One of the more energetic debates about postapartheid South African literature revolves around the question of why genre fiction, and more particularly crime fiction, so heavily saturates the book market. This debate has often been conducted anecdotally or superficially in reviews and comments on literary websites, despite scattered journal articles and one or two special issues on the topic. Particularly contested has been my own suggestion that crime thrillers may have come to stand in for what used to be seen as political or engaged fiction, in response to which some academics have argued that the generic or formulaic nature of detective novels precludes them from a nuanced treatment of sociopolitical issues. A common strand has been the contention that it is far-fetched to assume that genre fiction can engage with political themes in the manner of Gordimer, Langa, Mda or Serote. A great deal of this commentary appears in the form of stabs of opinion in the comment threads of digital media, and as such does not penetrate much beyond provisional position-taking.

An exception to this trend is Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky's essay ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, in which the authors argue that Nicol's own turn from serious fiction (as exemplified by his 1998 novel The Ibis Tapestry) to the popular form of crime fiction (as in his 2008 novel Payback) represents an unfortunate withdrawal from more serious literary writing in which matters are, fittingly, in a state of unresolved tension. Instead of keeping faith with the open-form novel, Nicol gives way to the temptation of neat but ultimately superficial gestures of closure. Although Titlestad and Polatinsky do not say so explicitly, there is in their argument a strong sense of disappointment that an outstanding South African author, in the older, more serious vein of South African writing, should ‘sell out’ to the seductions of a popular market where trite ‘answers’ are laid out in accordance with the norms of the genre. For Titlestad and Polatinsky, the intense grappling of pre-2000 writing with the challenges of cultural difference – how to give people of all ethnic, gender and class variations their due – appears to have given way to ‘thriller’ computations of the social totality.