Caitlin Martin: "Crime – Taking Place in Sue Rabie’s Blood at Bay"

Crime fiction is a genre that critics argue has the distinctive potential to engage with contemporary society.  South Africa’s unique environment that is a result of both apartheid history and developing democracy means that an awareness of setting is vital to contribute to the understanding of the novel without which Hausladen (1995) argues “the plot is needlessly enigmatic” (1995: 63).  As such, this genre is one which depends firmly on setting.  The treatment of place, then, and of character in place, is one of the challenges facing the writer of popular crime fiction.  How to depict a regional setting, with a definitive local ‘flavour’, while not lapsing into stereotype? How to do justice to an action-oriented plot that is “not meant to be slice-of-real-life” (Von Klemperer 2011) even as distinctive, identifiable settings with rich, contested histories are used to anchor the story?

 I will address such concerns about crime and place using Blood at Bay (2010) a Durban-based novel by Sue Rabie which, while it was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (African Region), has also been criticized for not having enough ‘meat’ and for being somewhat shallow.  Blood at Bay is located in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. “Part of the novel is set among the ocean-going yachts in Durban, and part at a sugar mill in the Dalton area” (Von Klemperer 2010). Sugar (growing, refining, shipping…) and the harbour are regionally significant, even iconic signifiers tied to the identity of Durban as place and cultural landscape in a wider South African imagination.

Caitlin Martin completed a Bachelor of Social Science at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) in 2007 majoring in English and Psychology.  In 2008, she did her Bachelor of Arts Honours in English at UKZN.  In 2009, and 2010 Caitlin went to South Korea and taught English to Elementary and Middle School children. She returned to South Africa and in 2011 she began her Masters in English. She was awarded the Encyclopaedia of South African Arts Culture and Heritage (ESAACH) fellowship which led to her involvement in the KwaZulu Natal Literary Tourism project creating author profiles and working on the website. Caitlin is also lecturing the Literary Tourism course that is offered to second year students at UKZN. Currently, she is writing her master thesis on South African crime fiction, the title of which is ‘Profiling the Female Crime Writer: Margie Orford’s Clare Hart Series, and Questions of (Gendered) Genre’.