South African melodrama is marked by menace

Wake Up Dead nolead ends

nolead begins By Roger Smith

Henry Holt. 304 pp. $26

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky

American movies of the 1940s and '50s retroactively dubbed films noirs were called melodramas at the time of their initial release. Read Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead, and it's easy to see why.

The thriller, the second novel from its South African author, is chock-full of types from those movies. An adventurer who comes home looking for what's his. A woman in trouble and living by her wits. A crook who tries, too late, to make good. A hint of redemption. Even, after a fashion, a doomed story of obsessive love.

Only the scene is not New York, San Francisco, or some nameless Midwestern town; it's violent, deeply divided Cape Town, mostly the deadly slums known as the Flats. The setting recaptures all the blood and menace that time and nostalgia have effaced from Raymond Chandler's mean streets - and redoubles them.

In classic melodrama fashion, Smith assembles his cast of characters - Billy Afrika, the mercenary with a mission; Roxy Palmer, the wife left with nothing; and the deadly Piper chief among them - moving all toward a common center and bringing them into combination and conflict. Each character's motives are so strong (and so compellingly articulated) that something has to give, usually in violent fashion.

The backdrop for Smith's urban nightmare is both fantastic and hyperrealistic, somewhat in the manner of graphic novels or urban fantasy:

"A woman in a Muslim headscarf scuttled across the road, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a tub of Kentucky chicken, and disappeared into Dark City. Otherwise the road was empty and silent."

Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steampunk Victorian hellhole, and none of his characters - rich, poor, colored, white, or black - has anything better than a bleak present and an infernal past.

The novel's flashbacks, narrative asides, and occasional political jabs, even the inflection of the characters' speech, contribute to a vivid sense of place. The only question is whether that place is Cape Town or hell.

Here is one of the jabs that anchor the novel in the real world:

"But he would rather give his life for that dream. . . . Or, rather, the lives of the ragtag army of boys who had come to believe in him as some kind of hip-hop Selassie."

Here's another:

"Two years before, Billy Afrika had stood there, over Clyde Adams' gutted body, and made another promise. Swore he'd take care of his friend's family. He'd handed in his badge and become a mercenary. No one had used the word mercenary, of course. You were a contractor, skilled in close protection."

Smith alternates viewpoint characters between and within chapters, beginning most in a character's head and invoking his or her name - "Disco de Lilly's curse was that he was just too drop-dead gorgeous." "Billy Afrika knew he was home when the tribal woman set off the metal detector at Johannesburg Airport." "The good news reached Piper in the morning as he lay in the bath washing off the last of the blood." "Roxy ran."

That's an efficient way to tell a story, advancing the action as it builds sympathy for characters, major and minor. (It also may be a part of the crime-fiction zeitgeist. Some of the best crime novels of recent years have used it, Declan Burke's The Big O and John McFetridge's three Toronto novels among them.)

Smith also leavens the book with humor, grim and otherwise. The tribal woman who sets off the metal detector, "barefoot, wrapped in an embroidered blanket, braided hair heavy with beads, her legs and arms thick with wire bangles," is led off to be body searched, and "Later he glimpsed her talking Zulu into the latest Nokia, standing against a backdrop of floodlit Boeings."

A good deal of the novel's sense of place derives from canny incorporation of the Afrikaans language, particularly the variety spoken by colored or mixed-race South Africans in Cape Town.

Smith is just one of a burgeoning group of crime writers from South Africa. Deon Meyer and Michael Stanley may be the best-known in North America, and Margie Orford's work may be closest in tone to Wake Up Dead. Read more about these and other South African crime writers at Crime Beat South Africa, http://crimebeat.book.co.za/about/.

The country's crime-fiction scene is one of the world's most fertile, and Smith recently explained why:

"During the apartheid years, writing crime fiction in South Africa seemed beside the point. But now, sadly, South Africa is one of the most crime-ravaged countries in the world, and writing crime seems all too appropriate."