This is a section about writing the books, doing the interviews and getting the inspiration for the books
Cults have been a reality since the days when witchcraft was commonly practised, and even before. Membership of a cult appeals to many. The member becomes part of a closed community and enjoys the comfort of being part of something important and exclusive. Like mainstream religion, the adherent may feel
The creation of Beloved Childe, the hero* of The Gathering, came about almost accidentally. She appeared for the first time as an important but minor character in The Top Prisoner of C-Max, a Yudel Gordon story. In that story she is visiting from the United States to find and punish
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
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 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 I was still unpublished, but in these attacks I saw plenty of material for thrillers and also
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
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
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
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
This is the story behind the writing Of The Robben Island List by Wessel Ebersohn Pretty much in the centre of Table Bay, overlooked by Table Mountain, one of the seven wonders of the world, just ten kilometres from Cape Town, lies a small island with a sad history. Over the