The long game: how a body in a boat became two books – Guest Post by Andre Louw

 

The city of George with the Outeniqua Mountains

Andre Louw is a man of many talents. He’s a guitarist, but he missed out on rock star fame so he turned to law. He qualified as an attorney in 2000, received a PhD in Law in 2010, and now teaches at Stellenbosch University. His fascination with corruption and his love of reading mysteries led him to try his hand at fiction, and that led to not one debut novel, but two! The first, titled Phantom Pass, was published in February by Catalyst Press.

I was very intrigued to discover this story set on the Garden Route on the Cape coast, the area where I live. Phantom Pass itself is about half an hour’s drive from my house. And, indeed, the book has a strong sense of place and an authentic feel. I was keen to learn how Andre came to write the book. And his story has important messages for anyone setting out to write fiction.

So it’s a great pleasure to welcome him to Murder Is Everywhere for today’s guest post.

Michael

 

Andre Louw

From a young age I’ve had a great love of books – my mom engraved that on my psyche and injected it into my DNA from early on - and I always wanted to write a book, my own book. Just one.

For my day job I have, over the years, written two published books and a number of academic articles. I knew that I could write. But I didn’t know if I could write this:

Fiction.

I would, on one or two occasions over the years, set out to try. Just a very few pages, one scene at a time. But that never worked. It never stuck. I guess I wasn’t yet ready for so big a task as creating a world filled with fictional persons with imperfections and problems, triumphs and emotions. For the mammoth task of spinning a yarn that someone would like to read to the end.

I did, though, get the impression that I might be able to do it, once I set my mind to actually just knuckling down and trying. Keeping at it for more than 30 minutes at a time, and then not immediately chucking the text because it lacked stuff (whatever stuff that was).

Then it eventually happened in 2019. I remember the actual day:

19 November 2019, a Friday evening.

I was 47 years old.

Wow, later in life than I thought it would ever happen, but better late than never, right?

I decided to write one scene for a crime thriller, the first one: The discovery of a body.  

Ooh, sexy! Right?

Right!

I did it. And I loved it. And I kept writing.

But not for long, just till I came to around page 30, when I realized that, as much as I loved the experience so far, I had no bloody idea where to go from there, nothing.

Nothing.

I had not plotted anything out, and, frankly, I had never planned for this to turn into an actual book. But I was there now, at last. And I decided: I was not gonna let that keep me down this time.

I am really proud of myself for that very small thing: To, just at that moment, decide that I would keep going; I would MAKE it work.

So, I set out to do it.

 

I spent 2-3 weeks just plotting; thinking about the story and where I wanted it to go, and what I wanted to say. And then I started writing.

My writing hours, for most days over the six months I spent on it, were from 22h00 to 02h00, most if not all nights. Quiet time, dark and no interruptions. And hey, I’d usually have a whiskey or two in the process. My muse. I loved it.

It feels very strange to say this, like some form of blasphemy, but for my book the coming of COVID-19 was a bit of a blessing. Just over 3 months after I started, South Africa was under a hard lockdown. Working remotely from home helped me manage my time to write.

It worked (I think).

I finished the first book in six months. And then, realizing that I had to split the work into two books and move some stuff around for that purpose – I was told that nobody would buy a debut novel by an unknown writer that ran to 250 000 words - the last 10 chapters of book two took me another couple of months. All in all, the book(s) were done in around 9 months.

I felt great. I felt proud.

And then I tried to get it published …

And everything came crashing down, hard.

 

I had from early on in the process wanted to self-publish. I spent nearly a year researching the publishing industry and self-publishing. During this time I lost my nerve to do things myself, as I realized I did not have the financial resources or the time to manage the whole process of getting the book into readers’ hands.

So then I started submitting the book to publishers, both in South Africa and elsewhere. There was no interest. Just the rate of (negative but mostly well-wishing) replies was probably less than 1%.

This was so demoralizing that I eventually put the book away.

Having done some soul-searching I realized that I had built up the expectation in my mind to a dangerous level. I now started to become depressed. The third book and the fourth, both of which I had started writing while I was seeking a publisher for the first, were shelved. I simply couldn’t write anymore.

What was the point?

Somewhere in 2022 an independent American publisher, Catalyst Press, read the book. They declined to sign it up, citing reasons relating to another title they had upcoming. One of their editors, SarahBelle Selig – by far my favourite person in the publishing industry – managed to break my heart in the nicest way. She raved about the book and the writing.

So, around late 2023 I thought, what the heck, let’s try again, and I once again asked them to consider it. On 6 May 2024, the day after my birthday, I signed the publishing contract with Catalyst for Phantom Pass and Chasing Ghosts (out mid-2026).

Yes, I googled it:

Phantom Pass

That was 1 630 days from that evening when I had put the first words to paper, describing the discovery of the mutilated body of Mark Whitcombe in a little rust-red-coloured boat floating on a cold estuary under grey, darkening skies. That image was the seed of everything.

From it, grew the two-book murder investigation set in Knysna on the Garden Route of South Africa. Capt. Josh Holland, a trainee detective with a background in law, is thrown into the chase under the wing of the experienced Colonel Gavin Whitall from the South African Police Service’s Serious Crimes Unit in George, after the mutilated body of a prominent retired advocate is found in a small boat on the Knysna estuary.

The investigating team encounters a number of suspects, including a former apartheid security police operative and a notorious local drug dealer. As the investigation expands the detectives realize that the fate of their victim appears to be linked to a murder committed in Mozambique in 1986, in the shadowy world of the African National Congress’s armed struggle. The team wades through a highly politicized police bureaucracy and grapples with high stakes political corruption, as they stalk a killer across the southern Cape and beyond South Africa’s borders. All the while the body count stacks up, as prey becomes hunter and death comes uncomfortably close.

1 630 days from a body in a boat to a signed contract.

Thinking back on it now, it is hard to fathom just how long this story has been a part of my life. Impossible to try and calculate the importance and role of its presence in the back of my mind; how it may have changed me, my relationships, my professional life, and my overall conception of myself as a person.

But, then again, I have also realized that it always will be a major part of my life. Regardless of whether it will sell and be a commercial or popular success. Maybe that stuff is just fluff?

It will always be there because it is something – like a child - that did not exist in the universe before I came along. Something I created, and of which I am personally, immensely proud. I know many people dream of doing this, and few manage to do it.

It is not Hemingway, Steinbeck, Irving or King. It is definitely not Larsson.

It is (just) me.

My First Farmer's Box and Two Kinds of Carrot Cake

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

I was excited (and a little apprehensive) to order our first 'farmer's box' from Talula Farms last week.

Till now I've shopped mainly in morning markets and supermarkets, but I love their goal of striking a balance between supplying organic/ pesticide free foods and supporting farmers who are attempting to support nature with responsible water and soil management.

To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive that I would receive a box full of half-wilted kangkong, watercress, local lettuce and bananas that would proceed to die after clogging up my fridge for three days.

So I was pretty thrilled to find beautifully fresh spinach, cauliflower, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes...

As well as (surprising to me) apples, avocadoes, tangerines, zucchini and cucumbers!

I honestly hadn't realised peaches, apples, tangerines and avocadoes could grow in our climate!

Which made me think about how I'm probably still living with a whole other lot of assumptions about what's 'local' here.


But at the moment, the practical challenge takes priority: how can I best use the $55 worth of vegetables that came in my Farmer's Box?

The creed here for now is Nemo Resideo: No Vegetable left behind.

We've been having box veggies with all our meals:

and I think we've already got our money's worth--though it's barely dented the hoard in the crisper!

But the big step for me was using fresh carrots to make carrot cake cupcakes which turned out surprisingly well, given I'm not a baker and we didn't have any baking powder.

I substituted yoghurt and baking soda (which we keep for coffee stains--yes, studying Chemistry came in useful after all) and three got eaten while they were cooling, before I could take a photograph!

They were Delicious!

But the issue is, when you say 'I made carrot cake', here, it's automatically assumed that you've got chai tow kway on offer.

Singaporean Chai tow kway literally 'fried carrot cake' is made of rice flour paste and steamed radishes and contains no carrots. It's a (delicious) savoury dish that comes in black and white versions.

The confusion arises because in Hokkien both radishes and carrots are chai tow (菜头).

There's also Lo Pak Go, a Cantonese version of the dish, which is commonly and less confusingly translated as 'Cantonese Radish Cake'.

Maybe the most famous Chai Tow Kway hawker in the old days was Madam Ng of Serangoon Gardens. Not only because she added 'real' red carrots (more expensive at the time) to the dish, or because her carrot cake pieces were crisp outside, soft inside and bound together omelette style... but most of all because during the terrible floods of 1954, Madam Ng continued cooking at her Potong Pasir stall and offered her carrot cake free to flood victims there.

Over 10,000 people were affected by the floods that hit some of our poorest kampong communities. Singapore was still a British Crown Colony then, and the British government declared an ongoing state of 'emergency' in response to calls for aid and Independence which were perceived as part of a communist threat. 1954 also witnessed the formation of the People’s Action Party. Thanks to the PAP, those slums are barely a memory now, but I really hope we'll remember Madam Ng and her chai tow kway.

Singapore has always accepted and embraced disparities and dualities. It's part of our mixed heritage what keeps our identity evolving.

So yes, there's room for more than one kind of carrot cake.

And I suspect that's true of writing too. After all, what's 'local material' on a granite island where almost everything is imported?
As Aunty Lee would say, 'I am Peranakan, so what I cook must be Peranakan food right?'

Shakespeare on the Hudson

Annamaria on Monday

On this past Thursday, Hudson Valley Shakespeare cut the ribbon on its new home: The Samuel H. Scripps Theatre Center.

HVS has been a blessing on my life, since my involvement from its inception in 1986, first as a fan and for the past 20+ years, as a member of its board of trustees.

Over those decades, there have, of course, been times when things were not going well. After all, no adventure worthy of the name is always fun when you're going though it.  There were a few times when HVS got very close to the edge of a cliff.

Its first home was a gorgeous place on the banks of the Hudson River, fifty miles north of Times Square.  A place where the hills are still green thanks to the determination and spectacular generosity of environmentalists. HVS literally pitched its tent on on the east side of the river, on the grounds of Boscobel House and Gardens, without which HVS would never have gotten off the ground (so to speak). 

Over time, thanks to its artistic excellence, HVS outgrew that home.  

But the company had no where else to go.  And no spare funds to buy itself a new place to live. 

What followed was an act of this play replete with a brilliant, but perhaps impossible solution, hard work, a great deal of nail biting, determination, spectacular generosity, more good luck, good will among groups of people, more nail biting, some seemingly miraculous luck, and even more unbelievable generosity by hundreds of people, absolutely brilliant architects, and ultra capable builders.  The company now has this gorgeous theatre on 98 acres overlooking the majestic Hudson.

I highly recommend a visit, not just to see the beauty of its location, but to enjoy (with the accent on JOY) a wonderful performance of a play.  This summer, here are the choices:

I'll be seeing all of them.  At least once.

You can tell.  Right now I am doing the happy dance! 

Cops and Robbers, Greek Style

 

Jeff––Saturday 

For those of you who ask me (or simply wonder) where I get my ideas for the wild fictional adventures of Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis in his capacity as head of the Special Crimes Unit of the Greek Police (GADA), below is my Exhibit A answer to your question. It comes in the form of an article appearing in yesterday’s Ekathimerini—Greece’s newspaper of record––written by Yiannis Souliotis and titled, “Police warn crime boss of plots against his life.” 

Here’s the inspiration: 

Police’s organized crime unit twice intervened to warn Giorgos Moschouris of active plots to take his life, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation, months before the senior Greek Mafia figure was fatally shot in April 2025 in the northern Athens suburb of Halandri. 

The 55-year-old, known by the nickname “Thamnakias,” was killed in a hail of gunfire when assailants armed with Kalashnikov rifles opened fire, hitting him with 54 bullets. The revelations emerged following recent arrests linked to his killing. 

According to information received by officers from the so-called “Greek FBI,” an attack against Moschouris had been planned at an entertainment venue he was known to frequent regularly. In an effort to prevent the assassination, police urgently summoned him to their headquarters (GADA), where investigators warned him during two private meetings in September and October 2024 that contract killings had been ordered against him. 

Moschouris reportedly responded by insisting he had withdrawn from criminal activity and declined to enter a witness protection program. 

He was considered one of the most influential figures in Greece’s organized crime underworld and had previously been convicted as the leader of a protection racket targeting dozens of businesses, mainly in the southern suburbs of Athens. Authorities also linked him to the fuel trade. 

In 2020, unidentified gunmen attempted to kill him in the parking lot of a bakery chain in Vari, east of Athens, firing 15 shots and wounding him in the abdomen. 

Police sources say that in the final phase of his criminal activity, Moschouris allegedly sought to expand into cigarette smuggling, a move that brought him into conflict with a group of ethnic Greek criminals from the former Soviet Union. Authorities attribute at least four killings of Greek Mafia figures to members of that group. 

Now to write the book. :) ––Jeff

What's in a Name

Annamaria on Monday

I have commented a few times here on MIE my doubts about AI.  To my way of thinking, the very wealthy and powerful creators are pushing far too hard on its adoption without properly considering the downstream risks.  They seem to carelessly brush aside all doubts.  They sweep the naysayers under the rug.  They respond, "That will never happen," without any useful explanation of what they are doing to prevent possible disasters.  In some cases, it seems as if they never try for a moment to ask themselves what could go wrong.  Not even in situations where doing so would be easy and quick: for instance the names they give their organizations. 

We writers of fiction carefully choose the names of our characters, because we know that given names influence what kind of person - real or fictional - the bearer becomes.  I am sure that if I named the heroine in my Africa series Valentina instead of Vera, she would have turned out to be altogether different.  This is true of all names.  Even of corporations.  Years ago, when two of my clients, Chase and Chemical banks merged, many of the people in the top executive jobs were from Chemical, but they called the resultant organization Chase.  Obviously to anyone, the better choice.

     Here are two examples of what look to me like mistakes made by AI companies when naming their organizations. I hope you will find this amusing.  You may even think I am being silly to bring them up. But I do worry about the lack of attention when it comes to the simpler task of choosing a name.  If they aren't looking carefully at that, wha else are they missing?

Some of the AI pushers fail to consider the way their corporate name will be received when spoken, rather then seen on the screen.  Before I ever saw these two, I heard them advertised on WNYC, my beloved public radio station.  

One, which I have been hearing on the radio station every morning is called Odoo.  Perhaps, in the language of the creators, Odoo is a complimentary term. But every time I hear it said aloud, I imagine employees who will be using the app saying, "Odoo is doo-doo." Now that I have seen it on the screen, it does not look so bad.  but did the developers test the name with people who would hear and speak it?  If they asked for feedback, surely someone would have pointed out that it rhymes with doo-doo.

The same question goes for Claude Ai.  On the screen it is fine, but when I hear it being advertised on the radio, I hear "clawed."  "Want AI so you can be more productive? Buy our product and get clawed!"

My general concern here is that AI creators and pushers don't seem to understand the importance of doubt in decision making.  They ought to be working hard to figure out what could go wrong and what needs to be done to avoid it.  That they approach their work without any doubts is dangerous. 

A Day for Honoring Mothers is Upon Us.

 

Jeff—Saturday

I can’t wait to get back to Greece.  There, at least, the relentless onslaught of agenda-laden, ratings-driven media political analysts, candidates offering transparently undeliverable promises, and crowds cheering for more of their savior’s particular flavor of flimflam Kool-Aid, are all delivered in a language I barely understand. 

Then again, I can barely understand what’s happening in America, and fear it’ll all end in tears.

But I have no time for that now. It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow, and so to all you mothers out there, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! 

I bet most of you don’t know that our present day US form of Mother’s Day was first celebrated in 1908 in West Virginia as a memorial service offered by Anna Jarvis (1864-1948) for her mother, peace activist Ann Reeves Jarvis (1832-1905).  It was in large part the relentless efforts of Anna Jarvis that drove President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to sign a proclamation declaring the second Sunday in May a national holiday to honor mothers.  Interestingly, Anna Jarvis later regretted the rampant commercialization of the day and tried (unsuccessfully) to have it removed from the calendar.

Mother Ann Reeves Jarvis

Daughter

Although some also credit Mother’s Day to Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), another prominent social activist who in 1870 wrote “The Mother’s Day Proclamation” advocating June 2 as Mother’s Day for Peace, it was not her vision of Mother’s Day that President Wilson proclaimed a national holiday.  But Ms. Howe still holds national prominence in other ways, for not the least of her accomplishments was authoring The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Others, too, are credited for their efforts at establishing a Mother’s Day—notably Juliet Calhoun Blakely (a pioneer Michigan woman), Mary Towles Sasseen (a Kentucky school teacher) and Frank Hering (a Notre Dame football player and coach)—so to all of them moms across America should say, “Thanks.”

 

(1818-1920)

Mary Towles Sasseen (1860-1906)

Frank Hering (1874-1943)

Just in case you’re wondering what possible Greek connection there is to all of this Mother’s Day talk, permit me to answer in a My Big Fat Greek Wedding sort of way: A day celebrating mothers and motherhood can be traced directly back to the ancient Greeks.  Each spring they held a festival dedicated to worshiping Rhea, considered the “mother of gods” for her children Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, and Zeus fathered by the Titan Cronos—a fellow best known for eating his children.  And, yes, in an act worthy of earning Rhea her very own Mother’s Day, mom helped to ultimately save them all.

Bravo, Mom!

 

(Rhea and Cronos, together again)

Thanks for everything!

––Jeff 

West with the Night

 

Michael - Alternate Thursdays

This story is really more up Annamaria’s street. It takes place at the time of her Africa novels - early twentieth century – and takes place where those novels are set – colonial Kenya. It’s the story of a truly remarkable contemporary of Karen Blixen – Beryl Markham. She was an aviator, a racehorse trainer, and a serial lover of such celebrities as Baron von Blixen himself, Denys Finch Hatton (of Out of Africa fame), and she added the Prince of Wales and his younger brother to her tally. She was married three times, but that certainly didn’t interfere with her affairs. Kenya was full of remarkable characters in the White Mischief era.

The main reason that Beryl Markham is remembered is not because of her sexual exploits, but because she wrote an extraordinary memoir titled West with the Night. The title comes from her feat of being the first person to fly solo from England to North America, flying west away from the sun into a long night. In fact, that adventure – during which she nearly died – occupies only the last chapter of her book. Most of it relates to her life growing up, training racehorses, and flying small planes in colonial Kenya.

The book didn’t attract much interest when it was first published. It did well enough while people remembered her record flight, but then sank into obscurity. Perhaps the fact that it mentions none of her husbands or her affairs disappointed the everyday reader who was looking for something more salacious. Ernest Hemingway, however, appreciated it. He wrote to a friend:

“Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ... She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

The friend was so taken with the book that he persuaded a US publisher to pick it up and republish it in 1983. The book became a best seller, and there was even some speculation and claims of (at least) co-authorship. None of those have ever been supported by the facts. The success of the book rescued Markham not only from obscurity but also from poverty in her old age. (She lived to 83.) It was a fitting ending to her story.

I reread the book recently and was again struck by the breadth of it, and by the almost cinemagraphic images. Here is a scene from her childhood that gives a flavour of both her writing and the Kenya of those days. It seems that people at the time seemed to think it a good idea to keep their own “tame” lions wandering around on their farms. Her father’s friend, Jim Elkington, had one.

“I was within twenty yards of the Elkington lion before I saw him. He lay sprawled in the morning sun, huge, black-maned, and gleaming with life. His tail moved slowly, stroking the rough grass like a knotted rope end. He was not asleep; he was only idle. He was rusty-red, and soft, like a strokable cat.

I stopped and he lifted his head with magnificent ease and stared at me out of yellow eyes.

I stood there staring back, scuffing my bare toes in the dust, pursing my lips to make a noiseless whistle – a very small girl who knew about lions.”

She holds her courage and walks past the lion, singing a defiant song.

“What lion would be unimpressed by the marching song of the King’s African Rifles?

Singing it still, I took up my trot towards the rim of the low hill which might, if I was lucky, have Cape gooseberry bushes on its slopes.

The country was grey-green and dry, and the sun lay on it closely, making the ground hot under my bare feet. There was no sound and no wind.

Even the lion made no sound, coming swiftly behind me.”

Obviously she lived to tell the tale, but not without scars to tell it for her.

“The lion had lived and died in ways not of his choosing. He was a good lion. He had done what he could about being a tame lion. Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?

I still have the scars of his teeth and claws, but they are very small now and almost forgotten, and I cannot begrudge him his moment.”

It’s a wonderful autobiography, whatever its biases or omissions.