Children find a body in the Strandfontein sand dunes. A populist politician is gunned down outside parliament. His number two executed in bed with a high-class escort. A cabinet minister shot leaving a security estate. A cop assassinated in his car. Another in his beach house. And it all ties back to the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986 - as private investigator Fish Pescado is about to discover. He's on the case, hunting a rogue agent through industrial estates, retirement homes, a farm in the Moordenaars Karoo. He's also convinced someone's out to kill his lover Vicki Kahn, lying in a coma in a hospital. But he can't watch over her all the time. Fish and Vicki are about to get hit by history. And history can be brutal, bloody and deadly.
Hammerman – A Walking Shadow
Children find a body in the Strandfontein sand dunes. A populist politician is gunned down outside parliament. His number two executed in bed with a high-class escort. A cabinet minister shot leaving a security estate. A cop assassinated in his car. Another in his beach house.
And it all ties back to the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986 – as private investigator Fish Pescado is about to discover. He’s on the case, hunting a rogue agent through industrial estates, retirement homes, a farm in the Moordenaars Karoo. He’s also convinced someone’s out to kill his lover Vicki Kahn, lying in a coma in a hospital. But he can’t watch over her all the time. Fish and Vicki are about to get hit by history. And history can be brutal, bloody and deadly.
“HAMMERMAN is the latest blockbuster from one of South Africa’s most talented thriller writers. Mike Nicol is a novelist and stylist, and every one of his books is a treat. HAMMERMAN is no exception,” writes crime novelist Michael Sears.
From the interview: “The thing about many crime novels, certainly the ones I most value, is that they are also political novels. They reveal a country’s history, politics, society. In an endnote in James Ellroy’s novel Perfidia, he writes about his fiction being a “novelistic history.” Which is what much crime fiction is all about.
With my Fish and Vicki series, I started with Of Cops & Robbers where the story hung on a number of apartheid hit squad raids into neighbouring territories and the mysterious killing of the Nationalist Party politician Dr Robert Smit and his wife Jean-Cora in 1977. No one was ever found guilty of those murders.
Then in Agents of the State, I returned to the assassination of Dulcie September in Paris in 1987 (first referenced in Of Cops & Robbers). She ran a branch of the African National Congress in Paris, and it remains a moot point as to whether she was killed by an ANC hitman or someone commissioned by the French secret service.
The next two novels in the series, Sleeper and The Rabbit Hole, despite mentions of past crimes, are more focused on the current looting of the state by members of the ruling ANC. With HAMMERMAN, I wanted to once again link the past to the present. I have long been fascinated by the mystery of the Palme assassination, and as it seems that BOSS agents were seriously thinking of killing him (they even had Hammer as the code name for the operation), I thought, why not bleed it all into the novel?”
For more read the full interview in The Big Thrill here.
Claire Keeton chats to Mike Nicol “about why he is ending his Fish Pescado series — and what’s next for the crime thriller writer”.
Sue Grant-Marshall on Reading Matters: “Grab legendary SA author Mike Nicol’s, ‘Hammerman’ ( Umuzi) before it sells out – as it’s all about Fish Pescado and Vicki Kahn’s last case. Nicol takes us from Muizenberg’s Surfers’ paradise, to glitzy Clifton and the dangerous Karoo as we race after killers, amongst them the murderer of Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme. It’s Nicol at his snappy-sentenced, character-rich best. Unputdownable.”
From a review by Jennifer Crocker: “One of the best books I have read, and I think Nicol’s finest off a high base. You really will only know the truth at the end and the truth will rock you.”
There are five books in the Fish & Vicki series. You can find more information on each title here. This series more or less covers the years 2013 to 2021 in my fictional history of South Africa.
