Margie Orford

After the demise of The Weekender, here’s a resurrection of its final book interview, between Sue Grant-Marshall and myself:

MARGIE Orford, queen of South African crime thrillers, has cracked it.

Her third book in the Clare Hart series, Daddy’s Girl, has delivered the “ball-crushing fear: she aims for. It’s what her readers have come to expect.

This novel is the most gut- wrenching of the series and she believes the third one establishes her as a professional writer. Michael Connelly, the acclaimed thriller writer, says it takes 10 books before you truly arrive, but Orford’s short-circuiting that .

Like Clockwork, her first thriller, sold 85000 copies in six months in Germany. She’s been translated into seven languages and is selling in nine countries.

“I’m frightening people all over the place,” she says with her quick wit and melodious laugh. Her nervous tension has been palpable for months as she anguished over the reception of Daddy’s Girl, so at last she can relax.

This generator of heart-attack heat turns up for an interview in cool white on a summer’s day . She’s celebrating, but already talking about her fourth book, The Quarry, and even her fifth, Water Music. Her lightness and brightness are a foil for the grim and grisly underworld of the notorious prison numbers gangs that feature large in Daddy’s Girl.

Graveyard de Wet, imprisoned with a triple life sentence for disembowelling a nine-year-old girl, her mother and her grandmother, makes an appearance.

Orford sets the scene: “Ex- prisoner. He cut through farmland, a shadow slipping down the serried vines. A woman making her way home stopped, uncertain. The man watched her, at ease. Prison erases a man’s smell, teaches him the art of absence.”

Captain Riedwaan Faizal, a member of Cape Town’s elite Gang Unit, strides onto the scene. Tough and streetwise, he’s used to being a target. But when his war against gangs sucks in his only daughter and he becomes the prime suspect in her abduction – “yes, there’s a history” – he is as powerless as a whale out of water. He turns to Dr Clare Hart, investigative journalist turned profiler. Her primary interest is helping women and girls who are figuratively disembowelled by SA’s misogynistic society.

She’s initially sceptical of Faizal, whose unorthodox and freethinking approach to crime- solving has landed him in trouble many a time. But Hart knows only too well what happens when little girls are abducted and against her better judgment she agrees to help him look for nine-year-old Yasmin. The search takes readers into some of Cape Town’s seedy backwaters, into prisons, nightclubs and the detritus of a port city .

In the background is a ticking clock as the vital early hours after an abduction slither by and death becomes more certain.

ORFORD cleverly slips us into the mind of the little girl: “She wants her father. He will find her, save her from the darkness she’s so afraid of. He promised. She breathes in, like her daddy said he does when he’s afraid. The thud of blood in her ears fades, and she can listen.”

Yasmin is written with dead- cert authenticity. Orford and her architect husband have three daughters. She sticks to what she knows and painstakingly researches what she does not. “How would I know, sitting in my kitchen in Oranjezicht, how a cop reacts to a certain situation?”

So Orford goes out on patrol with the police, with her sharp mind, and even sharper pencil, missing nothing.

“How would a pathologist react to a particular kind of corpse?” She goes to mortuaries, observes every detail, watches a pathologist tuck a wisp of hair behind her ears as she prepares to cut. “For me it’s those tiny details of behaviour that become a portal into creating a character,” Orford says.

“What would you do if your child was missing? We all know the feeling when your kid disappears in a supermarket – I want to take that moment and make it go on and on and on.” She succeeds.

Daddy’s Girl germinated in her mind over two weeks many years ago when 10 young girls were murdered on the Cape Peninsula. There was no serial killer, no psycho to catch. “The serial killer is our society that just picks off vulnerable little people,” she says.

You sense, rather than hear, the rage in Orford’s voice as she questions the malfunctioning of society. Small girls, “so symbolic of the future with tiny ovaries intact, the most vulnerable of us, are not protected. It’s as if we have a death wish. “Daddy’s Girl is about fatherhood and how it must feel to be a good man in our sick and misogynistic society.”

THE third book in the series – following Like Clockwork and Blood Rose – is a prequel. It can be read first. “I painted myself into a corner with (publisher) Oshun by telling them I had a fully worked-out series but it was a total lie. I just jumped into the deep end with Clockwork.”

In the first thriller Hart, who reads criminal minds intuitively, has a sizzling relationship with the hunky, but at times difficult, Faizal. This continues in the second novel . Yet they meet for the first time in Daddy’s Girl, explaining the absence of sex until almost the last page – and Orford does sex particularly sensuously.

“I promise in the next one there will be sex from page two. The first page, as we know in a crime thriller, always has to have a body.”

Blood Rose opens with the corpse of a boy slumped in a swing on a Namibian school playground, turning in the wind. The film rights to it have been sold to London-based South African team Malcolm Kohll and Robert Fig .

The Quarry, about a stalker, is located in Cape Town and Amsterdam. “I always set my books in ports and, no Joburgers, Bruma Lake is not a port,” she says.

The central character is Sophie Brown, beautiful, seductive, haunted and working on an exhibition . The quarry is where Sophie witnessed, at the age of four, her mother being killed – but she’s forgotten how to remember the trauma. In preparing for the exhibition she discovers the crime scene that has shaped her life.

Orford approached “crime artist” Kathryn Smith, a Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year whose serial exhibitions return to the uncanny remains of crime scenes, and asked her to bring Sophie to life. Orford says today Sophie, stalked and hunted by Smith, is now stalking them.

Water Music takes place in New York where the British-born, Namibian-raised and South African-educated Orford lived with her family for years. She sends a South African girl on a scholarship there and when she goes missing her parents ask Hart to fly to New York and find her.

Orford found the city fascinating. “It’s the same age as Cape Town. Maybe I could live there now that they’re just like us with Nobel Prize-winning politicians.”

Maybe one day Orford will be too famous to live here. But SA is spoilt for richness, with an over-abundance of homegrown crime.