Gillian Slovo

• Born: March 15, 1952
• Birthplace: Johannesburg, South Africa

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator; courtroom drama

Principal Series: Kate Baeier, 1984-

Contribution

In the 1980’s, Gillian Slovo became one of a growing number of female mystery novelists writing about young female detectives. However, her detective, Kate Baeier, is rare among these characters because she is not only a feminist but also a socialist. The result is a detective series in which, at least initially, politics comes to the fore and the characters earnestly discuss such things as the relation between the personal and the political. As the series progresses, the politics tend to fade away and even to be renounced at times, creating a somewhat disorienting effect, but what remains constant is the portrayal of Kate as a loner in a hostile universe.

Slovo’s most successful crime novel, Red Dust (2000), goes beyond the Kate Baeier series by successfully merging political and personal themes. In it Slovo moves away from hard-edged politics to explore the subtleties of South African society. Red Dust retains the crime novel form and carries readers along through the deft plotting Slovo learned while producing the Kate Baeier novels, but it aims at deeper things than plot and is more successful than the series novels in attaining them.

Biography

Gillian Slovo was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on March 15, 1952, to two leading members of the antiapartheid movement: Joe Slovo, leader of the banned South African Communist Party and chief of the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and Ruth First, a radical journalist and university lecturer. The family went into exile in London in 1964, and Slovo attended the University of Manchester, graduating in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in the history and philosophy of science. She later worked as a journalist and television producer in England.

In 1982 Slovo’s mother, then working in Mozambique, was murdered by agents of the South African government. Slovo later wrote that her novel Ties of Blood (1989), her first work set in South Africa, was inspired by thoughts she had while standing at her mother’s graveside. Nevertheless, Slovo’s first three novels, all in the Kate Baeier series, are set in London, though the initial entry, Morbid Symptoms (1984), does focus on characters involved in South African politics. Slovo’s attention began to shift more toward Africa in the 1990’s. She published The Betrayal, a thriller about an ANC member, in 1991, and in 1993 she wrote Façade, a novel about a London woman trying to discover the truth about her mother’s death, which also mentions Africa. Of the two Kate Baeier series novels published in the 1990’s, Close Call (1995) contains references to Africa.

In 1997, Slovo published Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, her best-selling memoir about her parents, their involvement in the antiapartheid movement, and her relationship with them, including the difficulty of having parents whose devotion to a cause reduced the amount of time they could spend with their children. In 2000, Slovo returned to fiction, producing Red Dust, a highly acclaimed courtroom drama set in postapartheid South Africa. It won the Radio France International Prize for Literature in 2001 and was made into a film starring Hilary Swank in 2004.

Saying that she might have written her last book about South Africa, Slovo in 2004 published a highly regarded historical epic, Ice Road, set in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Ice Road was short-listed for England’s prestigious Orange Prize in 2004. Also in 2005 Slovo collaborated with Victoria Brittain on Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, a play documenting human rights abuses at the American detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.

Analysis

The very title of Gillian Slovo’s first novel, Morbid Symptoms, indicates the special nature of her Kate Baeier detective series. As Kate explains, the phrase is a quotation from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, and refers to the minor problems at the end of an era, in this case the capitalist era. Kate is a socialist detective, opposed to capitalism, the rich, the police, and the apartheid leaders of South Africa. She is also a feminist and thus at odds with most of the men she encounters, especially white men and police officers. Kate’s feminism is shared by female detectives in other series of the 1980’s, notably those by Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, but her radical socialism sets her apart.

In the first four books of the series Kate encounters agents of the apartheid South African government; a landlord who violates the fire codes, causing death and injury; oppressed black Londoners who start to organize to overcome their oppression; victims of a fraudulent pension scheme benefiting businessmen and investors; and a host of brutal police officers. On the surface Kate and her author seem left wing and liberated, clearly on the side of the oppressed and against the forces of capitalism. However, as Sally Munt notes in her study of feminism and the crime novel, the Kate Baeier novels pull in conflicting directions and may not be as liberated as they seem. Munt points especially to the position of Kate’s black assistant, Carmen, who is very competent and industrious and is portrayed in a positive light but remains, by her own choice, in a subordinate position.

In addition, some of the left-wing politics seems merely tacked on, as when in Death by Analysis (1986) Kate approvingly takes note of Irish hunger strikers who have no real role in the plot. Indeed, many of the plots focus on personal rather than political issues, and in Death by Analysis the whole issue of the relationship between the personal and the political is uneasily discussed by various characters and is exemplified by the fact that Kate has been in therapy and is not entirely happy that the result of the therapy was to turn her away from changing the world in order to focus on her psyche. A major theme of this novel is the passing of the revolutionary moment. Characters talk nostalgically of the radical 1960’s but keep reminding themselves that it is now the 1980’s and revolution is out of style. In Morbid Symptoms, those who have remained on the radical left are portrayed for the most part as preoccupied with petty infighting among themselves, and in the end the true villain turns out to be not the so-called real enemy, the South African security forces, but a member of one of the left-wing groups.

Although the overt thrust of the novels is to attack authority and privilege and to side with the oppressed and with radical political groups, there is an undercurrent flowing in the opposite direction, so much so that in Catnap (1994), Carmen accuses Kate of having switched sides. Even as early as in Death by Analysis, Kate feels she is stuck on the black-white divide, not truly able to side with the black victims with whom she sympathizes. She also begins to develop self-doubts. In Death Comes Staccato (1987), she twice calls herself a failure as an investigator, and at the end she fingers the wrong suspect for the crime. In Catnap she feels incompetent, blames herself for a break-in, and even gets lost in a library.

Kate has lost her boyfriend, Sam, in Catnap. Sam was one of the few good men in the novels, gentle and supportive, just the sort of man a feminist might love, but as early as the opening pages of Morbid Symptoms Kate seems vaguely dissatisfied with him. In Death by Analysis she is leaping out of his arms, and in Death Comes Staccato she flirts with someone else and almost lets herself be seduced. Morag Shiach, in her article on female detectives, notes that they often have boyfriends who turn out to be too safe and weak, and she singles out Sam as an example of one who in the end provokes such dissatisfaction that he has to go.

Throughout the Kate Baeier series, Slovo seems to be struggling with the relationship between the personal and the political, and trying to get away from a fairly extreme political viewpoint. In the first three books she seems on one level strongly attached to that viewpoint, but conflicting views somehow emerge as well. In the fourth and fifth books, Catnap and Close Call, she seems at times to be renouncing her old views, but at other times reasserts them, shuttling back and forth in a confused way. When Slovo leaves Kate Baeier behind and focuses on the politics of South Africa in Red Dust, she achieves her greatest success, combining personal and political into one organic whole based on a much more subtle understanding of both politics and human nature.

Catnap

Catnap, which appeared after a seven-year hiatus in the Kate Baeier series, marks a shift in form. After three whodunits in which Kate is hired to solve murders, this time Kate herself is endangered in a Dick Francis-style thriller. Returning to London after five years away as a war correspondent, Kate finds herself almost constantly under attack, first by muggers, then by someone who breaks into her house and seems to be stalking her, and later by several other characters in the book. Much of the politics of the earlier Kate Baeier books disappears in Catnap, and surprisingly some of the villains (the muggers) turn out to be black. However, this book resembles the earlier ones in that it depicts Kate as living in a bleak and hostile universe full of angry, violent men.

Close Call

Close Call begins in an unprecedented way for Kate. She is back in journalism interviewing a police officer and discovers that he is sensitive, heroic, and compassionate. She keeps expecting some hidden rage to erupt out of him, which would be typical of the police in the earlier Kate Baeier books, but it never does. The result is that she begins to feel that she is wrong about everything. When she visits this officer’s wife, she expects to find a submissive woman oppressed by her husband, but that turns out not to be true either.

In this book Slovo introduces Kate’s father, a Portuguese general who, like Slovo’s own father at the time, is dying. Kate is estranged from her father, but he keeps on reaching out to her in the friendliest way, and she eventually begins to think she has been wrong about him or that he has changed from the unscrupulous manipulator he used to be.

Kate starts dating a police officer and encounters other apparently friendly police officers. In the first part of the book, the only villains seem to be women. A nasty female police officer threatens her, and an annoying and foolish activist from a rape center pesters her. Kate feels like killing this activist and does smash a vase of hers. Later Kate becomes physically violent with a female police officer. This violence on Kate’s part is quite unusual. In the earlier books, Kate does nothing violent; it is the men she encounters who are violent. In this book, however, everything seems turned around. The men are nice, the women are violent, and the message seems to be to reject the viewpoint of the earlier novels.

Everything reverts to normal at the end, however. Some of the nice police officers turn out to be corrupt, Kate’s father turns out to be his old manipulative self, and Kate ends up distrusting her police officer boyfriend. The novel’s message is therefore ambiguous.

Red Dust

Red Dust is a more complex novel. Instead of being caught in the middle of contradictory feelings, in this novel Slovo seems to be the master of them. She sensitively portrays the attitudes of several of her characters, abandoning the first-person point of view she used throughout the Kate Baeier series to enter the minds of several different characters, including two white South African police officers.

Instead of portraying the police as mindless brutes, Slovo depicts them as complex human beings. She also explores the internal contradictions of two black African characters who in earlier books she might simply have portrayed as heroes. There is also a subtle depiction of the complicated relationship between a young prosecutor and her aging mentor and between the mentor and his wife.

The story focuses on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in postapartheid South Africa. Black Africans are in control and whites are being held to account for the crimes of apartheid. The Africans are holding a series of amnesty hearings at which whites can be pardoned in return for full confessions.

The heroine of the novel is Sarah Barcant, a white South African who has emigrated to the United States, where she has become a successful and powerful prosecuting attorney in New York. She is summoned back to her hometown in South Africa to help with one of the amnesty hearings, in the course of which she helps solve the mystery of the disappearance of one black activist. The main focus of the hearing, however, is on the torture of another black activist, who is present to confront his old torturer. The novel skillfully presents the intimate relationship between the torturer and his victim, entering the minds of both to depict the psychology of torture.

At the end of the novel some of the old Slovo emerges, with the torturer suddenly denounced as a monster and Sarah making a brief rant against men. For the most part, however, this novel works as both a courtroom drama with a mystery to be solved and the psychology of a crime to be laid bare and as a subtle presentation of the complexities of postapartheid politics and the difficulties inherent in pursuing truth, justice, and reconciliation.

Principal Series Character:

• Kate Baeier , a Lithuanian Jew from Portugal, where her father is a leading general, left that country when she was eighteen and moved to London, where she seems perfectly at home. Little is made of her foreign background, except that people have difficulty with her name. She begins the series as a freelance journalist, solving crimes on the side, but she eventually sets up a detective agency, only to return to journalism. Initially, she is seriously involved with a single father, but he dies.

Bibliography

Eprile, Tony. “Settling Scores.” Review of Red Dust, by Gillian Slovo. The New York Times, April 28, 2002. Finds the novel gripping though at times one-dimensional.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on the life and works of Slovo.

Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge, 1994. Discusses feminism and socialism in various female crime writers, including Slovo. Focuses on racial issues, including the role of Carmen in the early books in the Kate Baeier series. Indexed.

Shiach, Morag. “Domesticating the Detective.” In Women Voice Men: Gender in European Culture, edited by Maya Slater. Exeter, England: Intellect, 1997. Discusses the home life of female detectives in fiction, including Kate Baeier’s relationship with her boyfriend.

Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. Slovo describes growing up in a family where her parents were committed to a greater cause. Provides clues to the ambivalence present in her mysteries and other writings.

Winston, Robert P. “Gillian Slovo.” In Great Women Mystery Writers, Classic to Contemporary, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Compares Slovo to Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. Discusses the political aspects of her early novels. Provides biographical information.