“Every Technique Known to Prose”: The Aesthetics of True-Crime in Contemporary South Africa

Contemporary crime fiction has recently been touted as a genre which might represent the ‘new political novel’ in South Africa. This article, however, suggests that the received tropes and glib ethical dismissals inherent in the “hardboiled” form allow little space for social dialogue or depth of field. In contrast, I then explore the mode of “true-crime”: a “subgenre” (Oates, 1999) of literary non-fiction that still adopts many conventions of the crime thriller. Via a close reading of Jonny Steinberg's Midlands (2002), Antony Altbeker's Fruit of a Poisoned Tree (2010) and Mandy Wiener's Killing Kebble (2012), I ask if such texts might present an alternative to the aesthetic and ethical limitations of genre fiction.