Sleeper

"It was difficult. He has two series, and we chose a later book in one of his series. It’s called Sleeper and it’s a thriller. It’s about a private investigator whose name is Fish Pescado. He’s a surfer boy in Cape Town, and his partner, Vicki, is an ex-spy with a South African spy authority, the State Security Agency. They make an unlikely but very intriguing combination. We thought this was one of his best, most successful books, balancing the PI and the spy aspects. Mike Nicols runs writing courses. His books are written in almost a staccato style. I’ve asked him about that, and he said that with crime fiction you’re breaking the law, people are getting injured, there are assassinations. Life is being distorted, and he tries to reflect that in the language in which he writes. He’s regarded as one of South Africa’s strongest stylists that way. If you look at his writing, you’ll find three-word sentences with no verbs in them. You would perhaps not tell your students to write that way, but it works very well. It really keeps you moving. That’s right. As I mentioned, one of his protagonists works for the government as a spy and has those skills. She is also semi-addicted to gambling, which is a risky combination for a spy. The other one is a private eye, so he has a much broader approach to how these crimes can be investigated. This one starts with the murder of the Minister of Energy, so it drops you right in there in the depths of what’s going on in the government. “Nicol picks themes that are high up in the country’s priorities” Nicol picks themes that are high up in the country’s priorities and, at the moment, power generation is a huge one. South Africa has daily scheduled blackouts, and there’s been talk of buying nuclear power stations from the Russians. Control over these things is not as good as it should be, and you do not want enriched uranium to be traded on markets to terrorists. These are real concerns. South Africa has nuclear facilities and it’s a very reasonable question as to whether the control is as good as it should be. That’s what he explores in the book, among other things. Our detective’s nickname is Kubu, which means ‘hippopotamus’ in Setswana. He’s got that nickname because he’s a very big, somewhat overweight guy. But also because if you get between a hippo and the water, you’re probably going to be in bad shape. Once he’s focused on a crime, that’s where he’s going to go. So he has that hippo feature, too. Our first book was called A Carrion Death , and it had the backstory theme of blood diamonds. It introduced Kubu and his family and that would possibly be where people would like to start. The idea for the book came because Stan is a pilot, and we used to do fly-in trips to different areas of Botswana and Zimbabwe. On one occasion, we saw a pack of hyenas attack and pull down a wildebeest. Hyenas are scavengers if there’s one of them, but if there are 50, they’re very successful hunters, which there were in that pack. Over the period of an hour or so, they’d eaten everything. They crunched the bones and ate the skin. There were some horns left and perhaps some bits of hoof, but that was it. We thought that this would make a great way of getting rid of a body in a murder mystery. After all, how can the police trace a murderer if there’s no body—if it’s been processed by hyenas? That’s the premise that starts the book. An ecologist and a game ranger discover a body being eaten by a hyena (the discovery is too soon for the disappearance of the body to actually occur). After we start writing, the question was, ‘Why was it important that this body be completely removed from the world?’ That led to A Carrion Death . Kubu appears fully fleshed out, literally and metaphorically in A Carrion Death and there’s no backstory for him because he wasn’t going to be the main character. We just needed a detective to investigate this murder. But he appeared and took over the series. There are six books in that series. Recently, we’ve been writing prequels to A Carrion Death . The first book, Facets of Death starts when he joins the force as a detective sergeant in the CID. It’s his first big case at the CID. The second book is set in a different part of Botswana. We try to set the books around Botswana, and to have at least a theme which connects with other areas of Botswana, because it’s a very fascinating country in terms of diversity of culture and environment. We’re busy working on the third book at the moment, which links the three prequels with A Carrion D eath . So you could start with A Carrion Death, as the first book that introduces Kubu. Or you could start with Facets of Death , which is the day he joins the CID. Yes. Things have changed very dramatically since Ian Khama stepped down as president in 2018. That’s another story and I don’t think your readers necessarily want to hear about Botswana politics, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. That hasn’t really affected us because our last contemporary book was set during Khama’s period. The prequels have their own issues. We always make a point of visiting the areas where we set our books, talking to people and eating at local places. Facets of Death is set just before 2000, so we now have to try and work out what was going on in Botswana 25 years ago. We were visiting then, but one’s memory doesn’t always produce quite the accuracy that one would like, so we’ve done a lot of research. We know a lot of people in Botswana. At one stage we were friendly with the commissioner of police, but he’s retired now. We have a lot of contacts and we spend a lot of time on research. That’s part of the fun, to be able to meet people from different environments and cultures and chat to them. People in Botswana are very friendly and very willing to share all these things with us. We were once in the town of Kasane and we needed to know how you would escape from the holding cells at the police station. We managed to speak to the head of the station and he wasn’t very pleased with our question. By sheer good luck, Stan got out his cell phone, phoned the commissioner of police’s number, and he took the call. Suddenly, we were very much persona grata with the head of the police station. He took us on a tour of the cells and explained how you could get out of them and all the rest of it. So yes, we’ve had great fun in our explorations of Botswana."