BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE [Hardcover]

 

 

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Africa remains a relatively unexplored setting for crime novels, so I was pleased to come across this book set in 1950s South Africa. It opens with Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper arriving in the tiny eastern border town of Jacob's Rest to investigate a report of a drowned police officer. It turns out the man found floating in a pool of water was the town's police captain/unofficial mayor, and was shot through the head. Thus begins Cooper's trip down the dark mean dirt paths that criss-cross the velt behind the town's Afrikaner, Zulu, and Colored houses, shops, and farms. As in any good small-town crime story, nearly everyone has secrets to hide from Cooper -- even the stoic Zulu police constable and mysterious Jewish shopkeeper who become his sidekicks. However, what might have been a standard procedural whodunit in an exotic setting is vastly complicated by the arrival on the scene of two national Security Force goons who take over the investigation. They are hunting for a communist angle to the murder, even if they have to beat it out of an innocent scapegoat, or knock a non-Afrikaner policeman like Cooper around.

These Security Force guys are more dangerous than any criminal Cooper has faced in Johannesburg, and he has to tread lightly around them in order to find the real killer. The story takes place just after the passing of the Immorality Act, banning sexual relations between the races, so you know that's going to play a big role in the story. And indeed it does, as Cooper strips away layer after layer of propriety and deception to reveal the not-so-innocent heart of this supposed "Godly" town, he gets closer and closer to being a victim himself. There's a kind of silly semi-supernatural element to it, as Cooper sometimes hears the voice of his old Scottish drill sergeant in his subconscious yelling at him to keep digging deeper and not to give in. While the bulk of the book is pretty engaging and fun, the climax is a bit of a letdown. The villain, when unmasked is somewhat disappointing, having been motivated by largely invisible extreme pathologies. I never like it when an otherwise perfectly decent crime story features a loony villain, I guess I prefer things to be more mundane. On the whole, however, it's a decent debut with some great atmosphere and a protagonist I wouldn't mind spending another book with. (And indeed, Cooper returns in the Durban-set Let the Dead Die).

FIRST SENTENCE (Chapter 1): Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen.

MEMORABLE MOMENT (Page 151): Every colour from fresh milk to burnt sugar was on show. There was enough direct evidence in the churchyard to refute that blood mixing was unnatural. Plenty of people managed to do it just fine.

KEEP IT OR NOT?: A reading group book, I shall return this for other readers to read and discuss.

A debut novel that I both enjoyed reading and learnt a lot from - I will certainly be looking out for further books by this author. A real page-turner - the crime/thriller aspect to the story was interesting enough but, for me, it was the insight into 1950s South Africa that was so fascinating.Well researched, A Beautiful Place To Die tells the story of a country segregated not only into 'whites' and 'blacks' but also into 'coloureds' as well - throw a Jewish character into the racial stew and you have a compelling if somewhat disturbing look at a country where, and I quote .....

"The new segregation laws divided people into race groups, told them where they could live and told them where they could work. The Immorality Act went so far as to tell people who they could sleep with and love."

Not only a good plot, there is a real mix of wonderfully observed characters who, though not always pleasant, are always human and make for great reading. My only 'complaint'? I would love to know more about the previous lives of 'English' South African Detective Emmanuel Cooper and Jewish doctor (?) Daniel Zweigman and hope the author explores at least Cooper in greater depth in her second book Let the Dead Lie

This impressive debut novel is set in South Africa in 1952, in the immediate aftermath of the election which resulted in the Boer government and specifically the Immorality Act, by which the "white", coloured" and "black" races were not allowed to intermarry or have relationships. This cruel and totally wrong policy forms the backdrop to this story set in the small country town of Jacob's Rest, where the chief of police, Captain Pretorius, has been shot to death just before the book opens.

The person who is sent to investigate the crime is Detective Emmanuel Cooper, who is an English veteran of the Second World War. He soon realises that he isn't going to get any help from the local police officials, who consist of one absent officer and one very stupid, green recruit, Constable Hepple. He therefore turns to the Zulu Constable Shabalala, who is the only intelligent and experienced member of the local force. Shabalala, however, seems to know more than he is prepared to tell Cooper.

Pretorius, it soon emerges, was more than just the police chief - he, his wife and six sons ruled the town, owning most of the businesses and land. The sons are all arrogant and demand that Cooper finds out who killed their father. Cooper's first problem is to determine a cause of death in the absence of the (white) police doctor who is travelling- he takes the body to the local convent where he is advised by the nuns to ask the "Old Jew" to undertake the task. The "Old Jew", who owns a general store and runs a small clothes-making operation in the back room, turns out to be not only medically qualified but also to be an intelligent companion for Cooper as he desperately tries to make headway in investigating the crime despite being constantly hampered. (The fact that Cooper is not allowed to order a post mortem because Pretorius's sons say their father "would not have liked it" is just the first of very many, increasingly challenging setbacks.)

The crime investigation is a tool used by the author to show at every opportunity the awfulness, meanness and worse of the prevailing administration and the attitudes it engendered in the people then living in South Africa. Not only do the Boers regard themselves as God's chosen people living in a land that has been given to them by divine right, but very soon the infamous Security Branch step in to oversee the investigation. They want to resolve the case as quickly as possible, ideally by finding a likely "communist" and beating a confession out of him, so Cooper has to play a careful game of appearing to help while in fact continuing his search for the real perpetrator(s). Cooper's methods are those of the traditional detective, but involve him experiencing the parallel life of the town along the "Kaffir paths" (mean little tracks that the black population had to use instead of the paved streets) and among the hovels and shacks that are the homes of the non-white population.

Malla Nunn is a great storyteller, and this novel gripped me to the end. It is somewhat of a melodrama, though, as the circumstances of Pertorius's death become clearer in a series of dramatic sequences that occasionally stretch credibility. My main problem with the novel, however, is one of attitude -- Cooper is a character in 1952 yet he has modern sensibilities. Rather than seeming like an enlightened liberal thinker of his time, he seems to me to me more like a 2010 man who has been parachuted in. Nevertheless, he's an attractive character, and very deserving of the reader's sympathies, both because of his dogged determination to get to the bottom of things despite considerable personal danger, but also because he's vulnerable. Looking at the novel from the strict perspective of the mystery, the solution depends too much on people (even his friends) not telling Cooper things until a suitable point in the narrative -- but this book is more than a crime novel, and it is one that will rest in the mind for a while.

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3.0 out of 5 stars A good debut ... but it might have been so much stronger
Turn back the clock to 1952, South Africa. The National Party is at the height of its power and, to paraphrase the author, not a year goes past without the government introducing... Read more

Published on 23 May 2009 by Richard Kunzmann

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Debut!
Malla Nunn's first book, A Beautiful Place To Die, marks the start of a promising series featuring Detective Emmanuel Cooper. Read more

Published on 8 Mar 2009 by bobbewig

4.0 out of 5 stars "Every year [the government] introduces a dozen new ways to break the law."
It is 1952 in South Africa, and Det. Sgt, Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, has been sent from Johannesburg to investigate a murder in the "deep country" outside the city. Read more

Published on 16 Jan 2009 by Mary Whipple

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