'Explore the realities of life in Zimbabwe': Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? reviewed in buzz magazine.

(https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/whatever-happened-to-rick-astley-zimbabwean-stories-review/)

An intriguing title that matches the short stories that follow, Bryony Rheam’s Whatever Happened To Rick Astley? opens a window to allow readers a glimpse of life, in all its forms, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The collection opens strong with the story of a young man, a modern Sisyphus in some ways, who has the self-appointed task of filling the potholes on a road every day, despite how they return… until a high profile politician is due to move nearby. Then, of course, the road is fixed professionally. Luckily – or probably unluckily – there is always a potholed road in Bulawayo.

The stories that follow take us from the dusty streetside to lush gardens, filled with characters facing different but constant challenges and experiences. Each story forms a piece of a larger, mismatched-but-realistic puzzle of the fluctuations of life in a country that mirrors these ups and downs in different ways. 

As a well-rounded and gratifying short story collection should, Whatever Happened To Rick Astley? is both an anthology of tiny worlds, each compact and consumable on their own, but they also form part of a bigger collection of work which, on finishing, feel inseparable from one another.

Megan Thomas

“A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer”: A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu in World Literature Today

 from www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2023/march/great-time-be-zimbabwean-writer-conversation-siphiwe-ndlovu-anderson-tepper

Siphiwe Ndlovu is interviewed by Anderson Tepper:

If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelist Siphiwe Ndlovu, author of The History of Man, about her work, her contemporaries, and Zimbabwe’s impressive and deep-rooted literary tradition.

Anderson Tepper: This year both you and Tsitsi Dangarembga were awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for fiction, and NoViolet Bulawayo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. What do these honors say about the state of Zimbabwean writing today?

Siphiwe Ndlovu: I have said it before and I will say it again: this is definitely a great time to be a Zimbabwean writer. There are just so many writers out there telling the story of a country that is often maligned or, worse still, written off as a “failed state.” These writers often help us think critically about the overly simplified way that the media tends to write about Zimbabwe.

Those of us who come from Zimbabwe understand the complexity, knottiness, and messiness that the many forms of violence and injustice—the product of exploitative and extractive settler colonialism and rampant postcolonial corruption and greed—create. The media narratives and portrayals of Zimbabwe both within the country and internationally tend to be limited and limiting and create the need for alternative narratives—and this is where storytelling comes in.

In Zimbabwe’s fiction, there is anger, outrage, disappointment, disillusionment, hope (and the loss of it), but most importantly, there is a call for reckoning and change that the politics of the country have failed to successfully address. All this makes for a literature that is concerned with many of the issues that globally plague our twenty-first century: the erosion of civil rights; the rise of a dangerous, exclusionary, and myopically inward-looking populism; and the persistence of racism and other forms of hate. The international recognition of Zimbabwean writers, via such awards as the Windham Campbell Prize and the Booker Prize, shows that we are not simply telling stories about a pariah state but about a world living and fighting its way through various crises and inheritances from the past—stories that, although they are about a country, are really of the world.

Tepper: Who were some of the authors who played a role in inspiring you to first write about your country and its history?

Ndlovu: Even though I grew up in Zimbabwe and spent all my years of primary and secondary education there, I didn’t really encounter Zimbabwean fiction until I was a college student in the US. I remember reading Charles Mungoshi’s wonderful collection of short stories, Coming of the Dry Season, in high school for one of the national exams. But I believe that was the sum total of my engagement with local fiction.

In college, when I told one of my professors that I had never read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, she was rightly appalled and aghast that I, a Zimbabwean creative writing student, had never read the book. She immediately gave me her own copy of the novel to read . . . and everything changed. I could relate to the experiences of all the characters in that novel—Tambudzai, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, Takesure. I knew and was related to people just like them. All of a sudden literature became not just something I loved but something that was familiar. That experience led to a journey of discovery that brought me into contact with such brilliant works as Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns, Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa, Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing—these works helped me understand my country and its history.

However, it was not until I devoured Yvonne Vera’s entire oeuvre, especially Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, that I realized that one could write about my city, Bulawayo, a city that I love very much, and make it come alive—make its absolute richness known to the world (see WLT, Sept. 2005, 64). I wrote my PhD dissertation on Rhodesian and Zimbabwean fiction, and thinking critically about the many issues raised within the country’s literature encouraged me to also write creatively about my country and its history.

Tepper: Tell me about the ground you set out to cover in your two novels, The Theory of Flight and The History of Man. How will the final book in the trilogy, The Quality of Mercy, complete the picture?

Ndlovu: The Quality of Mercy was published by Penguin Random House South Africa in September 2022 and is due to be published by Catalyst Press in the US in the latter half of 2023. Together these three novels—The Theory of Flight, The History of Man, and The Quality of Mercy—make up the City of Kings trilogy. The novels all deal with aspects of Africa’s modern history: colonization, decolonization, and postcolonization.

The History of Man deals with the colonial moment and its many (often limiting) narratives. The story of its protagonist, Emil Coetzee, serves as a critique of colonial power and the kind of masculinity it produces.

The Theory of Flight is concerned with the postcolonial moment and its gradual loss of “ease” as it becomes a place of increasing dis-“ease.” The story of its protagonist, Imogen Zula Nyoni, serves as a critique of postcolonial power and calls for a different kind of revolution from the one that led to independence.

The Quality of Mercy actually acts as a bridge between the first two novels and is a story of transition that delineates a country’s journey from being a colonial state to a postcolonial state. The story of its protagonist, Chief Inspector Spokes Moloi, serves as a way to think critically about the institutions, systems and attitudes that a postcolony inherits as it tries to right the many wrongs of the past.

Tepper: Though you’ve studied and lived abroad, you returned to your hometown of Bulawayo in 2018. What have been the challenges and benefits of being based back in Zimbabwe? 

Ndlovu: Bulawayo is a postindustrial city and, like most postindustrial cities all over the world, it is undergoing a crisis of identity brought on by loss of opportunities, devastating levels of unemployment, deterioration of once pride-inducing infrastructure, and the gradual decay of the systems and institutions that once upon a time held it together. These realities create many challenges and difficulties for us, but Zimbabweans are extremely innovative and resilient people who are adaptable, perhaps to a fault.

Even though most factories closed and multinational companies left after the political upheavals, the bad governance and civil unrest of the early 2000s sent the country into a tailspin; paradoxically, the city of Bulawayo continues to grow as more and more people leave the rural areas or other parts of the country and come to settle in the city in search of opportunities. As a result, this is a time of great struggle and change.

Given the state’s control over the narrative of post-2000 Zimbabwe, it is important, as a writer, to live in and witness this period of great change. One of the wonderful benefits of living in Bulawayo at this time is that there are many other writers living in and writing about the city and the country—John Eppel, Bryony Rheam, Violette Kee-Tui, Erica Gwetai, Scottie Elliot, Susan Hubert, Leroy Ndlovu, and Philani Nyoni. This means that the story of what is happening is being captured from many different vantage points and being written in its multifaceted complexity.

As academic Tsitsi Jaji has brilliantly pointed out, Bulawayo’s positionality as the second-largest city, coupled with its rather fraught history with the country’s capital, allows its writers to see and experience the country’s politics differently and, as a result, to write stories that often challenge the dominant narratives. As a writer whose works depict life in Bulawayo, the City of Kings, writing from a position of witness has been very edifying and fulfilling.

Tepper: Has the climate changed for writers and artists since the fall of Robert Mugabe five years ago?

Ndlovu: I think the climate changed for Zimbabwean writers long before the events of 2017. The immediate post-independence years saw a rise in literacy in the country, and it was almost taken for granted that educated Zimbabweans would read—newspapers, magazines, books. Libraries and bookstores thrived, providing readers access to both local and international writing. Mobile libraries traveled to out-of-the-way places—that is how much of a reading culture the country had. But reading is something of a leisurely and privileged pastime, and when people are struggling to make ends meet economically, the time they can devote to reading and consuming other forms of art dwindles. So, post-2000 Zimbabwe has seen a decline in its reading culture and support for its arts in general.

The state, understanding that writers and artists often use their work as critique and counter-narrative, seems to have taken advantage of an already bad situation and dried up or corrupted most means of arts funding. It’s made the taxes on importing books exorbitantly high, which meant that many bookstores had to close; allowed for textbooks to be photocopied, which meant that most publishing houses which relied on textbook publishing in order to publish literature have had to stop publishing local works of fiction, poetry, etc. Whatever gains in its reading culture that Zimbabwe had cultivated in the 1980s and 1990s have greatly diminished.

There is, however, a silver lining to this gray cloud. Post-2000 Zimbabwe has seen the creation of what has come to be known as the Zimbabwean diaspora, as more and more Zimbabweans leave the country and settle in other parts of the world. This diaspora has allowed Zimbabwean writers—NoViolet Bulawayo, Novuyo Tshuma, Sue Nyathi, Petina Gappah, Tendai Huchu, Brian Chikwava, et al.—to seek publication in other countries, which has led to the exponential growth of Zimbabwean literature over the past twenty years. Because of their subject matter, or because of the race or ethnicity or sexual orientation of their writers, many of the books that have been published in the diaspora would probably never have been published in Zimbabwe. The diaspora has allowed for twenty-first-century Zimbabwean literature to be truly diverse. My next series of interconnected novels will actually look at the experience of those living in Zimbabwe’s diaspora.

Anderson Tepper is co-chair of the International Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival and curator of international literature at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Words Without Borders, among other places.

How do authors create their characters - with John Eppel, Violette Kee-Tui, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and Bryony Rheam

 Four Bulawayo novelists John Eppel, Violette Kee-Tui, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and Bryony Rheam in discussion about how they create characters in their novels with Dr Drew Shaw. 

Recorded at The Orange Elephant in Bulawayo, with the support of The Centre for English Excellence and The Orange Elephant.

The links to the three sections of the discussion are below:

Section One

Section Two

Section Three

Glued to Book reviews Bryony Rheam's All Come to Dust

Reproduced from https://gluedtobook.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/all-come-to-dust-review-329/

 Chief Inspector Edmund Dube is introduced in All Come to Dust as he investigates the stabbing of a rich woman, Marcia Pullman. He is then refused access to the case, and police documents, and is removed from the case after it is determined she died of renal failure. Edmund’s past is revealed in a sequence of flashbacks to 1979 as he continues his investigation. A slow-paced police procedural set in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, with subtle references to race, class, mental health, memory, and colonialism.

All Come to Dust, a mystery by Bryony Rheam, is a classic murder investigation steeped in Zimbabwean culture. Many components of the book can only take place in such settings, and they are necessary for the novel to evolve in the first place. The protagonist is a lone wolf with a complicated personality and backstory who is dedicated to completing his task. The characters are well-developed, albeit slowly, with just enough cliches or stereotypes to lead the reader to believe they already know something. At the same time, the plot is both compelling and tiny or contained. It takes its time unraveling and provides enough red herrings mixed in with its hints along the way to make you want to keep reading and not feel cheated out of a satisfying conclusion. Throughout, it is a portrayal of how class, race, and gender still work in contemporary Zimbabwe, not so much an indictment as a laying bare of how injustice and privilege are still baked into everyday life, and the attempts of diverse individuals to break free.

This is an intriguing and often amusing look at a crime that isn’t a crime, as examined by a man who draws inspiration from books and movies. The reader is given the perspectives of all the suspects, however, it’s difficult to believe any of them. In the end, I enjoyed this story. It grew heavier than I had anticipated and dealt with several difficulties I’m currently working through. If you’re seeking a mystery that also serves as a character study of Zimbabwe, this is the book for you.

Agatha and I

 

Agatha and I, by Bryony Rheam, is reproduced from https://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2022/03/agatha-and-i.html

Bryony Rheam

Bryony Rheam is a Zimbabwean author who lives with her family in Bulawayo. Her debut novel This September Sun won Best First Book award in Zimbabwe and went to #1 on Kindle in the UK. Her new book, All Come to Dust, also an award winner, was chosen as one of ten top African thrillers by Publishers’ Weekly who described it as a “stunning crime debut”. I loved the book, and it was my pick of mysteries set in Africa for 2021. Paula Hawkins (author of The Girl on the Train) clearly felt the same way, describing the protagonist, Chief Inspector Edmund Dube, as “a fictional detective as memorable as Hercule Poirot”.

That would have made Bryony’s day because of her long association with Agatha Christie’s books. Here she tells us about that and how it motivated All Come to Dust.

Welcome Bryony to MurderIsEverywhere. Michael Sears

In preparing what to write for this blog, I looked back on some old blogposts of mine where I discussed the importance of Agatha Christie in my life. One of the lines stands out for me and seems to have taken on a deeper meaning than I meant at the time. I had just finished researching Agatha Christie’s trip to Rhodesia in 1924, a trip that resulted in her writing her third novel, The Man in the Brown Suit, and I had delighted in being able to follow her on part of her journey to Bulawayo and Victoria Falls. I wrote: ‘When I began my research, I thought I was following Agatha Christie on part of her journey, but now I wonder if the journey hasn't become my own.’

My journey with Agatha Christie began many years ago with my maternal grandmother. She was a lovely lady: very clever, well-read and funny. Having left school at the age of fourteen, she was largely self-taught. She loved to read, and she read anything and everything, but, in particular, she loved Agatha Christie. On Friday afternoons, I would take her books to the library for her, and I would exchange one lot of Agatha Christies for another.

She must have read them all; she must have read them two or three times, but it did not bother her. As an adult, and as an ardent fan of Christie’s myself, I now understand part of this desire to read and reread her novels. My grandmother was brokenhearted - she had lost her son in a car accident when he was twenty-one. She struggled, but she could not overcome severe depression and grief. All reading provides an escape, but with Christie it was so much more.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is considered the "Queen of Crime". Although not alone in doing so, she is credited with the development of the crime novel into what we know today and its growth in popularity. She is best known for a "closed murder" story in which the crime can only have been committed by a limited number of people, each with their own particular motive for doing so. Everyone is a suspect and usually it is the least obvious person who "dunnit".

The murders are not gory; there are no detailed descriptions of prolonged deaths, the pain and injuries inflicted or the mutilated body. That is not important. What is, is the method and the motivation. The planning behind the murders is always meticulous: the murderer knows who will be where when, how many minutes he or she has to cross the garden and enter the study window, how important it is that the poison is administered with the bedtime cocoa and not the after-dinner coffee, or how the drinks on the tray must be arranged just so in order that the victim chooses the correct one.

Of course, they make other errors which eventually lead to their downfall. Yet it is this absolute attention to detail that I believe makes Christie novels so intriguing. It’s the puzzle that’s important and puzzles can eventually be solved. All the pieces are there; the reader just has to put them together correctly – which of course we rarely, if ever, do – and that’s exactly where Christie’s genius lies.

Despite her upper-middle class background, Agatha Christie always felt like something of an outsider, which likely accounts for two of her most famous detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, being on the margins of society: Poirot is a foreigner and Marple is elderly. As such, they are able to bring attention to both the idiosyncrasies and the shortcomings of English society.

But there is another way in which Christie undermines the very essence of Englishness, and, in doing so, also undercuts the stereotypes associated with it. Her books capture that beautiful feel of an orderly life: the clock ticking in the drawing room, the letters on the breakfast tray, the train arriving at exactly three minutes past four. Her characters who lead such orderly lives are well-spoken, polite and know which spoon is for the soup and which for the dessert. The undermining of all this is what unsettles us so much. How could the vicar’s wife devise a murder so clever and with such calculation that it takes the powers of a super sleuth to detect the flaws? How could the murderer have written such hateful letters in the beautiful library; how could they have thought of putting poison in the tea served so punctually at four o’clock on the terrace?

It unsettles us. Christie takes us into the dark areas of the places we consider safe. More than that, the very things that add to that lovely slow rhythm of conventionally English life - trains that run on time, tea at four o’clock, an efficient postal system - seem to have been used against us. If these things, these people, these places are unsafe, then where is not? We would feel less vulnerable on the streets of New York or in the ganglands of Glasgow. As readers, we feel we have got into the car of the stranger our parents always warned us about. But they were smiling, they were welcoming, they had double-barrelled surnames we say – and so we seal our doom.

The good thing, of course, is that she rescues us. The detective arrives, the plot is worked out and the murderer is caught. Except perhaps for Murder on the Orient Express, everything is sorted out and any loose ends are firmly tied up. The puzzle is solved and the dark places dissolve. Once again, the calm ticking of the clock is restored. That is what I find so satisfying and that is what appealed so much to my grandmother. She had come to fear life. Her experience told her that anything can be taken from you at any time, even people you love with your entire self. Being a good person, living a good life – what did it mean? It was no guarantee that you wouldn’t be dealt a terrible hand. But if the dark places were not made light in her own life, at least they were in fiction.

Bryony with Matthew Pritchard

In 2014, I was a winner of the Write Your Own Christie competition organised by AgathaChristie.com.  The prize was dinner with Agatha Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, and her publisher at HarperCollins at Greenway, her home in Devon.  It was an emotional moment for me, one that linked the little girl who spent afternoons listening to her grandmother’s stories of life in India and Persia to the adult with a longing to write a crime novel of her own.

Outside Agatha Christie's House in Greenway

Yet it was to be another six years before this became a reality. All Come To Dust was published in Zimbabwe in November 2020, the UK in September 2021, and in the US this month. When I sat down to write it, I wanted to follow the structure of a classic Christie novel. However, there were some very obvious differences that I had to negotiate: present day Bulawayo is very different to the England that Christie wrote of from the 1920s to the 1970s. A closed murder seemed unlikely; in fact, it felt claustrophobic. The more I thought and planned, the more that it became apparent that many of the conventional tropes of the western crime novel would not work.

Zimbabwe’s police force is riddled with corruption.  It is also generally quite inefficient and there would certainly be very little forensic investigation into a death. However, I still decided to use a policeman to investigate the murder. He is also an outsider, a man who wants to do good in a world that seems overwhelmingly corrupt. He spends his time typing up traffic offences, trying to put the world to rights through the meticulous recording of events that will probably be settled by the payment of a bribe to someone on the force.

The lack of forensic investigation was a bonus for me as I, like Agatha Christie, could concentrate on the puzzle and not get weighed down by having to bring in technical detail. Nor did I go into any great description of the murder itself for I do not feel the need to do so. This is probably one of the reasons why reviewers often describe All Come To Dust as ‘an old-fashioned’ murder.

Yet this would suggest a ‘happy ending’ and, while it is true, that the mystery itself is solved, there is also a strong sense that any form of justice in Zimbabwe is not administered in the conventional way.  The sense of restored order evident at the end of an Agatha Christie novel is also not present. The peace is hesitant, wary, aware always that it is under threat.

Modern Day Bulawayo

I might not have set out to undermine the archetypal crime novel, but it became increasingly clear that the structure did not sit well in an African setting. It seemed obvious therefore to try and highlight this disconnect rather than ignore it. In doing so, I was able to explore modern Zimbabwean society through an eclectic range of characters, each bound in some way to the past and fearful of the future.

When I finished writing All Come To Dust, I decided that I would not write another crime novel. I had set myself a challenge and I had completed it. But now I see crime writing offers so many opportunities to explore the inconsistencies evident in Zimbabwean life. And so it is that the quest to follow Agatha Christie’s journey has led me to a journey of my own. I can only be excited of what lies ahead.

Bryony is to participate, with Michael Sears, at this year's International Agatha Christie Festival.

Michael Sears interviews Bryony Rheam about her new murder mystery

From: https: //www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/books/news/2021-12-06-michael-sears-interviews-bryony-rheam-about-her-new-murder-mystery/

Originally from The Big Thrill (1/12/21) Africa Scene: Bryony Rheam

Bryony Rheam is a Zimbabwean who lives in Bulawayo. Her debut novel This September Sun was named Best First Book in the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association Awards and went to number 1 on the UK Kindle chart. She was one of the five Africans chosen for a Morland scholarship in 2018.

Rheam’s new book, All Come to Dust, was chosen as one of 10 top African thrillers in Publishers Weekly, who described it as a “stunning crime debut.” Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, said it was “an intriguing, twisting murder mystery, a witty combination of old-fashioned detective story and keenly-observed portrait of life in suburban Bulawayo,” and chief inspector Edmund Dube was “a fictional detective as memorable as Hercule Poirot”.

In the story, Marcia Pullman is discovered dead in her Bulawayo home with a letter opener sticking out of her chest, but there’s not enough blood and it’s obvious that she was dead before she was stabbed. Edmund goes to the scene, having to wheedle a lift from Craig Martin, who is at the police station arguing a speeding fine. The pathologist, a friend of Marcia’s husband, says she died of natural causes, and the senior officers at the police station seem intent on thwarting Edmund’s efforts to get to the bottom of the case.

Superficially, the book seems to follow the tropes of the detective story genre, but soon we see it’s nothing like that. The rich characterisations and subtle surprises remind one more of PD James than Agatha Christie.

In this interview with The Big Thrill, Rheam shares further insight into her latest release and teases what she is working on next.

Bryony Rheam

Although your first book, This September Sun, also involves a murder, All Come To Dust is more of a murder mystery. Initially, the story seems to follow the framework of a typical detective story — the smart detective who is committed to the solution of the crime against the odds, the cast of suspects, the unreliable witnesses. It even has the final gathering of the suspects where everything is to be revealed. But you turn everything on its head. Was that always your plan, or did the context drive you in that direction?

I am a great Agatha Christie fan and always wanted to write a crime novel. Like Christie, I am not a great fan of a lot of violence; to me, unravelling the mystery is the most important thing. However, the classic Christie-type plot belongs very much to a time and a place, and it was obvious it would not work in Zimbabwe, despite our little English eccentricities that have survived 40 years after independence.

Many of the characters have some link to a type of crime writer: Craig, for example, reads an author called DP Radley (a fictional author) who chases fast cars and is surrounded by beautiful women; Mrs Whitstable reads Inspector Morse; Edmund reads The Saint. Yet none of these detectives seem to fit the location. They all seem to fall short in some way.

I suppose this is a reflection of the fact that I couldn’t use that same model of the detective story in the context of Bulawayo. The police are very unhelpful in Zimbabwe, and there is little in the way of forensic investigation, so I couldn’t rely on bringing in certain information in the same way. As I was writing, I became increasingly aware that the novel was not going to fit a certain model, and so I decided to undermine it instead.

Chief inspector Dube is an intriguing character. He’s smart and committed to solving the crime, but his back story suggests he has many deep issues of his own. We follow his childhood in Rhodesia as the son of a live-in maid whose apparently kindly white employers help him go to a good school and even with his homework every afternoon. How did you conceive him and his role in the novel?

A flame tree-lined street in Zimbabwe

The Zimbabwean police are not well-known for being either efficient or useful. During the Robert Mugabe days, they were synonymous with corruption. I thought there must be someone in the force who wanted to do a good job, someone who signed up with good intentions. That’s where Edmund came in.

The classic detective novel focuses on the crime at hand: who did it and why. There is not much detail about the investigator’s life. More recent crime novelists often present the investigator/police officer as a lonely person, someone who has given their life to solving crimes as an escape from the chaos of a dysfunctional family life, an unhappy marriage, or an inability to connect to others on a social level. In some ways, Edmund falls into this category as his marriage is not a happy one. However, he is also isolated at work, he is not taken seriously and is constantly put down. This forces him to go off on his own and work independently of the police force.

I am always drawn to the idea of an outsider. Edmund has never fitted in. He was one of a small group of black children who were let in to formerly white-only government schools in 1979. This was a very difficult time in the country’s history as it began to transition to majority rule. Edmund’s mother’s employers believe they are doing the right thing for Edmund by sending him there but are unaware of the challenges he faces. Later on in his life, Edmund again feels he does not belong when he joins the police force and is forced to take part in activities he does not agree with.

Edmund is intelligent and sensitive. He wants to do right in a country where everyone is very obviously doing wrong. He craves order and structure, hoping to put the world right by typing traffic offences and making sure forms are completed properly, yet outside is chaos and corruption. There is no room for people like him. It was very important for me to develop his back story and show how he came to be the sort of person he is. I liked the idea that he was solving a crime, and yet was also part of an unsolved mystery.

A house in Zimbabwe where the Pullmans may have lived

Marcia Pullman is the victim, but she and her husband are most unpleasant characters. Marcia dies in the first chapter, yet much of the book is about her and her impact on the people around her. By the end, we feel we know her well. Was it hard to build her character only through the eyes of the people who knew her?

I suppose in some ways I was unfair with Marcia, as, apart from the very beginning of the book, I don’t show her point of view. Everything the reader learns of her is through other people. However, I feel she is more symbolic than anything else. There is a new type of corruption in Zimbabwe which in some ways is quite difficult to explain. For years, people have pointed at the government as the main source of corruption, the implication being anyone else is not corrupt. I feel many white people in particular are like this. People fail to see how they themselves are drawn into the web of corruption. If they do acknowledge it, it is with the sense of “well, everyone else is doing it” or “how else are we supposed to survive?”

Perhaps ironically, there is no racism in this new type of corruption. Nigel Pullman teams up with the police, Marcia buys valuable antiques off old people (who would be mainly white) and gives them nothing for them.

Another view of the house

I based Marcia on someone I met who did this very thing. Back in 2000, when many people were leaving the country due to the farm invasions, she would buy up lots of valuable antiques and ship them to the UK. Many people had beautiful furniture that had been in their families for generations, but they did not really know what they were worth, tending to view them as old rather than antique. The same thing happened with old cars. You used to see lots of Morris Minors around, for example, typically driven by old ladies who had had them for years and years. Then buyers came from places like SA and bought them for a song. It was criminal.

Edmund identifies a cast of suspects: Marcia’s husband; the Pullmans’ maid and gardener; the peculiar neighbour; Janet Peters, who was bullied by her, and Janet’s invalid mother; a mysterious woman interested in her old records; and Craig Martin, who has threatened her. Each seems, in a way, to illustrate a different aspect of modern life in Bulawayo. Was that part of your plan for the novel?

Yes, it was. As well as writing a crime novel, I also wished to explore modern-day Zimbabwean society. We have all become increasingly isolated and lonely. This is due to politics and also the dire economic situation. There are those, like Marcia Pullman, who look after themselves at the expense of others, and there are those, like Dorcas, the maid, and like Janet Peters, who cannot stand up for themselves.

Craig is a handyman with poor business skills and low self-esteem. Edmund dragoons him to help with the investigation—staking out suspects, driving him around. Despite their wide differences, they seem to have features in common both in their adult lives and in their childhood pasts. Is this a yin and yang situation?

Craig and Edmund have much in common. They both had a traumatic event happen in their childhoods, and they are both essentially quite lonely characters, unable to connect to others.  However, Edmund is definitely much more organized and focused than Craig, who really is very lost. Somewhere along the line, they help each other. When Edmund asks Craig to do some investigating for him, it gives his life a sense of purpose, and he, in turn, can be of more practical help to Edmund.

Much of the story takes place in a historically white suburb near where the Pullmans live. Several of the inhabitants are hard up after the runaway inflation, but those that have access to hard currency—in one way or another—are doing much better. Did you set out to explore the effects of this modern dichotomy in the country?

Yes, definitely. Life in Zimbabwe has been very difficult over the last twenty years. Hyper inflation wiped out life savings and pensions for many people. The transition to the US dollar was very clumsily done as well, and many people lost money that way, too.  Sometimes it feels that almost everyone is doing something dodgy in order to earn US dollars! There is very little appeal in doing a conventional job as the salaries are so low. I think the older generation have been very badly hit. They struggle to survive on ridiculously small pensions, and really battle to understand the value of the currency as there is the official government rate of exchange and then the black market rate, which varies considerably. The divide between the haves and the have nots is widening considerably.

Would you tell us something about what you are working on now?

I have finished my third novel, The Dying of The Light, and it is at the editing stage. It is set in Bulawayo in the late 1930s and is told from the perspective of a house servant who works for a wealthy lawyer and his wife. I have started a book for young adults called Going Up.  It is set in modern-day Bulawayo and concerns a young man who has gotten into drinking and drugs. His wealthy grandfather gives him an ultimatum to get himself sorted out and hands him the responsibility of evicting vendors from an old department store that he owns and wishes to knock down. However, the young man soon begins to develop other plans for the building and sets out to restore it to its former glory.

Just lately, I have been thinking of another crime novel, and may even bring Edmund Dube back, this time as a private investigator. I think the crime genre is a perfect one in which to explore the decay at the heart of Zimbabwean society.

Michael Sears writes with Stanley Trollip under the name Michael Stanley. Their award-winning mystery series with Detective Kubu is set in Botswana, a fascinating country with magnificent conservation areas and varied peoples. The first book in a new series featuring Kubu as a young detective is Facets of Death, set when Kubu first becomes a detective and is faced with solving a diamond heist at the world’s richest diamond mine, Jwaneng. They also have a thriller Shoot the Bastards, which introduces Minnesotan environmental journalist Crystal Nguyen. Set mainly in South Africa, it has as backstory the vicious trade in rhino horn.

Michael has lived in South Africa, Kenya, Australia and the US.He now lives in Knysna on the Cape south coast of South Africa. 

All Come to Dust is published in Zimbabwe by amaBooks, co-published in the UK by amaBooks and Parthian Books and is available elsewhere throough the African Books Collective.

Reviews of Bryony Rheam's All Come to Dust

 

Wow!  I haven’t had a book captivate me like this one in a long time.  I intended to just read a chapter to get a feel for it and 100 pages in I was in heaven.

This is a great plot for me personally.  At its most basic, this is a murder mystery set in current day Zimbabwe.  It evolves into something so much more to include issues of repressed memories, trauma, racism, colonialism, family and mental health.  Instead of telling us about these issues, we are shown through narrative, the effects of past decisions and events on current everyday lives of the individuals and their families.  I love books where I’m entertained as I learn that this is very well accomplished here.   There is often a bit of a philosophical tone which I quite enjoyed.  

Our main investigator is not the typical hunky detective type, rather an insecure male who is very aware of his flaws and is consciously working on his self-confidence.  I loved Edmund for the first half of this novel as he proves himself not to be as pathetic as he would have led us to believe.  There are some unexpected twists to his story that I did not anticipate, and I ended the book not quite as enamoured with him.  Human beings are not perfect and none of the characters in this book is without fault.  I love how real and flawed they are.  

 The plight of a poor white man in a newly independent African nation was engrossing.  We get to know Craig pretty well and his back story is most intriguing.   Rheam gradually reveals each player to the reader when his/her that perspective is revisited, and they all grow in complexity and the reader grows in understanding.   Mrs. Whitstable was the biggest surprise for me.  We get to know a few of the “good” characters quite well but none of the bad guys.  I’d have liked to see some of the story from Marcia or Mr Pullman’s perspective.  Many subplots were woven together for a satisfying ending.  I do have a few questions though, especially regarding the plight of the women who were transported over the border.  

There is a wonderful sense of place; smells, sounds, sights transported me to Bulawayo.  The writing is amazingly easy to read, and it moves everything along every quickly.  The use of some local language is perfectly integrated so that I never felt I had to look something up.   

I loved this book and look forward to more from a highly talented author.  I will be checking out her other novel, This September Sun, as soon as I can.  (Mary S. Educator, Netgalley)

All Come to Dust is a novel by a Zimbabwean set in modern Zimbabwe. On the surface it is a classic—and very complex—mystery. But I felt throughout as though there was a literary novel behind the scenes attempting to show itself behind the screen of a conventional mystery. The writing is often quite lovely, and the story is told from various points of view, each one shedding light not only on the diverse characters but also on the details of living in Zimbabwe. Add to this the fact that much of the suspense concerns the characters’ pasts, not the present murders of a disliked middle-class white woman, and you have a book that feels much more like literary fiction than a genre novel.

The mystery suffers somewhat. Its resolution is extremely clever, with one of those endings where you discover that every character’s story is an interlocking piece of the puzzle; but the clues leading up to the resolution are somewhat murky, often requiring cultural knowledge the average reader may not have (I didn’t). It takes a plot strategist and practiced writer like Agatha Christie to pull off the sleight of hand of showing the clues in such a way as to make them ignored but present enough in the subconscious for an “Aha—that was it!” moment at the end. This was not such a mystery, though it has enough of the trappings of a mystery to make the reader wonder exactly what it is trying to be. The reader who wants to be sure of the clues may need to reread the book—and this is a book that would stand up to rereading, primarily because of the vivid picture of Zimbabwe.

I found myself highlighting often, because of the vivid passages about Zimbabwe. Bryony Rheam’s slow, observant, and graceful writing calls to life the dusty roads, the smell of grasses, and the blossoms tossing in the trees, while limning an elderly generation of impoverished British non-leavers, a sleazy group of exploitative whites, and a mixed race underclass attempting only to find a job and make a contented life in a country where not even the electricity and water can be relied on. Bryony Rheam writes of this country with authority and astuteness. In Zimbabwe, she has found her ordained setting. I am not certain that the mystery is her genre. But I am sure she is a writer to watch; and I look forward to her next book with considerable eagerness. (Helen Aristar-dry - Goodreads)

Initially assuming that All Come To Dust was a straightforward murder mystery, I was impressed to find that actually Rheam is doing something much more intricate and important here. Rather than a No 1 Ladies Detective Agency-style southern African comic romp of a mystery novel, All Come To Dust instead grapples with difficult issues of colonialism, racism, mental health, and memory. The insights into the lives of the remaining white population of Zimbabwe were fascinating while clear-eyed: the reader is encouraged to sympathise with certain of them, but also reminded of their privilege. Highly recommended. (Janet B, Netgalley)

All Come to Dust is a long-simmering stew, with the raw-ingredients of an old-fashioned detective mystery and the mélange of spices of post-colonial Zimbabwe breaking down and melding together to offer up something far more than you might have expected when you started. The writing itself is incredibly patient, only revealing itself slowly and at its own measured pace. But within it Rheam is able to slowly develop an assortment of characters. Each time we revisit someone we learn more about them, forcing us to be patient as they reveal themselves. Similarly, the sense of place is intense. I have never visited Zimbabwe, but the writing instantly brought me to Bulawayo, from the scent of the flowers in the trees to the piles of utterly useless bureaucratic paperwork at the police station. Without ever being heavy handed, the occasional use of vernacular language combined with really specific sensory descriptions to really make the setting its own character, and one that affects every other character in their own way.

The characters are well drawn out, if slowly, just playing on enough of tropes or archetypes to let the reader assume they know something prematurely. The story itself is both riveting and small, or enclosed, at the same time. It takes its time unspooling, and offers enough red herrings mixed with its clues along the way that you want to keep reading and don’t feel cheated out of a proper resolution. All the while it is a portrait of how class, race, and gender still function in contemporary Zimbabwe, not as much an indictment as it is just a laying bare of how injustice and privilege are still baked into everyday life, and the efforts different people take to escape such social shackles. 

If you’re interested in a compelling detective story, you can find that here, and although surely this novel wraps itself in that affectation it is more than that. It was a joy to read, even as it slowed me down and insisted I take it at its own pace. Every aspect, from characters, to story, to writing, was deliberate and nothing felt rushed or hackneyed. The latter third of the book did feel a little more rushed than the first parts, though that is part and parcel with whodunits. There were some things that wrapped up a little too neatly, or quickly, again common in the genre but it didn’t feel entirely fitting with the rest of the story. It wasn’t enough to feel unearned, though, and the incredibly memorable primary character, who himself was more than just a copy-and-paste genre detective but actually someone who experienced growth and development throughout the story, was more than enough to give this novel high marks and a hearty recommendation. (Gyalten Lekden, Netgalley and Goodreads)

All Come to Dust is available:

 In the UK for pre-order from www.parthianbooks.com/products/all-come-to-dust  (UK Publication Date is September 2021). 

In Bulawayo  through Inganu Bookshop at the Orange Elephant, River Estate, 12th Avenue Extension, Bulawayo (WhatsApp 0772 851 609 or 0733 781 246).

In Harare through Bindu Books, 37 Victoria Drive, Newlands (0242 782720 or sales(at)bindu.co.zw).

in North America through the African Books Collective: https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/all-come-to-dust

As as an ebook in North America: https://www.amazon.com/All-Come-Dust-Bryony-Rheam-ebook/dp/B094RJHMCJ

and in Australia and New Zealand: https://www.amazon.com.au/All-Come-Dust-Bryony-Rheam-ebook/dp/B094RJHMCJ

NetGalley helps publishers and authors promote digital review copies to book advocates and industry professionals. Publishers make digital review copies and audiobooks available for the NetGalley community to discover, request, read, and review.

Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. Their mission is to help people find and share books they love. 

 

Bryony Rheam in conversation with Drew Shaw

 Reproduced from https://www.centre-for-english-excellence.com/articles/bryony-rheam-in-conversation-with-drew-shaw-in-bulawayo-may-2021

Congratulations, Bryony, on the launch of your latest novel, All Come to Dust (which was published by amaBooks in 2020)! It’s an intriguing, markedly different follow-up, in many ways, to your acclaimed debut novel This September Sun (published by amaBooks in 2009), which topped the Amazon UK charts, won the Best First Book at the Zimbabwe Publishers Awards, and later became an A-level English text in Zimbabwe. Both novels have also been published by Parthian in Wales. In 2006 you won the Intwasa Arts Festival Short Story Competition, and more recently you won a ‘Write your own Christie’ award and a Morland scholarship, so you have an accumulated list of achievements.  In addition to writing, you teach at Girls’ College where you are the head of the English Department, and I know you have a partner and two daughters and numerous other commitments. When do you find time to write, and have you got any tips for aspiring writers?

There is never enough time to write, but somewhere along the line, I manage to fit it in. I don’t do as much as I would like though. I think time is a funny thing – the more you have of it, the more you waste. I didn’t realise this until my eldest daughter was born. I used to write when she was asleep, and I really made use of the time. It’s surprising how much you can do in twenty minutes if you put your mind to it. There is a lot of wasted time in the day. At one time, I used to write while I was cooking. I’d sit at the kitchen table and just write whatever came to me in the few minutes it took for a pot to boil! I think you just have to do it. Don’t think: I have to sit down and write a novel; think, I have to write something. Even a couple of lines is a start.

 

I know you were born in Kadoma in 1974, moved to Bulawayo when you were young and attended Whitestone Primary School then Girls’ College, and you’ve lived in England, Singapore and Zambia before returning to Zimbabwe. Can you tell us about your journey to becoming an author. What was your earliest inspiration?

I have always wanted to be a writer and can remember putting together little books I had made when I was about six. They were about three tiny pages long! My biggest inspiration, I think, was Enid Blyton. I know some people don’t think much of her writing, particularly these days, but I loved her books. When I was about 13, I read her biography. She may not have been the nicest of people, but she was a very astute businesswoman. She was the first writer, never mind woman, to trademark her signature and her book sales made her into a very wealthy person.

You have written several short stories in addition to your novels: for example, in the Short Writings from Bulawayo series - stories such as ‘The Queue’, ‘Something about Tea’, ‘The Rhythm of Life’, ‘Miss Parker and the Tugboat' and ‘The Piano Tuner'. Then there is ‘The Reunion', for which you won the Intwasa Arts Festival competition in 2006, and also ‘Christmas’ in Weaver Press’s Laughing Now collection. Are there any plans to publish these as a collection? And do you prefer the short story or the novel form: is the writing process similar or quite different?

Parthian and amaBooks want to publish a collection, probably next year. I like writing short stories, especially if you just want to capture a particular moment or idea. It is still quite a lengthy process though, although sometimes I just get an idea and write it really quickly.

This September Sun is a novel about two main characters Ellie and Evelyn, a granddaughter and grandmother who form a close bond and have overlapping stories from different eras. The lives of both are lived mostly in Zimbabwe yet partly in the UK. Although it is fictional, many have remarked on how ‘real’ This September Sun reads - almost like a memoir. Who or what inspired Ellie and Evelyn, and were you able to draw on your own or other people’s real-life experiences in any way?

 

Yes, everyone thinks it is an autobiographical novel – and it is in many ways, but it also isn’t. I drew on many incidents from real life, for example the fact that Ellie doesn’t like swimming and doesn’t feel she fits into Zimbabwean society. That was very much me. Some of the incidents, I exaggerated or changed in some way.

My real grandmother was a lovely lady who had had a fairly troubled life. She was funny and clever, but had never really been given the chance to develop herself and her talents. Her son was killed in a car accident when he was 21 and she was, understandably, totally devastated by his death. This happened five years before I was born, but it dominated the early part of my life. I remember lots of tears, heated arguments, and various people trying to help her. I didn’t realise until I started writing This September Sun how much I had been affected by my uncle’s death and I had never met him. Sometimes I found myself crying whilst writing. It was the overwhelming sadness of the situation and the fact that, as a child, there was so much I didn’t understand.

Evelyn is quite different to my grandmother, yet I felt that in some way I was giving my grandmother an alternative story to live. It was a ‘what if she had done this instead of that?’

I’m sure you were delighted when This September Sun was chosen to become a set book in Zimbabwean schools, which means a wide spectrum of pupils are now reading it. 

Have you got any thoughts on why it was chosen; and what do you hope young readers will get out of it?

It's funny, I don’t actually know why it was chosen. I didn’t think that it would the kind of book ZIMSEC would like, but I am glad they did. A young reader once wrote to me and thanked me for writing This September Sun as it gave them an insight into white Zimbabwean society. I feel that in many African novels, white people are portrayed as ‘bad’ or, at best, very hard, unemotional people. What I hope readers will see is a common humanity, a life that we all share whatever our skin colour. People suffer loss, love, joy and hatred whoever they are and wherever they are.

Your two novels are quite different in terms of genre, yet there is some overlap in terms of Mystery. This September Sun is part epistolary, part Bildungsroman, Romance and Mystery, as John Eppel has described it. On the other hand All Come to Dust is mostly Murder Mystery, within the category of Crime Fiction. Did you always want to write a Whodunnit, and can you explain the transition to this genre?

I have always loved crime fiction. I don’t like violent crime or plots concerning psychopaths and that sort of thing! I enjoy the puzzle – working out a character’s motivation and trying to decide which clues are meaningful and which are red herrings. I therefore thought I would like to try writing my own. When I finished it, I thought ‘never again’, but now I have a couple of plot ideas for other mysteries. I think in future I would make them shorter though and more specifically ‘crime’. All Come to Dust is a crime novel, but it is also a comment on Zimbabwean society. I think I might be tempted to leave that out next time.

 

In fact both your novels are ‘two in one’ type stories. In This September Sun we have the separate yet linked narratives of Ellie and Evelyn. In All Come to Dust we have the mystery of ‘Who killed Marcia Pullman?’ but also the strange disappearance of Chief Inspector Edmund Dube’s adoptive parents. What attracted you to this ‘two-pronged’ approach? And was it hard to do?

I like the idea of different perspectives, how different people can view the same incident differently. I also like exploring the idea that the past is always with us, and that often, in order to understand the present, we need to go back to the past. I didn’t find it difficult to do, although with Ellie and Evelyn I had to always be aware of creating two different characters.

Why did you decide to set your fiction, most of it, in Bulawayo? Does the city hold special significance for you?

I think it’s always easier to write about a place you know and have a connection with. Some of This September sun was set in the UK, and I felt I could do that because I had lived there. I don’t know if I would be so confident about doing that now, having been away from it so long. Bulawayo is an interesting place, a real mix of people and different attitudes. When I was growing up, there were a lot of very strict, no nonsense, school teacher types. Many of them had come out to Africa at the end of the Second World War and they embodied the way of thinking of that time. However, as I got older, there was a growth in quite an arty, different sort of crowd. There was an influx of expats after 1980 and I think they influenced Bulawayo society which was generally very conservative. Bulawayo has always attracted rather different types. If you are looking for an expert on anything, from butterflies to 5th century Japanese architecture, you don’t have to go very far!

In This September Sun you explore travelling and belonging: Ellie can’t wait to ‘escape’ overseas, then ends back in Bulawayo, re-examining where she really belongs. In All Come to Dust, your diverse set of characters all struggle, to varying extents, to establish their place and purpose in a Bulawayo community. But it’s Chief Inspector Edmund Dube who perhaps grapples most with his own identity and sense of belonging - an outsider in so many respects. I’m very interested in these themes. Were you consciously exploring them?

Until I wrote This September Sun, I don’t think I appreciated how many people consider themselves to be outsiders – I thought I was the only one! I suppose it’s inevitable in a way when you have a mix of people from different countries and cultures in one place. I always found white society very narrow and one where you were expected very much to fit in. If you didn’t fit in, you were out. Simple. It was only when I came back to Bulawayo after being away for about eight years, that I began to realise that, in my own way, I had been equally as narrow. This is what Ellie discovers after her grandmother’s death. She had always thought Miles, Evelyn’s boyfriend, was a typical ‘Rhodie’, but actually he is the one who reads Shakespeare.

In All Come To Dust, all the main characters struggle with a sense of loss and a feeling of not being on the inside. Here, I was more open to the idea that even people who appear to fit in – Craig, the archetypal Bulawayo man, Edmund, the police officer – don’t. Marcia Pullman is the kind of person who lets you know whether you belong or not according to whether you are invited to her book club and bridge parties. Nobody particularly likes her, but they will never challenge her because they are afraid of being left out. I feel this is very relevant in Zimbabwean society. The people with money call the shots, even socially.

Edmund has never felt he really fitted in, but he does not appreciate this as a strength, which, of course, it is. He was the only black boy in a white school just before Independence, and he’s also determined to fight crime without getting involved in corruption. I think his early experience of being isolated prepares him to be able to stand alone as an adult.

I think you have a trademark style, in terms of Zimbabwean literature at least. Your descriptions of time and place, mood and character are incredibly detailed. There is a carefully-observed picture of what’s on the street or in a house, or what characters had for supper, a focus on every-day minutia - and one might call this a classic realist style. At the same time, your protagonists engage in quite detailed interior monologues - reflections, observations, and heightened self-reflexivity (Ellie, most notably, in This September Sun) that might be called modernist. So there’s a simultaneous exploration of the external and internal in your work. How did you develop this style and was it a conscious choice? It also seems you write longer books than most Zimbabwean authors - a joy for your reading fans, but probably time consuming on your part. What are the challenges, and were you inspired by any authors in particular?

Thank you for saying I have a trademark style – that is quite a compliment! There are times when I look at the size of my books and think, ‘Bryony, you need to stop writing.’ To me, a setting is very important – that and atmosphere. I like little details because I think they can tell the reader so much, and when I write I have a picture in my mind. I can see the person stirring the tea and the tea whirling round. I don’t know if I could write differently. It may take more time, but I don’t think I would feel it was me if I didn’t write like this. I have taken parts out though when editing. An author I love is Scott Fitzgerald. I wouldn’t claim to write like him, but he has definitely been an influence. Another writer is Virginia Woolf – I like the attention she gives to the small, everyday details that are part of our lives.

All Come to Dust has struck chords with a wide age range in Bulawayo. I met an eighty-nine-year-old lady who loved it, as did my twelve-year-old nephew who commandeered his mother’s copy and got similarly engrossed. Do you have any thoughts on why the detective genre has a broad appeal? What appeals about the Whodunnit and does it allow you to explore society in a particular way?

I met someone once who told me she had no interest at all in murder mysteries. She said she really did not care who ‘did it’. I believe she is the exception to the rule; so many people enjoy trying to work out who ‘the murderer is’. There are those who can just read or watch something for pure entertainment and never think about twists and turns and how you as a reader/viewer are being manipulated, and there are others who enjoy the challenge of trying to work it out. Once you get into a habit of reading crime, you realise you are also actively involved in the novel. Your understanding and interpretation of events is part of the novel’s success or failure. I think that can be quite fun.

As a writer, I think crime does allow you to explore society in a different way. What I love about Agatha Christie is that she creates these beautiful quaint English villages that are seething with murderers. She believed everyone is capable of murder, and that’s a very frightening thought. Modern crime suggests that murderers are psychopaths and easily identifiable as such. That’s where it all goes wrong. You finish the book and feel separate from the murderer: he was just some nut case who had an unhealthy relationship with his mother. It’s much more unsettling to discover the nice old lady who serves tea and biscuits every Sunday at church has been slowly knocking off members of the congregation because she didn’t want her past to come to light.

Who or what was the inspiration for Chief Inspector Edmund Dube in All Come to Dust and are we likely to see him again?

I was drawn to the idea of a policeman who wanted to do a good job. He wanted to solve a crime and was tired of the police force being something of a laughing stock. I also like the idea of a policeman with his own issues, his own darkness that needs healing. A couple of people have asked me if I would write another book with him in it, and initially I said no, but now I am thinking he could go out on his own as a private investigator. That might be an idea.

The hapless Craig Martin, in All Come to Dust, my nephew’s favourite character, provides a certain amount of comic relief. Who or what inspired him?

I love Craig! I am so glad I gave him a haircut at the end. Craig was initially in a short story I was developing. He wasn’t as lonely in the story as he did have friends, but they were all married with children and he couldn’t seem to get his life together. I had a boyfriend when I was about 18, who drove a Renault. It was a slightly different model to Craig’s. He also had a mullet (but it was OK then because it was 1992!) He had a very different character to Craig though.

Both your novels are about solving mysteries and uncovering secrets, which seems to drive the plot. Can you talk about your interest in mysteries and secrets, and how easy or difficult is it to structure a novel around them?

I have always absolutely loved mysteries and secrets. I think it all started with reading The Secret Garden as a child, and all those Famous Five books where they discovered treasure and secret passageways!

I think every family has secrets, and those secrets only come out over a period of time. You get different versions of the truth from different people and, of course, the very idea of an absolute truth is flawed. Memories change, feelings change, motivation changes. We all have family myths, stories that are handed down as truths, but have inevitably been changed. However, it is important to know these. I think they are part of who we are.

Can you tell us about what you are working on at present? What’s it called and what will it be about?

Earlier on in the year, I finished The Dying of the Light, a novel set in Bulawayo in the late 1930s, which involves around an incident at a place called Bisset Hall, an institution moulded loosely on Ingutsheni. I have now started a novel which I think will be more for young adults, although I hope it is the type of book that everyone will enjoy. It is about a young man who has ruined his life through drink and drugs. His very well-off grandfather gives him a challenge which is to manage a very big, old departmental store in Bulawayo that is currently divided into little shops. He is told he can do anything with it, as long as he clears everyone out. What he doesn’t know is that his grandfather is essentially using him to empty the building, which he has other plans for. Meanwhile, the young man sets about restoring the shop to its former glory, even going as far as trying to recruit some of the old staff or their family members.

Have you got any thoughts about other Zimbabwean writers and writing at the present moment?

I think Zimbabwean writing has been a bit in the doldrums and needs some sort of boost. One of the most promising writers at the moment is Siphiwe Ndlovu. I just loved her book, The History of Man. I find it frustrating, however, that the best writing often comes from outside the country. It’s hard to be a writer here. It’s impossible to make enough money to live on. I really feel we need things like competitions with big prizes, scholarships and sponsorship.

That would be nice. I think there's nevertheless a lot of excellent writing coming out of Zimbabwe as well as the Diaspora. Conventional publishing opportunities seem to have shrunk here... But it's nevertheless nice to see award winners such as Siphiwe Ndlovu coming back to Bulawayo to work on new writing. It was a real achievement for you both to win Morland Scholarships to continue your work, and I very much enjoyed our discussion about the City of Kings as a character in your novels. It's wonderful also that you yourself returned from several years in the Diaspora, and I have an idea there's symbiotic overlap and interchange between those writing from within Zimbabwe and without (a topic perhaps for another discussion). Let’s hope we can continue promoting the value of literature in Bulawayo and beyond. Bryony, thank you very much for the conversation.