All the captivating colours of the dark

CAN a novel be crime fiction and a literary work at the same time? It's a question Afrikaans readers of the works of Karin Brynard, Chris Karsten and Deon Meyer have often asked themselves. Now the problem presents itself again, acutely, with Chris Whitaker's All the Colours of the Dark.

The answer is: yes, of course — but you have to know that the characters in All the Colours of the Dark will keep talking to you long after the book's crime-fiction elements have faded from your focus. The people convince. No Reacher-like cardboard figure is going to intervene and put everything right. The pages are populated with people in their full-bodied glory and ever-present cares.

All the Colours of the Dark is one of those novels that becomes part of your life without you being able to explain why. The protagonists are three characters you don't really expect in a crime novel. There's Patch Macauley, who is 13 when the novel begins in 1976. He has only one eye and he thinks of himself as a pirate. Then there's his friend Saint, who throughout the 25 years of the story is his only real supporter. And Grace…

One day, Patch saves a rich man's child from kidnapping but is caught himself and thrown into a pitch-dark room. There he meets Grace, whom he can never see but with whom he converses. Once he escapes, his life transforms into a quest to find her.

Whitaker is an incredibly subtle writer. All the Colours of the Dark does not have an abundance of action. There's a lot of talk, and those conversations are often not about Grace but about other missing children and the fear that haunts everyone in a small community.

The novel does have an abundance of characterisation, and a chance to get to know humanity in all its brutal manifestations. At the story level, far less happens than what occurs in the inner world of the characters. Saint is eccentric in the same sense that Patch is simple. That simplicity is his bastion against life. Patch becomes a painter, a seeker. Saint is his safe haven, the girlfriend who keeps his life safe from the elements.

The characters in All the Colours of the Dark signify Whitaker as a great writer. It's a coming-of-age novel but also an ordinary love story cast in crime-fiction format, with a hefty dash of detective work. All these elements are carried by Whitaker's focus on his characters. It takes a different kind of ingenuity to blend these genres.

When the incredible last words are muttered, and despite all the dark things, you experience warm fuzzies. I want to rejoice in the discovery of this author. He knows how to purify man from the taint of cynicism.

All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker is published by Orion and costs R381 at Loot.

Names ring bells. Truth Be Told is Patricia Raybon's third novel with detective Annalee Spain. But I remember Raybon for her famous essay on washing windows in which she covers everything from slavery to homeownership and raising children.

She is a master of a simple story that touches all humanity. The reason lies in her small team: Annalee is a detective who receives support from her church congregation. Her pastor/reverend, Jack Blake, is her lover and co-detective. Then she has a white orphan, Eddie Brown. The novel begins in the garden of a black philanthropist, where a corpse is discovered at a party. Annalee is religious, and the story takes in  issues such as the exploitation of young women by rich men and the history of the black community. Annalee's faith and her knowledge of nature are tested. 

This woman is the kind of detective you don't often find in crime fiction — one with a deep prayer life. You could airlift her into Chris Whitaker's All the Colours of the Dark and she wouldn't be put to shame. Annalee lives in Denver in the 1920s and Raydon lets the book speak to writers of that era (Agatha Christie, EC Bentley, Dorothy L Sayers). But her entire sphere is that of the bulwark of faith in the black community in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. This book is refreshingly different from the cynical spirit of the current generation of crime novels.

Truth Be Told by Patricia Raybon was published by Tyndale Fiction and cost $11.99 at Amazon.

It is annoying when you pick up a book and realise that before you can go any further you have to read the author's previous novels. In this case The Savage Kind, in which two teenagers, Philippa Watson and Judy Nightingale, end up on the trail of a serial killer in the 1950s.

The two women — femmes fatales from an era of innocence — are at it again in Hall of Mirrors, but this time the main focus is on the only person who believes their concerns about the serial killer, namely Ray Kane, a crime novelist. Kane is actually two people, a writers' society, as it were, consisting of Roger Raymond and Lionel Kane. Roger dies in the first chapter, and now Lionel is trying to prove it was murder.

Copenhaver developed an interesting stylistic structure for these two novels, built around the notes the two women make on the unfolding of affairs. Copenhaver is an educationalist who deals primarily with teenagers, so you sometimes get the feeling that you're dealing with a sophisticated form of young adult fiction. Lionel Kane's entry puts the novel on a more mature tack and gives Copenhaver the space to develop his big themes (queer identity, racism and homophobia in the 1950s).

I won't give away anything more about the story — I can only say that Copenhaver has created one of the most interesting distortions of the detective novel. The story he tells changes the lives of those involved. Reading it makes one experience a similar feeling. In a way, it's sensitivity training on gender issues, with an intense line of tension.

Hall of Mirrors by John Copenhaver was published by Pegasus Crime and costs $21.97 at Amazon.

♦ VWB ♦

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