The Quality of Mercy

"This was only published earlier this month. It’s Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s latest book in her City of Kings trilogy. It’s really lyrical literary fiction as much as it is crime fiction. It’s about a detective whose name is Spokes Moloi. It starts with a fable which is an introduction to the area and his life after he comes back from fighting in the Second World War. I haven’t spoken to Ndlovu yet, but I’m going to be doing an interview with her. For reasons I’m not 100 percent sure about yet, she sets her books in a fictional African country. But all the aspects of it are Zimbabwe, which is her home country. The Quality of Mercy is set at the time of the changeover between Rhodesia into Zimbabwe and all the tensions and frictions that produced. Again, we thought it was a bit of a landmark, in terms of taking the Southern African political scene and showing how it affects real people, from the inside. She’s a Zimbabwean writer and she knows what she’s talking about. It doesn’t contain a lot of blood and guts, but I don’t think that fact means the crimes are cosy. You might question whether it’s a crime fiction book at all. The crime aspects are that it explores the commitments and emotions of the detective, which I suppose a lot of police procedurals do. But it’s not a police procedural either. There’s a lot of other stuff going on, and it’s embedded in the type of government before and after the change to independence in Zimbabwe. It’s a book that’s very hard to pigeonhole, and I like those books. You could call it literary fiction, or genre fiction, or crime fiction. You could even call it a police procedural, in the sense that one of the main characters is a police detective and there are crimes being investigated. But that’s definitely not the whole story. It’s lyrical and that’s what struck me. The writing is really beautiful."