of the character Amina Khan is based on the murder in Paris of Dulcie September. She had established a strong anti-apartheid lobby that argued for sanctions and disinvestment and had become a threat to the apartheid state. In March of that year she was shot five times from behind with a silenced rifle as she opened the ANC offices. In 2011 the state denied September’s family access to documents related to her.
The tenure of State president Nico Diederichs as finance minister played a part in inspiring Dr Gold. Diederichs was alleged to have been paid a small commission on any gold sales, moving South Africa’s gold holdings from London to Zurich as a speculative emergency war fund should the nationalist government be forced into exile.
There is a brief reference to the Numbers gangs (the 26s, 27s, and 28s) through the character Seven.
During the war fought along the border between Angola and Namibia during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the rhino and elephant populations in the region along the border were decimated. It is alleged that UNITA troops, which were supported by South African forces, traded rhino horn and ivory for weapons with South African Defence force senior personnel.
With the factual basis for some of the novel’s fictionalisations established above, I would also like to quote from the novel’s opening at length, which I then subsequently unpack:
They come down the street in a baby-shit yellow Ford Granada, going slowly, checking out the houses. A whisper of exhaust smoking from the tailpipe. A growl like the pipe is rusted, holed somewhere near the box. Four men in the car, all wearing sunglasses. The driver’s got on racing gloves, olive-coloured racing gloves. The thing about him, his face’s huge and red, he’s known as the Fisherman. The man behind him’s leaning back, his face in shadow. A cigarette hanging on his lower lip. A cigarette he keeps there like he’s breathing through it. He’s got mad wild surfer-blond hair. The one in the passenger seat has his fingers steepled, but not in prayer or contemplation. The man behind him sports a rictus grin standard on his face, his arm’s out the window, big glitzy rings on every finger. They rumble at a crawl down the street in their baby-shit yellow Ford Granada.
Such a hard-boiled opening – swathed in atmosphere – sets the work’s surefooted tone and style, as much an extra character as the setting. This tableau of four men on their way to a job is suffused with the kind of grit and gravel that fans have come to admire. Nicol’s style here is pure Hammett, with touches of Chandler and Macdonald. The texture from the different layers – the descriptive layers with specifics like the “baby-shit yellow Ford Granada”, the four men “all wearing sunglasses”, the “olive-coloured racing gloves”, “glitzy rings” and “mad wild surfer-blond hair” on the one hand, and the signifiers of action and movement – “the cigarette [… kept] there like he’s breathing through it”, the “whisper” of exhaust smoke, the “growl” of the tailpipe as if rusted and the “fingers steepled but not in prayer or contemplation” – offers a virtuoso understanding of the synchrony of form and content. This classic opening passage sets a high standard of bloody poetics which is maintained throughout, although Nicol mixes up his storytelling, something I will touch upon as we go along.
As the focal point of one half of the narrative scope and action (set before the present day), Blondie, Rictus Grin, the Commander and the Fisherman are the four-man Icing Unit, an apartheid death squad. Nicol covers the Unit’s most high-profile killings from the late 1970s onwards. In the early 1990s the Unit’s members come under fire themselves.
The other half of the bifurcated focus rests upon an intricate layering of events that involve illegal smuggling, cover-ups, drag racing, murder, drug-dealing, gambling, sex, extortion and any other nefarious activities. Rather than laying out a coherent plot summary, readers can rest assured in the knowledge that the simplest strand of the labyrinthine plot involves the pairing of PI Fish Pescado and lawyer Vicki Kahn working together in order to nab the culprit behind the death of a spectator at a drag-racing event in the Cape Flats. Long before the novel’s conclusion it also becomes clear that Fish Pescado functions as a kind of knight errant in the classical sense, on a quest to seek some form of justice for the death of an innocent man and to rescue Kahn as a kind of damsel in distress due to her gambling addiction.
Described as “an interesting fish”, Pescado has “wild surfer hair”, “quick eyes” and a “discreet earring in his right lobe”. He’s a milk stout man, drives a Cortina Perana V6, can make a mean smoorvis, and loves nothing more than a surf or two during the day. Bartolomeu Pescado on his birth certificate, after the Portuguese explorer, Fish to his friends, for obvious reasons, Fish believes in “having wheels ready because you never know when you’re going to need them. A call-out. A chase. A getaway. Fish Pescado, investigator, always has wheels ready to rock ‘n roll.”
After the killing of Mullet Mendes (one half of the twin protagonist private investigators Mendes and Saldanha from the novel co-authored with Joanne Hichens, Out to Score), he inherits a boat, the Maryjane, a bakkie, various firearms, and a long list of willing dagga buyers, including one Prof Summers, who comes to play a role in the latter parts of the action.
The mother of the PI, Estelle, acts as a suppressant, always on his case. She sells “investment opportunities” in London. Luckily he has Daro Attilane at his side, car dealer, member of the community police forum, veteran surfer. While Attilane’s immediate concern is the drug-dealing gangster Seven targeting buyers at his daughter Steffie’s school, his chequered past will come back to mess with the cards he’s been dealt.
The love interest and female protagonist is Vicki Kahn, Indian, 35, beautiful, feisty. Kahn’s addictive personality and obsession with cards land her in Gamblers Anonymous. It so happens also that Vicki’s aunt, Amina, was a political rabble-rouser who was killed for her part in the resistance against the National Party government under apartheid.
With his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, Nicol explores how the “servants of the state” have now become acquisitive “masters”. As antagonists, then, we have, first and foremost, the “American-twanged, highly-connected Clifford Manuel … Not someone you want as an enemy. Guy has family connections that go back into the bad old days of the struggle.” One of Nicol’s sleaziest, most Machiavellian creations yet, ex-police commissioner Jacob Mkezi is also a double agent, dividing loyalties between the ruling party and the ANC during apartheid. After having escaped attempts on his life, Mkezi has a taste that runs to crocodile shoes as it does rent boys, street children that Mkezi has sexual encounters with more than once, and with extensive coverage, in the novel.
In the first, most disturbing scene, Mkezi cruises around in his Hummer looking for sex, waving around money in front of the destitute street urchins. Once Mkezi has found a suitable candidate, the child expresses his love and admiration for Ma Brenda Fassie, and Mkezi puts on a recording of “If I hurt you little boy”. The episode is book-ended by the following free-flowing passage: “Jacob Mkezi sighs. Looks out at the city bowl, this city where he’s on trial, being held to account for doing his job. For fixing a broken country. Him, a comrade, a struggle fighter. In court before a prosecutor. Before a judge. Explaining himself.”
Some irony. Some tragedy.
Nicol shows his skill by providing a door into the thoughts of the corrupt Mkezi, “the man in the crocodile shoes”, head of African Enterprises (Pty), always cruising in his Hummer, turning what would be a sympathetic reaction from the reader into one of constant, knowing head-shaking. We’ve seen this story all too many times recently. Readers might have fun deciding whether Mkezi is most like Jackie Selebi or Bheki Cele.
Rather than peddling the “everyone’s corrupt, it’s a national disease” mantra of Killer Country and Black Heart, Nicol is turning such a formulation inside out, a device that ironically bankrupts such a one-sided view when one considers who is speaking here: “No one gives a toss for the law. Politicians, citizens, the high and mighty, the lowlife all doing their thing, no problem. Expect he can’t be gifted a pair of shoes it doesn’t make headlines.”
For public relations during his corruption trial, Mkezi hires spin doctor Mellanie, who has her own agency, Mellanie Munnik Communications. Aside from being his sexual partner, Mellanie follows him on his many adventures in and around South Africa. His court case is, shock and horror, thrown out after the star witness is killed in a hijacking. Whether the hit was sanctioned by Mkezi is irrelevant. It is hard to miss the glaring irony of the son of Jacob Mkezi, the seemingly untouchable guilty party in the drag race that kills a Cape Flats teen, being called Lord, while his father must cover his tracks, quite literally.
As in the Revenge Trilogy, the movement from officially employed police officers to private security operatives over the past number of years lurks noticeably. The international trade in rhino horn becomes central to the novel’s plot, while Fish’s mother works in trying to secure a mining deal involving the Chinese. Crime is thus both privatised and internationalised.
There is a thinly veiled scene referencing of the Brett Kebble “assisted suicide” and “botched hijacking”; there is the fixer, Mart Velaze, and the Voice, a female “deep inside security” issuing orders rewarded with handsome cash payments. If you are willing to surrender to the idea of South Africa as a generally venal and corrupt society, these elements are grist to that mill.
One of the most memorable and grotesque scenes in all of the novel involves the Jacob Mkezi entourage attending the Miss Landmine beauty pageant in Angola, the last of which took place in 2008:
A young man in a pink shirt, low cut jeans, springs up, punches a boom box into life: 2001: A Space Odyssey, the girls peeling off the bench, stomping across the hall on sticks and wooden crutches, their half-legs swinging. A girl on two metal crutches with no legs at all … The girls hobble out in a line: the first one’s got both legs blown off at the knees, her stumps tapering. She’s hanging between the aluminium crutches, balancing there no problem, the biggest smile across her face.
We are told that “everyone has the right to be beautiful”, and hence the “winner” of the event will be treated to a brand spanking new prosthesis from a Scandinavian country. The above-mentioned passage highlights the heightened sense of the absurd one is to encounter. As ridiculous as this scene is, it is even more tragic. The fact that it is based on an actual beauty contest makes the effect that much more startling.
In a haunting conceit, Nicol sutures into the narrative Goethe’s aphorism, “Traume keine kleine Traume … Dream no small dreams.” In a byzantine world of connections and affiliations, one where the severing of connections comes just as quickly as the severing of arteries, dreaming big dreams invariably signs your death warrant. Therefore it is fitting that a quote from the Biblical book of Revelationis employed, albeit ironically, by a corrupt character, who states that “he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.” The hunters of the Icing Unit become the hunted as the tables are turned. Much of the suspense in the second half of the novel is generated by the machinations of this clever reversal.
From Colins the bergie, seemingly invisible, carrying about his manuscript composed entirely of a single phrase repeated over and over, to the petty gangsters Jouma and Seven, “the pharmacist of Muizenberg”, Nicol’s array of colourful minor characters continues to grow. The unique ability of the crime novel to conjoin characters from all walks of life with a form of credibility is mined for all it is worth.
In such a self-reflexive environment it makes perfect sense that one character would tell another to “never stop playing cowboys and Indians”. Even more so when someone quips that you “step outta one reality into another”. He could just as easily be referring to the leap of faith that readers make when entering Nicol’s twisty, tart domain. Limit this as escapism at your peril.
In a breaking of boundaries between high and low, we encounter discussions of Goethe, his Faust and Mephistopheles, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the film version of Elmore Leonard’s Out of sight, female country artists The Dixie Chicks, Shaun Colvin, and our very own Jim Neversink. Rather than resorting to pastiche, Nicol’s uses each cultural reference to augment our way of understanding a certain character. Fish, for instance, is a blonde Adonis, but also an only child, a surfer and lone horse, in touch with his softer side.
The past literally creeps up on the present, a stiletto just out of range. Secrets are gradually revealed, connections uncovered, entanglements disclosed. By cutting back and forth in time, Nicol manages to build the suspense, slowly, methodically, applying the deadliest but most pleasurable kind of slow poison. This is despite the fact that the action of the novel explodes into life at various points, which is then undercut in many instances with what could only be described as “interesting conversations” between the members of the Icing Unit. Some of these conversations are indeed Beckett-like, and I won’t reveal the details here.
The convolution of the novel thus has its own canny way of playing roller coaster – you’re never quite sure where the present scene will end and the next one will take you. Of Cops and Robbers certainly isn’t predictable, either.
In turn, many references and further digressions underline the fact that Nicol makes no claim with his crime novels to any kind of realism in the strictest formal sense. The consolations of genre trump the need to stick to the facts, and a good story always wins out over attempts at historical accuracy.
Nicol still has a way with names. No Mace, Pylon or Sheemina this time around, but Fish Pescado is joined by minor characters such as Willy Cotton (soft and without much backbone), and Fortune and Samson Apollis (father and son, both ill-fated and without strength in standing up to physical and emotional threat).
Although Nicol’s ear for clipped, mordant dialogue and potent description are ever present, the writing on display in Of Cops and Robbers appears more fluid, molten even, than before.
The humour is still black as night, deadpan, deadly, and the violence still as gruesome as you would expect. Yet I would venture that the overall universe that these characters inhabit is not nearly as unremittingly grim as the one inhabited by Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso in the Revenge Trilogy. A larger degree of playfulness has crept into the mix, and Nicol is having a helluva lot of fun.
Nicol is most proficient at exploiting the form of crime fiction to play a particular kind of game with his readers. It is a game where the distinctions between “high” and “low” forms of literature are done away with, a form of play where the reader “bets” as to predicting the content and the outcome. Nicol’s characters also play games throughout, notable examples being the Icing Unit playing cards, Vicki taking part in a special evening of poker arranged by Mkezi, and even the lowlifes Jouma and Seven playing dominoes in a security guard’s office when the pair steals rhino horn from a museum bearing the mark of Cecil John Rhodes.
Only in a crime novel would you be able to call a (coloured, skollie) character Jouma (translated as “your mother”), and playfully name another (white, Afrikaner, killer) Dommiss (translated as “Stupid is”). This kind of playful authorship extends to the ways in which Nicol allows for the polyphony of voices and speech – from white, black and coloured males to white, black, coloured, Nigerian and Indian women – to cascade across the pages, regularly coming into contact.
The cover of Of Cops and Robbers features a window being shattered by a single bullet. The cover offers a striking meta-commentary: firstly, through the rapid-fire associations of guns and bullets with both cops and robbers, and secondly, by way of the space created by the bullet hole, one which is by this visual optic an aperture for readers to look through or fix with their own involvement when reading the text. As readers we see the cracks on the glass, and once we start to read the novel, we open up our own consciousness, our own ways of looking, to influence from Nicol’s literary “bullets”.
A pane of glass is notable also in its form, as it can be penetrated and cracked without falling to pieces. Perhaps this is what happens when we read writers such as Nicol. Instead of running to take cover, we seek out the “hit”; we confront the work of the “assailant”, the author. We stand beside him, part of his world. Yet we are like the pane of glass. We experience the world of the novel viscerally, but when the final bullets leave the chamber and we close the book, we are still standing, a little broken but still whole.
Whether you read his latest work as a playful homage to the hard-boiled heroes of the 1930s, find the crossing of boundaries between fact and fiction a source of interest, or just want to read a white-knuckle thriller about the not-quite state of the nation, Nicol’s your man.