Newspaper: The Witness
Interviewer: Margaret Von Klemperer
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ROSAMUND Kendal’s new novel, The Murder of Norman Ware, (reviewed on this page) is a crime novel with a difference — and has a KZN setting for its quirky, dark and often creepy action. Books Editor MARGARET VON KLEMPERER asked Kendal a few questions about it.

The Murder of Norman Ware is different from your previous novels — what made you turn to the crime genre from medical fiction?

I didn’t set out to write a crime novel specifically. I had decided before embarking on my third novel that I did not want to write another book in the medical fiction genre, both because I felt that if I wrote a third book in the same genre as my first two, it would box me forever into that and because I wanted to challenge myself as a writer.

The fact that The Murder of Norman Ware ended up being a crime novel was almost incidental. I began writing it with the intention of playing with the ideas of synchronicity and chance or fate, and it evolved in such a way that the pivotal event around which everything else revolved was a murder.

Are you a reader of crime fiction, and if so, which writers have influenced you?

I do enjoy crime fiction. I have read most of Ian Rankin’s novels and I think Martin Cruz Smith is a great crime writer. I also enjoyed Patricia Cornwell’s earlier novels.

We have fantastic South African crime writers, among them Mike Nicol, Margie Orford and Jassy Mackenzie.

However, I think it was Carl Hiaasen’s work that most influenced me in the writing of The Murder of Norman Ware.

Are you still working as a doctor as well as writing, and, if so, which do you see as your main job? How do you juggle your time?

I do still work as a doctor and I see that as my job. Writing is everything else: my therapy, relaxation and sanity. I work flexible hours as a general practitioner, so I am able to find time to write.

What I enjoyed was that this is crime combined with fun. The humour is black, with some creepily gruesome bits, but it is a wacky story and a change from the violent and realistic thriller writing that seems to be the South African norm at the moment. Why go this route?

I suppose it was because I didn’t specifically set out to write a crime novel that the end product was this rather unusual, darkly humorous murder mystery.

The characters kind of developed themselves ... So I completely refuse to be held responsible for them. And I had fun writing the book.

I began writing the novel with no intention of having it published and so I had no limitations or expectations about what I could or could not write.

I sat down one day and started writing simply for the enjoyment of writing. I gave myself complete freedom to play around with characters, genre and plot, and I think that comes out in the novel.

You have a big cast of characters and various viewpoints. Did you map out before you started how you were going to pull all the strands together?

Interestingly, in this novel I didn’t have an initial plan that I followed. I mapped my previous two novels out meticulously, but I began The Murder of Norman Ware with absolutely no idea of where it was going to end.

Many of the characters seemed to force themselves into the novel. It was only when I was about a third of the way through that I sat down and mapped out how everything was going to tie up.

Twists of fate and chance encounters are important to the plot. Do you see life like that?

All the time. I spend a lot of my time imagining alternative realities. I like to think of life as a tapestry woven from the threads of all the choices that we make, both wittingly and unwittingly.

Norman Ware, who as the title tells the reader, is going to be the corpse, is in many ways the most attractive character. Why make him your victim?

It’s probably the result of my natural cynicism asserting itself.

You make life on a golf estate sound like something to be avoided at all costs, artificial and full of very nasty people. Is it like that?

I had better choose my words wisely here, since I live on a golf estate. I don’t think that estates are full of nasty people (crazy, perhaps, but not all nasty), but I do think that they are completely artificial. Having said that, the way in which I have portrayed life on the estate in The Murder of Norman Ware was intended to reflect, on a very small scale, the extreme social and economic inequalities prevalent in South Africa.

So, in that respect, the golf estate is almost a microcosm of the country.