Category Archives: Malla Nunn (Aus)

Aussie Authors Aced

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I know the title doesn’t mean much but I had a yen for alliteration. What it means is that I have finished the highest possible level of the Aussie Author Challenge (8 books by Aussie Authors during 2010). And it’s only July.

These are the titles I read counted for the challenge

I have a swag more books by Aussies sitting very close to the top of the TBR pile so this is by no means the end of my aussie reading for the year. Stay tuned.

Review: Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn

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Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, was one of my favourite books of last year so I was keen to get my hands on this second, follow-up novel. I’m also counting it towards my Aussie Authors challenge because even though Nunn was born in Swaziland and the book is set in South Africa she lives in Australia and, as is our practice, we’ve happily adopted her as our own.

In the 1950′s it’s eight months since the events of A Beautiful Place to Die and, under South Africa’s increasingly draconian apartheid laws, Emmanuel Cooper has been re-classified as non-white and stripped of his job in the police. He’s had to move to Durban and is working a manual labour job by day and doing undercover surveillance work documenting police corruption at the dockyards for his former boss at night. It’s during his night time work that he stumbles across the body of a young boy, Jolly Marks. Of course investigating deaths is no longer Cooper’s job but he is compelled to work the case anyway. When he is accused of being the one to have committed the crime, and two subsequent murders, he has only a brief window of time to clear his name.

Once again Malla Nunn has delivered a brilliant depiction of a time and place. In the urban setting the harshness of the political situation is even more starkly displayed than was the case with the first book which took place in the remote Jacob’s Rest. With so many routine day-to-day activities now controlled by the myriad of new laws virtually everyone is in danger of doing something illegal at some point and the distrust, paranoia and necessary self-interest this engenders is portrayed here to perfection. There is also a hefty dose of desperation displayed by many characters caught in horrendous circumstances such as having married before the laws came into effect and now learning the marriage is outlawed because the couple are newly classified as different races. What struck me too here was that on top of all the kinds of hell the regime settled upon the civilian population it made the ever-present ‘us and them’ mentality between police and the wider community that much worse because, essentially, everyone a policeman comes across is a criminal of one sort or another. Even an honourable cop struggles to deal with that.

Characterisations are Nunn’s other great skill. I liked Emmanuel Cooper even more than in the first book though he is not always a likable human being. But as a character, flaws and all, he is the sort of person who leaps off the page. Experiencing first hand the plight of being classified out of the self-appointed ruling race and losing his job, the main thing by which he defines himself as a human being, make Cooper lose some of his confidence and sense of self-worth. He seems even more haunted by the phantom of his former Sergeant Major and is generally not functioning at his best but he strives, not always successfully, to do no harm to others, especially when the two friends he made in Jacob’s Rest come to town to help him. There isn’t a single standout villain here but there’s a criminal under

As far as story goes I found the middle section a bit woolly with a couple of complications too many. Apart from Cooper, who simply can’t let the dead lie, no one seemed to care much about the murder victims because they were too busy worrying about themselves (not without good reason I admit) or, in the case of the cops, were focussed on ‘getting’ Cooper. For a while the story lost its way a little though it ended strongly with a nail-biting but believable climax.

Emmanuel Copper is certainly not the first flawed protagonist in crime fiction but I find him unique in terms of the experiences he’s endured and I’m left wanting to read more about him. And while this is too confronting a setting to be considered a comfort read it is superbly drawn and, alas, all too believable. I heartily recommend this book though would suggest reading A Beautiful Place to Die first to get a full sense of all that Cooper has had and lost before becoming who he is in this novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher Simon & Schuster [2010,]; ISBN 97814116586227; Length 382 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Let the Dead Lie has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction and you might also want to read my review of A Beautiful Place to Die

Books of the month – April 2010

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In an effort to make my end of year selection of best reads a little easier I have decided to sum up each month’s bookishness here at the blog. Most people would have started in January but I’ve never been one to follow the crowd. Also I didn’t think of it until now.

That was then

I finished 15 books in April and threw another one on the DNF pile. Six of my completed reads were audio books which is an indication that the weather finally cooled down enough for me to get back into my regular routine of walking to walk every day (and sometimes home again too). Without wanting to sound all schmalzy I truly do feel grateful to be alive when someone tells me a great story as I walk through the city which I have almost to myself in the crisp early morning. Crunchy Autumn leaves underfoot are a bonus right now.

The pick of the month’s books was undoubtedly Arnaldur Indriðason’s Hypothermia. I am still reflecting on it and telling people about it and would be pressing my copy upon friends but for the fact I borrowed this particular book from the library (I’ve thought about opening my own branch but I’m not sure I want strangers reading newspapers in my lounge room all day to keep warm).  The one word I keep using to describe this book is beautiful. I’ll read it again one day.

Honourable mentions go to Deon Meyer’s Dead at Daybreak for introducing me to the compelling Zatopek (Zet) van Heerden and Margot Kinberg’s B-Very Flat for a fine modern take on the classic whodunit.

The other book from this month’s reading that I’m still talking about is Luis Miguel Rocha’s The Last Pope but only because it was the silliest book I’ve read in ages and I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of something more polite than that to say about it when I go to my book club to discuss it on the weekend.

More to come

For now at least I’ve given up giving up acquiring books. I spent most of 2009 completely failing to give up getting more books and I know what the definition of insanity is. So I’m allowing my TBR pile to grow at its natural rate and I tell myself that I’m sensibly planning for the apocalypse. Oh you can smirk all you like about that but who’d have been laughing if the Icelandic volcano ash cloud had kept planes out of the sky for a year instead of a week huh?

Through a mixture of purchases both new and second hand (damn the library’s book sale), gifts from my fairy godmother, library borrowings and a prize win from the Scandinavian Reading Challenge host I acquired 18 books this month (a net gain for my TBR of only 2 books which is not too appalling). Highlights of these acquisitions that I’ve yet to read include:

Matt Rees’ The Samaritan Secret is the third Omar Yussef mystery set in Palestine and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the first 2 books. There’s already a 4th in the series so I need to catch up and look forward to reading this one soon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The audio version of Shona MacLean’s The Redemption of Alexander Seaton is a historical mystery that’s been discussed at several of my favourite blogs including the excellent Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. It’s set in Scotland in 1620 and tells the tale of a disgraced would-be religious Minister who sets out to uncover the murderer of the apothecary’s nephew in an effort to redeem his good name.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Simon Lelic’s A Thousand Cuts is a book I wanted to read after seeing Maxine’s excellent review at Euro Crime. The book views a horrific school shooting from the viewpoint of various people impacted by the crime including police, family members of victims and staff and students of the school.

None of these books qualify for my several ongoing challenges though so I’m not sure when I’ll be reading these. The actual titles next up on my reading list are

  • Michele Giuttari’s A Death in Tuscany to complete the Europe portion of the global challenge (I’ve had it on the go for a week, it’s kind of dragging)
  • Leif Davidesn’s The Serbian Dane as book 2 in the Scandinavian Challenge (I’ve read the first 50 or so pages and am hooked)
  • Glen Peters’ Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta to complete the Asian leg of the global challenge (to be honest I bought it because I loved the title)
  • Malla Nunn’s Let the Dead Lie which is her newly released second novel that I am dying to read after devouring the first (plus I can count it for the Aussie authors challenge) (she wasn’t born here and the book isn’t set here but she lives here so she is an Aussie OK)

Chart of the month

As everyone probably knows by now I keep a lot of utterly useless information about the books I read and sometimes I create charts out of it all just to give the illusion I’m not barking mad. This month let’s look at how many pages I’ve read so far this year. I have no analysis of these figures for you except to say that you can tell January is holiday month in Oz – even though I was at work no one else was which meant I wasn’t busy and could get much more reading time into my day.

Pages read per month



2009 – The Favourites

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I don’t rely entirely on my ratings for including a book into my favourite reads of the year. There’s also an indefinable ‘something-about-it-stuck-in-my-head-long-after-finishing’ quality that comes into play and that element is unknown when I give my rating (which I do within a day or so of reading the book). So, to arrive at my top ten books for the year I looked at a list of all the books I’d read and rated 3.5 or above (81 out of the 127 books I finished) and reflected on each one (sometimes skimming my review, sometimes not needing to) and slowly whittled them down to the ones with the most ‘stickinmyheadedness’. The result (in alphabetical order of the author’s surname) is:

I didn’t take any of this into account when narrowing down my list but noticed something curious once I’d finished:

  • Three of these are by women.
  • I read three of these in audio (unabridged of course), the rest in old-fashioned print
  • Three of these qualify as historical fiction although the past they are set in is quite recent (two in the 1950’s and one in the 1970’s)
  • There is one each set in Australia, Laos, Scotland, South Africa, Palestine, Russia, England and three set in Sweden (which is odd because I read 43 books set in the US this year but none of those made it to the list and only six set in Sweden)
  • Only three of these were by authors I had read previously

There are procedurals and whydunnits and whodunnits and thrillers and books where crime-solving is incidental to a different kind of story in the list.

There are light books and dark ones and a few in-between ones.

What they all have in common is characters that are memorable and stories that have captured my imagination. I’ve met people who are strong, funny, poignant, awe-inspiring, evil or tragic. Their stories have made me angry, happy, wistful, sad and nostalgic. Each one of them has made me badger friends, family, colleagues and, in at least two cases that I can recall, strangers on a bus to read them.

Hearing this year about the struggles new (and new-ish) authors must go through to get published made me count my blessings for all the wonderful books that do get published and make their way to my hands. To the authors of all the great books I read this year, the ones on this list and the ones that narrowly missed a spot but still entertained and engaged me, thank you for your endurance and your stories.

Review: A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

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beautiful place to dieTitle: A Beautiful Place to Die

Author: Malla Nunn

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-405-03877-5

Length: 397 pages

Genre: Historical crime fiction / police procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: A stunningly confronting yet beautiful book.

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In the early 1950′s in the small South African town of Jacob’s Rest the police captain, Willem Pretorius, is found brutally murdered. When Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate he struggles against the backdrop of the newly instituted racial segregation laws (apartheid) . Pretorius’ Afrikaner family want quick vengeance: they distrust Cooper who is English and assume it is the black community or coloureds who have killed their patriarch. At the same time the Security Police descend on the town and work on the theory that Pretorius was killed by a communist or other political activist and they soon sideline Cooper from their investigation.

Of the many striking things about this book the one that is likely to stay with me longest is the unflichingly honest picture it paints of the time and place in which it is set. So many engrossing details of both the political and physical setting are provided that I easily felt myself in the town of Jacob’s Rest with its roads for whites and its kaffir paths and its segregated Sunday church services with potluck dinners. I felt awkward and angry as the realities of the segregation laws were demonstrated through the story playing out but despite my discomfort I found myself unwilling to leave the place even for a moment and read the entire book in a single sitting.

On top of the setting the book has stunning characters. Cooper struggles with nightmares from his days in the trenches during the war and regularly argues with the voice of his former Sergeant Major. Although white he is distrusted by the powerful Afrikaners but also finds it hard to be accepted by the myriad second class citizens although, ultimately, it is a myriad collection of these people, including captain Pretorius’ Zulu ‘brother’ Constable Samuel Shabalala, who help him with his investigation. But it’s not only the sympathetic characters who are brilliantly depicted: Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Special Branch is one of the most loathsome men you’ll find in crime fiction, all the more so because he’s entirely believable.

Of course none of this would be worth much if the book didn’t also tell a gripping story and there’s a real old-fashioned whodunnit here. In trying to uncover who killed Willem Pretorius Cooper uncovers a series of crimes that have been left unsolved because the victims weren’t white and also learns of Pretorius’ own moral lapses. He races to find what these events may have had to do with Pretorius’ death as he tries to salvage his own career from being ruined by the Special Branch.

This is yet another book that has everything I look for in my crime fiction and had me alternating between indignant mutterings under my breath, heart-in-my-mouth fear and more than a few tears.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Beautiful Place to Die has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction,  Reviewing the Evidence and Crime Down Under

Malla Nunn was born ins Swaziland but lives in Australia so we’re claiming her as ours. This interview with her on Radio National’s Book Show last December prompted me to go out and buy the book (and it only took me 11 months to rescue it from the TBR pile).