If Tsehloane's ‘end of history’ thesis about postapartheid literary culture is at all accurate, in the sense that writers embody in their works a ‘yearning for a different society’ but see such a hope as ‘futile’ (81), then the task of detection seems ever more urgent: what went wrong, and how was the early-transition plot, with its tropes of springtime and rainbows, of reconciliation and renaissance, so conclusively lost? Postapartheid South African writing in the 2000s enters what might be described as a forensic phase, following on from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; however, there is no single line of development in the various tropes and modes of diagnosis. Whether phantasmagorically or factually spun, in neo-noir thrillers or nonfiction accounts of a sick social ‘underbelly’, the tales in the later postapartheid phase have forfeited any innocence they may have laid claim to in the earlier, prelapsarian phase. A broader look at this collective act of diagnosis, a kind of collective biopsy on the ailing body of the ‘new’ South Africa, therefore seems apposite.

Neo-Noir 1: Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood

One of the most potent fictional treatments of a social condition perceived to be in an advanced stage of ill health is to be found in the work of thriller-writer Roger Smith, particularly his densely (over)plotted first two books, Mixed Blood (2009) and Wake Up Dead (2010). Despite its Byzantine plot, Mixed Blood is a strong thriller debut. It examines the devastation wrought by apartheid upon the people of

Cape Town – especially the large ‘coloured’ sector – and works it into a neo-noir style; noir itself is both a style in which excruciation is narrated with cool, worldly aplomb, and a mode in which, according to Foster Hirsch, ‘middle-class citizens [are] unexpectedly invaded by or lured into crime’ (13). Indeed, Smith's method is to create, in even in the most prosaic elements of literary style, settings that are saturated with the imminence of catastrophe and death, stricken with signs of disease and invasively contagious. And, as per the noir formula, the middle class, not to mention the extremely well-to-do, get sucked into a criminal culture despite their best efforts to remain separate from it. It is as if the actual material world of postapartheid conspires in the spreading of a murderous contagion.