Margie in conversation with LitNet's Janet van Eeden
Margie, you said in an interview that Daddy’s Girl is a prequel to your two other Dr Clare Hart novels, Like Clockwork and Blood Rose. It is my favourite of all your Clare Hart novels to date. Did you find it difficult to go back in fictional time to write about events preceding the other two novels? Did this happen by accident or did you plan to write the prequel even before you wrote the other two? Is it difficult to write in reverse, as it were?
Daddy’s Girl is the prequel – but I had not planned it that way. With Like Clockwork I just held my breath and jumped into the deep end of the crime fiction pool. I had not realised, though, how central the relationship between Clare Hart and Captain Riedwaan Faizal was going to be to all the novels. Milan Kundera wrote that the rules of a relationship are set within the first 20 minutes of their meeting. I thought I needed to know what happened in those first 20 minutes between Clare and Riedwaan. The kernel of the back-story was there in Like Clockwork. So I went back to it. I loved writing Daddy’s Girl – harrowing as it is – because the time of the novel was so tight – 72 hours. It is hard to predict where a writing path will take one – so writing the prequel was just part of the path that I have set myself on. One always writes without a map, so Daddy’s Girl was a way of discovering the topography of my characters’ world.
Click here to read the full interview.
Great coverage for Gallows Hill
Gallows Hill has had some excellent coverage and reviews since its release:
'It's got the snappy dialogue and the meticulous forensic detail you've come to expect from a Clare Hart thriller. But it's also got something different.' Jacqui L'Ange, The Times. Read more.
'Margie Orford, South Africa’s queen of crime writing, is almost anthropological in her study of how humans live and die.' Karabo Kgoleng, City Press. Read more.
Also, click here for links to an interview in The Citizen and a podcast interview with Jenny Crwys-Williams.
Jonathan Ball promotes Margie as The Queen of Crime
Margie's South African publishers, Jonathan Ball, are promoting Margie as the Queen of South African Crime Fiction this holiday season with this fabulous poster series which will promote her books in CNA stores.
Margie interviewed on Australia's Channel 10
On her visit to Melbourne for the She Kilda Festival, Margie was interviewed on The Circle on Channel 10 on 6 October 2011. Click here to view a video of the interview.
Gallows Hill
GALLOWS HILL, the new Clare Hart thriller, is released in South Africa in October 2011. Margie has a full tour of events and engagements planned.
‘Margie Orford is the queen of South African crime thriller writers…’ Sue Grant-Marshall, The Weekender
The woman lay curled up inside the small box. She had been jammed into it. Her head must have pressed up against the top, her feet against the bottom. Her belly would have pressed painfully against her lungs, her thighs. If she had been alive to feel it.
A dog scavenging in an illegal building site digs up a bone. A human bone. She drags it back to where her mistress lies dead in an abandoned shed, but there are hundreds more … Skeletons which have lain undisturbed for centuries beneath Gallows Hill, where Cape Town’s notorious gibbets once stood.
Investigative profiler Dr Clare Hart is called in by Captain Riedwaan Faizal of the SAPS Gang Unit and soon discovers that a deadly, more recent secret lies hidden among these long-buried bones. Who was the woman in the green silk dress? Who wanted her dead? Who buried her body among these ancient graves?
As Clare Hart gets closer to revealing the truth about Gallows Hill, she becomes entangled with a fascinating but vulnerable young woman, and is drawn into a world of art, desire and destructive jealousy. Against the backdrop of corporate corruption and seething political tensions, Clare and Riedwaan’s complex relationship remains as explosive as ever – and their very lives are at risk: the keepers of the secret of the woman in the silk dress will stop at nothing to keep the truth buried.
Gallows Hill is the fourth in Margie Orford’s Clare Hart series, published to acclaim around the world. Be warned – read one Clare Hart novel and you’re hooked!
Daddy's Girl UK edition
The UK edition of DADDY'S GIRL, published by Corvus, is now out. Buy it at Amazon.co.uk.
'Orford plots so brilliantly that to stop reading is as harrowing as to carry on.' – Jake Kerridge, Telegraph. Read the whole review here.
Captain Riedwaan Faizal is a member of Cape Town’s elite Gang Unit. Tough and streetwise, he is used to being a target. But when the danger of his anti-gang war envelops his only daughter and he becomes the prime suspect in her abduction, there is little he can do.
He turns to Dr Clare Hart, investigative journalist turned profiler. She is sceptical of Riedwaan Faizal, but she knows only too well what happens when little girls are abducted. Against her better judgement, she agrees to help look for Yasmin.
Their desperate search for the missing child, whose chances of survival diminish with each hour, unravels a web of deception and danger that puts all their lives at terrible risk.
Wordsetc #7
The seventh edition of Wordsetc, South Africa’s foremost literary journal, hit the shelves in March 2010. The publication continues to showcase the best of South African literature. This time around it focuses on crime fiction as a theme. Guest edited by author and editor Joanne Hichens the edition explores the ins and out of the genre, the motivation of crime writers to write crime fiction, and takes a look too at real-life crime in our society.
Read all about Margie Orford’s success – how she makes crime pay – with her Clare Hart series, in the main profile by Sam Beckbessinger.
There are also illuminating essays by writers such as Hichens, Jassy Mackenzie, Sarah Lotz, Richard Kunzmann, Roger Smith, Helen Moffett, Andrew Brown, Justice Malala, Emma Chen, Thembelani Ngenelwa and Megan Voysey-Braig. It’s a feast of reading for the literati or those who simply can’t get enough of South African literature.
Rave reviews for Daddy's Girl
'Orford plots so brilliantly that to stop reading is as harrowing as to carry on.' – Jake Kerridge, Telegraph. Read the whole review here.
‘Orford is on top form. Her sense of place - the sandy drear of the Cape Flats, the mank of strip clubs in the daylight hours - is immaculate. Her writing is more assured, pithier, with snub-nosed dialogue and a sprinting pace.’ – Michele Magwood, Sunday Times. Read the whole review here.
‘Orford writes of these things skillfully, economically, lovingly. Her ear for natural dialogue is assured, and she weaves Afrikaans and local argot in seamlessly, without either condescending to the South African reader or pandering to readers elsewhere.’ – Stephanie Alexander, The Witness
‘Margie Orford queen of South African thrillers, has cracked it. Her third book in the Clare hart series, Daddy’s Girl, has delivered the “ball-crushing fear” she aims for.’ – The Weekender
‘To her credit, Orford’s books often have the knack of being impossible to let go of. Her characters feel very true to life, and because she puts a lot of effort into capturing minute details so that her settings acquire depth and become real in reader’s minds.’ – Natalie Bosman, The Citizen
'Orford is one of a select club of South African crime writers who have built an international reading audience. One can see why: she delights in perfectly rendered local colour and lingo, her characters are convincing, the setting – a police force in messy and sometimes dysfunctional transformation – is conveyed with unflinching honesty, and she writes with verve and a crackling energy.' – William Saunderson Meyer, Business Day
‘Margie Orford is guilty of writing a very, very good thriller. Sophisticated plotting, great characters, raw emotions, a satisfying resolution, respectful of, but not slavish to, the genre.’ – John Maytham, (Cape Talk radio host and critic)
‘Margie Orford is to Cape Town what Val McDermid is to the north of England, capturing the seamier side of the Mother City: drugs, prostitution, gangs, police corruption and the clash between policing and political correctness. … Thriller fans will be delighted by this, the latest Clare Hart novel. But, as I said before, the Cape tourist industry, and sections of the South African police, I suspect, will not.’ – Anthony Egan, Mail and Guardian
Meet Sophie Brown
THE QUARRY is a unique collaboration between Margie Orford and artist Kathryn Smith.
Read more about this extraordinary project.
Support Rape Crisis Cape Town
1,000 Hearts: Buy a heart and support Rape Crisis Cape Town.