“Translated from the dead”

In light of the contemporary popularity of crime fiction, true crime and crime television, avid consumers of these kinds of narratives like to think of themselves as amateur detectives – schooled in the discourse of observation and deduction. Readers of crime fiction become accustomed to a kind of formula, comforted in the knowledge that the mystery will be resolved and the perpetrator apprehended. However, this chapter investigates how a number of short stories in Ivan Vladislavić's 101 Detectives challenge the conventions of legibility in representing crime in post-apartheid South Africa. The mediations of language, reading and writing as modes of detection are shown in these stories to come up short, so to speak. Instead, and through the stylistic and formalistic frame provided by the anti-detective genre, acts of detection are defeated, closure is deferred, and order is not restored. Writing crime and violence reveals a matrix of structural violences in the postcolony, experiences that cannot be “translated from the dead”. The chapter argues that while violence and crime are not unrepresentable per se, the degree to which they can be “managed” or “contained” by language or fiction is limited.