John Fullerton

In a city where murder by sniper is an everyday experience, a woman in a bathtub is a bit of an anomaly. This story focuses on a police chief, his complicated background and what he has to do to survive in this city of tensions and hostility. It's an interesting look at a recent historical mess that is still causing ripples.

There was a little bit too much of the issues that the author was trying to highlight rather than story and overall it didn't quite work. Interesting but not quite my cup of tea.… (mais)

Although crime fiction has dominated best-seller lists around the world, South Africans have been slow to embrace the genre: our Nadine Gordimers and JM Coetzees may have won Nobel Prizes, but they will never capture the popular imagination to the extent thriller writers do.

But this century we are playing catch-up as a spate of writers across both the colour and the gender line follow in the footsteps of James McClure, producing a spate of excellent crime novels in which, refreshingly, the villains are evil men, rather than apartheid relics or functionaries.

Most South African authors elect to deal with contemporary reality, reflecting a country with enormously high murder rates, a huge discrepancy in wealth, and millions of illegal immigrants. Fullerton has chosen instead to set his book in 1994, with flashbacks to the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Although he was educated in South Africa, and completed his national service, Fullerton has spent most of his life away from the country, working as a journalist for Reuters. Unfortunately, he gets too many of the details wrong, from names to social conditions, which is incredibly irritating.

White Boys Don’t Cry [a black colleague snorted derisively when he read the title] is as multi-layered – and occasionally as tear-inducing – as an onion, with the truth deep within: he revisits chapters in our past that most white South Africans would prefer to forget.

He calls on his own youth as background to this tale of love and betrayal: white privilege, dysfunctional families, and exclusive WASP private schools. In common with most local thrillers, this is set in Cape Town for the most part – although some of the more sordid aspects are reserved for Gauteng and that ‘dull little dorp on the Eastern Cape Coast’ Port Elizabeth.

Hero Sebastian Palfrey [white, English-speaking and poor] befriends Josh Schuter [white, Afrikaans and rich] in preprimary school back in the 50s.They remain friends through their school years, through University and even during National Service in the parabats.

The story centres on the 1994 murder of Josh’s father, multi-millionaire white supremacist, former National party politician and apartheid ideologue Chris Schuter. The mystery unfolds retrospectively as the protagonists gradually reveal their complex pasts and the parts they played under Apartheid.

Interesting although the book is with its themes of betrayal and love, it is mired in the past and tediously PC: for South Africans reading about our recent history, the devil is in the details and the dodgy descriptions, inauthentic names and anachronistic scene settings spoil what could be a good story… (mais)