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ICON RPG Convention |
 23-25 July 2010
JABULA REC HALL, JHB |
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Interviews
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Written by Sarah Lotz
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 Richard Kunzmann’s impeccably researched and detailed writing has been compared to the likes of Cormac McCarthy. His first book, Bloody Harvests , was nominated for a Crime Writers Association’s J.C.W. Creasy Award for Best New Novel. But his books are not for the squeamish.
Like the best in the genre, Richard is not one to shy away from telling it like it is, violence and all, and you won’t find any sugarcoated morality tales in his hard-hitting prose.
The Namibia-born South African writer 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.
Although Richard admits that he rarely sits still, he managed to squeeze some time in to speak to Sarah Lotz about crime, all things writerly, gore, G5 jets and the future of the South African Police Service (SAPS).
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Written by Henry Arnaud
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 Eva Mendes doesn’t have to try to be sexy. It’s in her blood. The way she walks, the way she talks, the way she smiles… She is using all that and more for her character in The Spirit.
Adapted from the legendary comic strip, Will Eisner’s The Spirit is a classic action-adventure-romance told by genre-twister Frank Miller (creator of 300 and Sin City). It is the story of a former rookie cop who returns mysteriously from the dead as The Spirit to fight crime from the shadows of Central City. Eva plays Sand Saref, the jewel thief.
She’s the love of his life turned bad.
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Written by Joe Vaz
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 At first you may not recognise his name, but Ed Neumeier has created two of the greatest Sci-Fi franchises ever, Robocop & Starship Troopers.
He was recently in South Africa shooting his directorial debut, the third instalment in the Starship franchise, Starship Troopers: Marauder, which he also wrote.
Having had a small role in the film I was lucky enough to get on to set and given the opportunity to interview him.
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Written by John Connolly
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 Stephen King chews another grape and smiles happily. The first reviews of his latest novel, Lisey’s Story, have begun to trickle in on this, the first day of publication, and all are hugely positive. They may, in fact, be the best reviews of his career, and his delight, even 33 years after the publication of his first book, is genuine and undisguised.
The pleasure he takes in them has a number of roots. It’s clear that Lisey’s Story is important to him, which is why he has taken to the promotional trail for the first time in seven years in order to publicise it. He knows that it is one of his best books, a beautifully written study of a long marriage and the grief that follows the death of a spouse, as well as an examination of the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the writer and the creative process. “Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark,” as the book puts it at one point and, even if King is keener to point out the ways in which it differs from his own life rather than the resemblances, it is obvious that this is an intensely personal book for him.
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Written by Joe Vaz
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 Pick up a John Connolly novel and immediately you’ll find yourself sucked into the grimy world of private detectives, smart-aleck sidekicks and sadistic serial killers, but Connolly’s books travel just a little beyond your typical hard-boiled detective novels and into the darkness along the edges of reality.
His recurring protagonist is Charlie Parker, an ex-NYPD cop whose wife and daughter have been brutally slain by a serial killer. He is a tough, cynical, really, really pissed off guy - a man so far beyond the edge that he seems to have travelled a little past this world’s limitations. He is so completely surrounded by death that he has struck up a relationship with it.
He sees things, he hears things, and occasionally they slip through.
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 Supported by
The National Arts Council
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Interviews 
