Crime takes place: spatial situation(s) in Margie Orford’s fiction

Abstract

Building on the early interests of scholars such as Hausladen (1995), recent academic writing on crime fiction has begun to give more credence to the significant role of place in the genre (see Schmid 2012), granting the form a sociocritical impact beyond assumed escapism. This article uses several krimi novels by Margie Orford to illustrate the genre's potential to move beyond descriptive “setting” in order to offer informed, located responses to the ways in which space, in particular social contexts, is established and mediated. Orford's treatment of various locales in her fiction grounds narrative in recognisably South/southern African geographies. At the same time, however, her interest in the question of social relation entails moving a reader from the casual acceptance of separate spaces (whether of “race”, class or gender) into challenging, critical forms of spatial, conceptual and experiential interconnection. Additionally, she works in satisfying ways with patterns of spatial scale familiar to readers of crime fiction, a range that at once satisfies popular genre expectations of atmosphere and thrill, even as she disconcerts received assumptions about the nature of places such as “home”. She also moves beyond national boundaries, tackling crime's internationalising impetus. Overall, Orford's novels illustrate elements of Reijnders notion of “guilty landscape” (2009), creating intriguing links among place, history, memory and uncertain futures.