A Carrion Death: Introducing Detective Kubu

“Our first book was called A Carrion Death, and it had the backstory theme of blood diamonds. It introduced Kubu and his family and that would possibly be where people would like to start. The idea for the book came because Stan is a pilot, and we used to do fly-in trips to different areas of Botswana and Zimbabwe. On one occasion, we saw a pack of hyenas attack and pull down a wildebeest. Hyenas are scavengers if there’s one of them, but if there are 50, they’re very successful hunters, which there were in that pack. Over the period of an hour or so, they’d eaten everything. They crunched the bones and ate the skin. There were some horns left and perhaps some bits of hoof, but that was it. We thought that this would make a great way of getting rid of a body in a murder mystery. After all, how can the police trace a murderer if there’s no body—if it’s been processed by hyenas? That’s the premise that starts the book. An ecologist and a game ranger discover a body being eaten by a hyena (the discovery is too soon for the disappearance of the body to actually occur). After we start writing, the question was, ‘Why was it important that this body be completely removed from the world?’ That led to A Carrion Death. Kubu appears fully fleshed out, literally and metaphorically in A Carrion Death and there’s no backstory for him because he wasn’t going to be the main character. We just needed a detective to investigate this murder. But he appeared and took over the series. There are six books in that series.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer