Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Present Darkness by Malla Nunn

 

Malla Nunn is an Australian film maker and author of young adult books and adult crime fiction. She was born in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini. Her family emigrated to Australia to escape apartheid. Her four mysteries about Detective Sergeant Emanuel Cooper are set in the 1950s in South Africa, amid the cruelty and abuse of the race-based apartheid laws, which existed from 1948 into the 1990s. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, the Barry, the Macavity, the Anthony, and the Ned Kelly awards.

The most recent one Present Darkness (Emily Bestler Books, 2014) finds Cooper in Johannestown a few days before Christmas. Everyone is wrapping up their assignments in anticipation of a long break. Instead all vacations are cancelled when a white schoolteacher and his wife are found murdered in their home and their traumatized daughter names two black students as the culprits. One of them is the son of Zulu Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala, Cooper’s closest friend and to whom Cooper is indebted for an earlier rescue. Once Shabalala’s son is under arrest, Lieutenant Walter Mason insists on closing the case with no real investigation. Cooper and Shabalala and Cooper’s friend Dr. Daniel Zweigman work around Mason and his corrupt cronies at significant danger to themselves to get to the truth of the killings.

A carefully considered and plotted police procedural. What elevates it from good to outstanding is the reconstruction of apartheid, an inhuman system of segregation in all areas of life based on skin color and race. The degree to which the state could legally and did interfere with the freedom of South African citizens is unimaginable. Readers from the United States will automatically compare apartheid to the laws of the Jim Crow South with good reason. The two were miserably similar, although I do not know of an instance in which the police in the U.S. South were authorized to enter homes at night to check on sleeping arrangements.

A very fine if depressing piece of historical crime fiction. This book leaves a few threads in Cooper’s life loose; hopefully another story is in development.

Starred review from Publishers Weekly.

 

·         Publisher: ‎ Emily Bestler Books; Original edition (June 3, 2014)

·         Language: ‎ English

·         Paperback: ‎ 352 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎ 1451616961

·         ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1451616965 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2022

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.