This article compares the representation of detection in two novels by Mike Nicol, The Ibis Tapestry (1998) and Payback (2008). Each concerns the fortunes of arms dealers. The first is a complex intertextual weave of the biography of (the fictitious) Christo Mercer, the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his tragedy Tamburlaine and reflections on the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second is a crime-thriller that concerns the legacy of the dubious struggle history of two former operatives now offering personal protection to wealthy foreign tourists in Cape Town. Both deal with the persistence of apartheid history into the post-apartheid dispensation and are equally sceptical of any simple notion of recovering the truths of that history. But the novels differ significantly in their mode and in their generic affiliations. The paper speculates about this difference: it argues that contemporary South African crime writing is inclined to reduce the complex questions regarding the elusive nature of historical truth to generic devices. Irony has, perhaps predictably, become the dominant literary mode in a South African present marked, not by agonized interrogations of our past, but by a worldly resignation to routine criminality and corruption. We have, our argument concludes, left the territory of the political for a politics of generic style.

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