Stanley Trollip, one half of Michael Stanley, speaks at Sea Point library.
Stanley Trollip met with eager readers at the Sea Point library last Thursday to discuss his new book, A Deadly Covenant.
Together with Michael Sears, they form the award-winning author Michael Stanley, who is responsible for producing the Detective David “Kubu” Bengu series, of which A Deadly Covenant is the eighth book.
“I’ve done a number of talks here, I love speaking to the people in libraries, they always ask good questions and whenever I get a chance to give a talk in a library I always do it,” said Mr Trollip, 75, who lives part-time in Sea Point and Minneapolis in USA.
The author shared some insights into their writing style and how they find the villains in their stories.
“We write by the seat of our pants. So when we start writing we generally have no clue who the bad guy is or who the bad guys will be, we don’t know and we don’t care. We think its very unfair that people like you, readers, go through the book, and you get more and more nervous wondering who it is who the bad guy is and you get near the end and all is revealed, we want the same experience when we write,” he said.
“So in the book A Deadly Covenant as it went on we made changes and we redo things as you find it’s not going where you want it to go later. We were probably 80% through the book and we had several people who could be the bad guy, so we had to finesse it so that its completely fair to the reader who that person is,” he said.
“So whoever the bad person is, you’ve got to have a paper trail as to who it will be and you want the reader to see that when they go back they can see the hints, they can maybe say this was puzzling, but then it all comes together.”
According to Mr Trollip, they began writing their first book, A Carrion Death, in March 2003. This was nearly 15 years after observing hyenas devouring a wildebeest.
“On a trip to Botswana in the late 1980s, we watched a pack of hyenas hunt and devour a wildebeest, it took about four hours, they eat the bones and the flesh. And Michael and I said if we ever need to get rid of a body we leave it out for the hyenas. No body no case. Now both of us were readers of fiction and we thought there’s a really good start to a murder mystery.
“It took us three years to write the book and we wrote it for ourselves. We gave it to our friends and they said they liked it as good friends are required to say. But they pushed us to get it published.”
After sending out close to 40 letters to publishers they were finally signed by an agent in New York and offered a contract by HarperCollins.
“I was speechless that such a big publisher wanted our book. This was beyond our wildest dreams and the agent said they wanted a two-book series which we were not planning to do. But I said yes we will do a two-book series.”
It’s two decades later and the duo have written nine books, the stand-alone book being Dead of Night (U.K. & South Africa) also known as Shoot The Bastards (USA). Mr Trollip says fiction is not well received in South Africa as people prefer to read about crime, politics and personalities.
“It’s a small market for us, but a nice one, our biggest market is the States and the UK as well,” he said.