Sisters in crime: Reading June Drummond and Margie Orford

Abstract

Margie Orford introduced South Africans to Clare Hart over half a century after the publication of June Drummond's The black unicorn, which Mike Nicol refers to as South Africa's first crime novel. Drawing on Sarah Nuttall's notion of “entanglement”, this article attempts to trace the ways in which these two authors are connected, despite the historical and sociopolitical divide that separates them. Both Nan, the protagonist of The black unicorn, and Clare Hart, the independent forensic specialist at the centre of Orford's series, overstep the bounds of the traditional female investigator's role, and in doing so, cause a reconfiguration of the relationship between investigator and community. Particularly in Orford's series, this transgression manifests in the embodied representation of Clare Hart.It is into these streets that one slips the lonely hero(ine), the Aristotelian moralist, to walk the streets on our behalf, to investigate the darkness and put it to rights. In a sense, the hero(ine) of crime fiction is a prosthetic eye/I who can look at the medusa-head of crime, the psychic drive behind violence and fear, and not be turned to stone.Margie Orford (2010: 189)The detective is dead – and it looks like the woman did it. Gill Plain (2001: 245)