Disentangling the Detective in Andrew Brown's Coldsleep Lullaby

Abstract

If fictional characters may be read as reflections of social context, then detective figures in contemporary South African crime fiction offer a truly kaleidoscopic view: Andrew Brown's Detective Inspector Februarie exemplifies this in part through his identity crisis and the eventual transformation he undergoes. This article applies both Sarah Nuttall's notion of “entanglements” of histories, identities and moral issues and Zimitri Erasmus's understanding of “complicity” to the figure of the detective. Specifically, it shows how the detective, in the course of his criminal investigation, is forced to critically view his own involvement with both dominant white and dominant male violent practices. The article examines the personal consequences of these entanglements for Februarie, as well as the resource they represent, on his way, in post-apartheid South Africa, to encountering others as human beings beyond past injuries and across categories of difference.