Messy human dramas
I’ve read three domestic noirs that also happen to be crime novels. Genre boundaries are increasingly blurring—noirs contain crime, and crime novels contain messy human drama. What keeps me reading are characters and the relationships between them.
Esther Is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney
This novel about a stalker makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Esther is Irish but lives in London with her husband, Johnny. He’s a wonderful guy, the kind of man most women would be happy with—he adores her, works hard, drinks little, and would make an excellent father. But then she loses their baby at four months and her whole life implodes. Only later does the reader discover the full implications and details of what happened. The tragedy drives them apart.
Esther hates her job as a data capturer. She spends all day typing incomprehensible codes into a computer, unsure what they’re for or what they mean. Suddenly everything feels meaningless, including her marriage. She fixates on Ted Levy, a Canadian film star she happens to spot in a London park—their eyes meet for a moment.
Now she becomes a superfan, stalking him online day and night. She uses money inherited from an uncle to fly to Canada, without informing her husband. She has already begun chatting online with his half-sister, Naomi, a therapist who lost a husband and two children in an accident. They bond over grief. Of course, Esther does everything she can to engineer a meeting with Ted—Naomi has no idea she’s being used.
Esther does come face to face with the man of her daydreams, but everything gradually unravels. She has long since lost her friends and her husband, as well as her pride. Naomi keeps hinting that she should find somewhere else to stay, but she clings like a limpet. She meets Ted’s supermodel girlfriend, yet still believes they are destined to be together.
It’s like a nightmare you can’t wake up from. You feel sorry for Esther, who lives with so much unprocessed grief and whose mind unravels so badly. Eventually you feel embarrassed and ashamed on her behalf. She has no brakes. It makes you reflect on the dangers of social media and the price of fame.
Esther Is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney is published by Transworld Publishers and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.
Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden
Freida is a machine when it comes to turning out domestic noirs—several a year. She’s a master storyteller. Dear Debbie is certainly no longer her newest. There may be a certain formulaic quality creeping in, but I still devour every McFadden.
Debbie is an agony aunt for a newspaper. Her advice is direct, aimed squarely at women, and sometimes controversial, spiced with humor. The reader gets to know Debbie through her advice and her behaviour toward her family. She is hyper-intelligent, distractible, and intense. She’s a fixer who stops at nothing. Her garden is full of colourful and deadly flowers, including a kind of opium poppy she calls windflowers.
Then she is fired over advice she gave a woman—to simply get rid of her husband. Now she’s bored and money is getting tight. She has developed a cellphone app to track her husband’s and daughters’ movements.
Her daughters are teenagers, and the relationships are problematic. The eldest has a worthless boyfriend who threatens to share nude photos of her. The youngest has a problematic sex pest of a soccer coach. Debbie deals decisively with both of them—and also with her husband’s difficult boss, who refuses to make him a partner even though he is the backbone of the company.
After that, she can carry on with her life quite cheerfully. It’s a delightful vigilante fantasy with a satisfyingly uncompromising narrator.
Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden is published by Sourcebooks and costs R225 at Graffiti.
The Barbecue at No. 9 by Jennie Godfrey
This is one of those noirs set in a close —a gated complex with identical houses. The reader gets to know a whole array of characters, the residents of the homes arranged in a horseshoe. In the front of the book is a table with a diagram of the houses saying who lives in which number; at first you have to consult it constantly.
Most of the focus is on the family in No. 9, as the title suggests: the Gordons. The parents argue constantly, traumatizing their two children—a teenage daughter, Hanna, and her sensitive younger brother, David. The reader learns long before her parents and neighbours that Hanna is pregnant. She hides it. As you get to know the residents, you suspect several of them in turn of being the father.
The Gordons host a barbecue—what they call a braai is really just charred patties and sausages. It’s 1985, the day of the historic Live Aid concert. The whole complex is invited. The book essentially unfolds over a single day, the day of the big barbecue, though there are flashbacks to the complicated lives of the residents.
As the performers appear on TV, everything comes to a head, and it becomes clear that the truth is going to come out.
At times it felt a bit claustrophobic to me—a whole novel set in one housing complex in the course of one day. But the ending was quite unpredictable, and the dynamics between the characters keep you reading.
The Barbecue at No. 9 by Jennie Godfrey is published by Cornerstone and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.
