Kevin Ritchie talks to Mike Nicol about his latest book, ‘Falls the Shadow’

Falls the Shadow

Mike Nicol, Pan Macmillan

It’s been five years in the making, but Mike Nicol is back with a bang with Falls the Shadow.

It’s his 14th novel, but most importantly, it’s a brand-new crime thriller set in Cape Town, the first of a new series that builds on the Mace Bishop trilogy and the five-part Fish and Vicki series.

For fans of his work, there are plenty of links with the last series, which ended with the death of private investigator Fish Pescado, especially the delightful Janet, the bergie who Nicol could simply not let go.

As with all his books, Falls the Shadow is as alive today as a newspaper headline, something you’d expect from someone who started his writing career as a journalist.

The story centres on police corruption and gun running, and the hero is the delightful tough-as-nails Captain Zara Dewane.

Dewane, who made a brief cameo in Hammerman: A Walking Shadow, his previous book, is set for at least another two books of her own, one of which (Firing Line) is already with the publishers and the other in manuscript form.

Nicol has been writing about Cape Town and crime for almost 20 years. His heroes have been based in Muizenberg, in the City Bowl and now Woodstock and near the V&A Waterfront, while the action has spread across the peninsula and into the hinterland. This time it goes up the West Coast to Saldanha.

He uses different tools to achieve this, whether it’s having his characters drink bespoke wine in wine bars, artisanal coffees on the Atlantic seaboard or craft beers in False Bay. They also listen to different music.

“It’s me having fun, but it’s also very intentional,” he says. “I need the music to get into the character’s emotional makeup. The artist Jo Ratcliffe gave me a lot of the music for Killer Country, and that’s when I realised how music plays a role in getting the characters onto the page.”

With Zara Dewane, it was 4 Non Blondes — a San Francisco rock band.

“I didn’t listen to them back in their heyday, but I found them and this amazing voice and thought, ‘That’s it, that’s the person I want for Zara.’” For Dewane’s next adventure, Nicol has segued to Linda Perry, the lead singer of 4 Non Blondes, who went off on her own.

Irrespective of whose story it is, Cape Town is always the backdrop; it’s almost a character in itself.

“It’s the quintessential crime city; it just has everything,” he says. “It’s got this mountain in the middle and the sea all around. It’s got great suburbs and great townships and then the winelands,” which brings in the next unique element, transport, or in this case, idiosyncratic vehicles.

“How do you get the character through all those wonderful locations? You can’t just locate the character in Cape Town city and not have the rest of the city, because that’s not the city, which is this great sprawling mass.”

Nicol not only does his own writing, but he teaches it too, with a masterclass programme now in its 15^th year, but there’s no danger of it influencing the stories he tells.

“My main thing with teaching is really to encourage because I think that’s the most important thing that a teacher can do,” he says.

In this regard, ideas are the greatest currency of any writer.

“Many people say, ‘I don’t know if things are going to work out,’ but that’s the thing with ideas; you can’t tell me on page 2 that the book’s not going to work, because you just don’t know. You carry on writing until it stops altogether or dies of its own accord or you get to the end. There’s no giving up just because you’ve got a bad idea.”

Nicol’s move into crime writing in 1998 was inspired by his partner. An award-winning poet and a literary novelist, Nicol had returned to South Africa from Germany, where he had been on a writing residency.

“I had tried to write a novel where the character was not unlike Zara Dewane. I continued with the book for another two or three years, but it hadn’t worked. I put it in a drawer and one day my partner said, ‘why don’t you look at crime?’”

Until then Nicol had always derided crime writing, but he decided to eat humble pie.

“I thought it (crime writing) was the most wonderful thing I’d ever read. You can have so much fun with it as a writer; it’s fantastic. There’s a structure to it, there’s dialogue, it’s got settings, and it’s got characters.”

But it was a struggle at first. “It did not come easy, even though I was convinced it was something I had to do.” Once again, the inspiration lay deep in the recesses of his memory.

“My partner and I had our beginnings on a Greek island, and we used to wander in and out of these marvellous churches in about 1983, and there would always be this mace on the altar at the end of the church, and I always thought that Mace Bishop would be a great name for a character.”

And so it was. “He’d sat in my mind for about 25 years; it’s weird the stuff that accumulates and then emerges.”