He was not very big as spiders go, probably about five centimetres from the tip of one leg to the tip of the one opposite. (I almost wrote from, “wingtip to wingtip.”) He was also very low-slung. His belly seemed to scrape on floor or wall as he scuttled along.
The Writing of Closed Circle
The day in the late 1980s when I visited the Oudtshoorn township should have been an unremarkable one, but because a councillor of the township had been killed by a mob not long before, because I was being accompanied by a member of the local comrades and because the security
The Bad Old Days and Closed Circle
Most South Africans complain about the way the country is run. And, heaven knows, we have reason to complain. We all know about rising prices, political bosses living off the fat of the land while your supermarket trolley becomes increasingly unaffordable. And then, Eskom plans a price increase few can
Common Purpose
Under the Common Purpose doctrine anyone who was present at a homicide and was judged to be of one mind with the killer was also guilty. If Common Purpose is applied, instead of being found guilty as an accessory, the onlooker can also be judged a murderer. Judge Meyer was
The Events that Inspired DELUGE
As the old political order started to fall away in South Africa, the changes in the country affected everyone. Many of the unfranchised majority, especially young people, who were going to feel themselves free for the first time, were seized by a great urgency. Was it possible, they wondered, that
The Creating of Yudel Gordon
The first Yudel Gordon story was entitled A LONELY PLACE TO DIE. At the time there had been a succession of attacks on well-known opponents of Apartheid. Some of them resulted in assassinations. I was still unpublished, but in these attacks I saw plenty of material for thrillers and also
DELUGE: My New Yudel Gordon Thriller
Writing a thriller is different to writing any other kind of novel. The story’s structure is everything. Scenes have to follow each other logically and they have to draw the reader in so that he or she simply cannot put the book down. The reader simply must know what is
Landscape and the thriller
South Africa has landscapes of every type. For a medium sized country the variety of settings for a novel is astonishing. In romantic stories and rural epics the landscape often plays an important role. We have all seen Gerald O’Hara looking across his cotton fields and telling us that “Land
The creation of Yudel Gordon
All but one of my thrillers have Yudel Gordon as the central character. Down the years, many people have asked me on whom I based him. Usually I’ve tried to avoid the question. The truth is that he is an amalgamation of three real men, all of them psychologists, and
Writing a South African novel
Apart from only Klara’s Visitors, all my novels have been set in South Africa. This is not unusual among novelists from any country. Writers set their stories against backgrounds that they understand and have experienced. Among South African writers this is particularly true. When you live in a country as