How crime fiction writers are reimagining the semi-desert
The Karoo’s dusty dorpies, and vast, windswept horizons are quietly establishing themselves as the new frontier for South African crime fiction. Writers are increasingly turning to the region not only for its haunting beauty but for its natural ability to evoke isolation and the undercurrents of unease that fuel great noir.
Unlike the urban crime sprees of Johannesburg or Cape Town, the Karoo crime novel trades speed for stillness. The crimes are quieter, stranger, and more psychological.
The emptiness of the terrain becomes the perfect mirror for the unresolved pasts and shifting identities of its characters. In the same way that David Lynch transformed the idyllic American town into a site of surreal dread in Twin Peaks, a growing number of South African authors are using the Great Karoo in particular as a setting to peel back the dust and expose the rot.
Klein Karoo offers a cosy crime frontier
Sally Andrew’s Tannie Maria series is perhaps the most recognisable example of Karoo crime fiction, set in the Klein Karoo town of Ladismith. The first book, Recipes for Love and Murder, introduces Maria van Harten, a recipe columnist turned amateur sleuth, who solves crimes while dispensing culinary advice through the local Klein Karoo Gazette.
The series blends cosy mystery with deeper themes of trauma and resilience, all set against the backdrop of the Swartberg Mountains and the region’s dry, open veld. Andrew, who lives near Ladismith, said the setting was essential to the tone of her novels, describing the Karoo as a place “where the silence holds secrets”.
The series has found international success, with The Milk Tart Murders, the fourth instalment, continuing to explore the quirky yet unsettling undercurrents of small-town life in the Karoo.
Great Karoo brings isolation and noir
In the Great Karoo, the vastness of the landscape lends itself to darker, more introspective crime fiction. Johan Vlok Louw’s Karoo Dusk is a gritty novel set in the Northern Cape, where the protagonist, a former soldier, navigates a world of violence and redemption amid the desolate plains. The novel captures the harshness of the environment and its impact on the human psyche, reflecting the themes of isolation and survival.
Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust, while primarily a legal thriller centred around South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is set in a fictional Karoo town. The novel interrogates the complexities of justice and memory in a post-apartheid context, using the Karoo’s remoteness to underscore the characters’ emotional and moral isolation.
A regional style taking shape
While Cape Flats noir and Joburg thrillers have long held sway in South African crime fiction, Karoo noir is beginning to take shape as a subgenre of its own.
This style is less interested in chase scenes and more in slow burns. It lingers in the heat shimmer of a road outside Graaff-Reinet, or in the bar of a hotel in Nieu-Bethesda where the walls remember things the patrons do not.
Authors like Francois Bloemhof, who has dabbled in rural-set thrillers, and Deon Meyer, whose characters occasionally roam the semi-desert, help lay the groundwork.
In Meyer’s Fever, although the post-apocalyptic plot veers into speculative territory, his treatment of Karoo landscapes as both refuge and threat taps into the same crime-writing sensibility now gaining momentum.
The Karoo as South Africa’s uncanny heart
What the Karoo offers is space: physical, temporal, and moral. It is a place where the ordinary rules of society feel suspended. A body in the veld can go undiscovered for months. A missing person can stay missing. In these novels, justice is not always served, and clarity is rarely achieved. It is in this moral ambiguity that the Karoo becomes fertile ground for the psychological tension central to noir.
Could the Karoo become South Africa’s answer to Twin Peaks? In many ways, it already is. A place of beauty and brutality, stillness and suspicion, the Karoo is not only being reimagined in South African thrillers, it is becoming their most enigmatic protagonist.
