Namibia-born South African writer, Richard Kunzmann, burst onto the local and international crime-writing scene with his first novel, the dark crime thriller Bloody Harvests, which was published when he was only twenty-six (though he wrote his first complete novel when he was ten!).

The story of his publishing deal is the stuff of which wannabe writers dream. He’d moved to the UK for love (his girlfriend’s visa had expired), and while working as a bookseller he bumped into an editor and pitched the idea for a novel based on the horrifying spate of muti killings, which were then garnering international media attention.

That idea grew into Bloody Harvests which introduced readers to his main protagonists, Harry Mason, an ex-pat white English policeman, and Jacob Tshabalala, an African policeman with strong religious beliefs. They reappeared in two further novels, Salamander Cotton and Dead-End Road.

RICHARD'S WORK FOR SW:

RECOLLECTION -
Originally published in SW#8

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