00:00:01
Speaker 1: Lunch with Pippa Hudson.
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Speaker 2: We all have a voice.
00:00:05
Speaker 1: Use yours.
00:00:06
Speaker 3: Call 021-446-0567.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: Join the conversation on Cape Talk.
00:00:16
Speaker 4: And with that, we dive into our live studio audience, which, of course, requires a live audience. A very warm welcome to everybody who is with us at our Greenpoint studios to celebrate the launch of the latest Dion Mayo novel. Scorpio Rising is the English translation of Dion's latest mystery involving detectives Benny Crystal and Vaughn Cupido.
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Speaker 1: Hit the shelves.
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Speaker 4: Virtually at the same time as Dion's new TV series, Invisible, which is based on his previous novel, Blood Safari, and will be hitting our screens this coming Wednesday.
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Speaker 1: I know I'm now sounding.
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Speaker 4: Like a stuck record, but please make sure you're watching it Wednesday, 8 o'clock on MNET. So a very busy time indeed for one of this country's most beloved writers and one of its busiest writers.
00:00:56
Speaker 1: We're really glad you could fit us in, Dion.
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Speaker 4: In between book launches and TV screenings and press junkets.
00:01:01
Speaker 1: Thanks for being here and welcome.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Pippa. Thanks for having me. It's always a great pleasure and a privilege to be here and to talk to you. And hi to the studio audience. Thanks for being here.
00:01:11
Speaker 1: Thanks, Dion.
00:01:12
Speaker 4: To the audience members, just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question or there's something you've always wanted to know about one of the previous books, for example, you're very welcome to do so. Just raise a hand so that Amber in the multicolored shirt at the back there can get a microphone to you so that the audience listening at home can hear. And of course, to the audience listening at home or in the car or at work, you have the usual channels available to you, including the WhatsApp line 0725671567. Dion, before we dive into the book, the new book, let's just kind of take stock of where you are, because.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: Already established as.
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Speaker 4: the country's most successful crime novelist, your book's selling around the world, translated into multiple languages, but to have a new book and a new TV series launching literally within 10 days of one another is not something that happens every day.
00:01:58
Speaker 1: It must feel a little bit surreal.
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Speaker 2: It is a little bit surreal. It's a coincidence that it happened so close together, but it's wonderful. It's extremely exciting, both Scorpio Rising, now out in English, and the TV series, and The strange thing is that both projects started two, three years ago. So, you know, to come to fruition now is coincidence and fantastic.
00:02:25
Speaker 4: If you think back to the Dion of 20-plus years ago, as he was just making his start as a writer, wondering, can I do this? Am I going to be able to get my first book published? I mean, did he ever imagine that he'd be in this position one day?
00:02:37
Speaker 2: Well, it's 30-plus years ago, but thank you. No, you know, I... My first hope was just to have a novel published, and I never thought that it would be more than that. I was just hoping. As a matter of fact, my very first novel in Afrikaans was a total failure. I think they printed 1,200. They sold about 800, and they sent me a letter saying they're going to pulp the remainder, and I bought 20 copies at one rand each. so that at least my grandchildren would know that I wrote a novel. So back then, I never envisaged that this could ever happen. And even now, it feels a little bit surreal and dreamlike that it did happen.
00:03:23
Speaker 4: Those 20 copies must be collector's items of note.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Have you got them under lock and key somewhere?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: I still have them at home. It was fascinating. I think my manuscript submission back then was the first suspense crime novel in Afrikaans in so many years. I think under apartheid, there just wasn't much of that. And also, it was frowned upon during those times to read crime fiction. A good Afrikaner did not read such lowly fiction as crime fiction. And so the book was published. It was called Wie met Fiesbiel. It was never translated. It was published with a very gaudy sort of a common cover title, sort of a semi, a woman with a décolletage and a guy doing a karate move. And I absolutely hated it. Luckily, it was republished, reprinted several years later with a much more lovely cover. But things have changed a lot since then.
00:04:27
Speaker 1: For one thing, we don't have to put stars on the deck all the time.
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Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:04:30
Speaker 1: I love it.
00:04:32
Speaker 4: I mean, Dion, you're often cited as one of the very few South African writers who actually does well enough to make a living as.
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Speaker 1: A full-time writer. But of course, it wasn't always like that.
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Speaker 4: And I mean, a story like that demonstrates you didn't magically become a famous, best-selling international author overnight. There was a lot of Plotting the streets, submitting manuscripts, reworking.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Them, etc. And in fact, I don't know if everybody knows.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: That Dion was a reporter on a newspaper way back before he started publishing books. And what was it like for you being able to make sort of get that first foot into publishing? I know you'd also worked as a brand strategist in between, but that journey from the one world into the other.
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Speaker 1: What was it like?
00:05:11
Speaker 2: It was an incredible journey. As I said, my first book didn't do extremely well. As a matter of fact, the publisher who published it did not want to publish anything else. I got very lucky in that a small niche Afrikaans publisher, Quellerie, decided to publish my second novel. And then I got even luckier when the... retired former managing director of Tafelberg, read the book. Isabel Dixon was his daughter-in-law who became our agent. He sent the novel to her. The English title is Dead Before Dying. And Isabel decided to take me on because of that book. But then it took several years for the books to be translated and for her to be able to submit it to European and British and American publishers. So there was a long period in which my books did not sell well in Afrikaans because I think it was very strange for people to read in the genre in Afrikaans. But they started selling overseas much better. I was a A bestseller in France, I think five, six years before my Afrikaans books started selling well.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
00:06:26
Speaker 2: It took a TV series called Oeriont, which was on CakeNet, MNet back in the day, for people to really notice my books for the first time and start buying them in Afrikaans and thinking, well, it's okay for good Afrikaans to read this sort of thing.
00:06:42
Speaker 4: It's fascinating how that process worked. Quite a few people asking the same question around translation, Sue and others.
00:06:48
Speaker 1: Does Dion do his own translations into English?
00:06:51
Speaker 2: No, I don't. I have a wonderful translator, Laura Segers. She lives in New Bethesda. But she only started translating my books after the late Madeleine van Booyen passed away. Madeleine did, I think, the first three or four. She was a larger-than-life character for those who remember her. She was the grand dame of South African books, and she did the first, I think, three or four translations. Then she passed away, and Laura became my translator. Laura is great. We've worked together for such a long time. What was funny initially, Laura is an incredibly decent woman. And when Benny and Vaughn used to use profanity, she toned it down in the translation. So I had to sit with her every time and say, Laura, that's not how policemen and women speak. Let's ramp it up.
00:07:47
Speaker 5: I love it.
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Speaker 4: Well, that's answered the second part of the question, which is how much changes in translation, and do you have to sort of allow that and leave your hands off, or can you step in?
00:07:58
Speaker 2: No, no, we work together closely. Laura would do half of the novel in translation, and then she'll send it to me, and I'll work through that while she carries on. Initially, when we got to know one another and she got to understand my style, I had to do a little bit more work, but these days I do very little. So I'm very happy with your relationship with your editor, your translator, and your agent. It's a lot like a marriage. There has to be utmost trust for it to work.
00:08:35
Speaker 4: We're going to talk about the marriages in the new book and the trust issues there in just a second. The new book is Scorpio Rising. It was Scorpio in Afrikaans when it came out originally. And as you've heard Dion reference, it brings back your, I think we can call them much loved duo of Benny Chrysler and Vaughan Cupido. Two men with a nose for detective work. They can track down the smartest of criminals. Dion, it's just a pity they can't manage their own marriages and love life with quite the same degree of confidence. I'm sure most of the audience have read at least one of their stories before, but there might be somebody listening who hasn't met them. So before we talk about where they go in the new book, will you just introduce us to Benny and Vaughn?
00:09:13
Speaker 2: Right. Benny Griesel, he's a recovering alcoholic. He's 49 years old in... Scorpio and he's had a very messy personal life he was divorced when he was much younger then finally fell in love with a woman again and Alexa Barnard and they in Leo they got married right at the end of Leo they got married so in Scorpio Benny is a newly married guy for the second time and coming to terms with this new life and pinching himself to have found such a wonderful woman while Vaughn Cupido who hails from the Cape Flats. He lives in Stellenbosch. He lives with... his partner, Desiree Kutsia. And Vaughan is too afraid to ask her to marry him. So he's constantly on a diet, saying he's got this target weight of 99 kgs. And when he reaches that, he'll ask her to marry him. And Benny keeps on telling him, you're just afraid that you'll say no. That's why your diet never works.
00:10:23
Speaker 4: Every time he hits 100 kilograms, he goes on a burger run, and.
00:10:25
Speaker 1: It's backwards again.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: So I don't want to give too much away of the plot, but just to set the scene for those who haven't read the book yet, this book opens with a report of arson, a very small crime. It targets a shepherd's hut, a derelict shepherd's hut on a farm outside Stellenbosch.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Nobody is hurt. The damage is limited. It seems fairly insignificant.
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Speaker 4: And then a second incident targets a caravan on another property outside Stellenbosch, but this time somebody is killed. And at the same time, Benny and Vaughn are asked to look into an apparent suicide of a local private investigator.
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Speaker 1: Vaughn's convinced it's not what it seems.
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Speaker 4: And then as the book continues, these crimes and investigations converge and turn out to be something much, much bigger with the shades of international criminal conspiracy. I think I'm leaving enough for the reader to discover for themselves there. What intrigues me, Dion, is I read somewhere that you actually came up with the sort of the broad concept for Scorpio back in the 2010 World.
00:11:21
Speaker 1: Cup or so.
00:11:21
Speaker 2: Yes. One half of the story idea comes from back then. And I had the idea and I just couldn't make it work because the technology was not available back then. to make it credible, because that's the one thing that I think is of the utmost importance, and especially crime fiction, is verisimilitude. It's got to have that texture of the truth, that feeling that this could happen. And then the other half of the idea, I actually had lunch with a wonderful South African journalist who told me a true story. And that was when I remembered this idea from 2010, and suddenly I realized that Today, the technology is so advanced that it would be absolutely possible to do what I wanted to do. So it was very serendipitous.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:12:12
Speaker 4: I mean, you must have had to do a lot of research, though, because it's quite complicated technology. It's new technology that you're referencing in many respects. And there are elements of it's almost unbelievable, except you know it is real.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: So, I mean, there is that sort of tension between technology.
00:12:27
Speaker 4: Suspending your incredulity with the recognition that this is real tech you're talking about. But you must have had to get to know that tech and understand how it works to be able to write credibly.
00:12:36
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:12:36
Speaker 1: What did that process look like?
00:12:38
Speaker 2: Well, it was a very long process. I was very lucky to find people who could help me, experts in the field. I did not know back then that in South Africa we had a world-famous... expert in AI and missile technology, and I was very fortunate to be able to meet her and to spend time with her, and obviously a lot of other research as well. The big problem was for me to first of all understand it, and then to, this is Vaughan Cupid's case, which is the really complicated one, and to let Vaughan understand it, because I think he's smarter than I am. So if I understood it, he would understand it. But then the real challenge was, how do I present all of this information to the reader so that it's not boring, but it's understandable and it's credible? And that was, I think, the biggest challenge. The research that I did was much bigger than what eventually landed in the book. Because you just can't put everything in.
00:13:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
00:13:41
Speaker 4: But as you say, you need to know that back story to be able to present the front page, as it were. Now, Dion, I mean, you've referenced there finding the experts to help. In all of our interviews, you've referenced how many... police officers have been that expert for you over the years, have helped you look at the procedural elements which are so crucial to these books and the ins and outs and say, you know, yes, it is conceivable that that could happen or really an investigation wouldn't work that way. And I know you've previously expressed a lot of gratitude to them. I'm assuming it was the same this time around?
00:14:12
Speaker 2: It was the same this time around as well. When I finish a manuscript, I have Colonel Elmery Mayberg who has since left the South African Police Service quite recently. But she reads all of my manuscripts, and she points out if I make any procedural mistakes or anything else that concerns the way that the police work. And if she's happy, then I know it's credible in that regard.
00:14:40
Speaker 1: How do your police readers respond?
00:14:42
Speaker 4: I mean, have you ever had that kind of interaction where an actual police officer comes to you and says, you got this so right, or, dude, you got this so wrong?
00:14:49
Speaker 2: I haven't had the, you've got it so wrong so far, thanks to people who read the manuscript before it goes to print. But I do have policemen and women who come and say, thank you for presenting our world in a way that is sympathetic and is real. And to me, that is one of the biggest compliments is when a detective comes to me and he says, you got it right. I love that.
00:15:13
Speaker 4: And we're going to talk about some of those aspects of their world that you touch on in this book. And in this book, in some cases, in more depth than before, I just want to say for anybody who's tuning in on air halfway through this interview and wondering who you're listening to, I'm sure you recognize the voice anyway, but it belongs, for the record, to Dion Mayer, our best-selling crime novelist. in studio with us chatting about the launch of his newest book, Scorpio Rising, is the English translation of Scorpio in Afrikaans. And we have a live studio audience with us, who I'm hoping will join the conversation as well with some questions just now.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: A question quickly from Keith.
00:15:46
Speaker 4: You have referenced before the naming of characters and the naming of Benny Grissel, but Keith wants to know where you got Benny's name from.
00:15:53
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, Benny was never supposed to be a protagonist in the Dead Before Dying, I needed a drunken cop to spoil the fun of the protagonist. When it's a character that you know is only going to be in the book for two or three pages, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the name. And in my head, he looked a little bit like the son of one of my favorite teachers at high school, Mr. Ben Griesel. And his son is called Benny. And I thought, well, as a homage to Mr. Ben Grissel, I'll just call this character Benny Grissel because the son looked like Benny. And then when I started writing the character, he was so much fun to write about. He gave me so many creative options in terms of the story that he just didn't want to go away. And eventually he became a substantial character in that novel. And By the end of it, I thought, well, he's got the potential to have his own book one day. And then when I eventually got to that, which was Devil's Peak, I had the main problem of now I have an alcoholic cop, which is such a cliche. What do I do with him? And the journey with Benny has always been interesting ever since those days. But there's a little tale to this story. Benny, the real Benny Gressel, Mr. Benny Gressel's son, Benny, he's also a Cantonian, and he's been to several book launches, and he told me the wonderful story some years ago when he lived in Blobeck Strand. He said one of his great pleasures is in December when the bikini girls are lying on the beach reading one of my novels, he says the greatest pick-up line in the world is to walk up to them and to say, Hi, my name is Benny Gressel.
00:17:48
Speaker 4: A second career as a dating coach lies ahead here. Now, speaking of characters who sort of grew beyond what you initially thought they were going to be, Mark in OBS emailing to ask whether the same is going to happen with Vaughn Cupido, because Vaughn has become a bigger and bigger presence, partly because his character is.
00:18:04
Speaker 1: Maturing and his police work is maturing.
00:18:07
Speaker 4: But Mark asking, do you foresee a possibility of Vaughn having his own book on his own one day?
00:18:13
Speaker 2: I think for me, I don't think in terms of a Benny Griesel mystery, I think it's a Benny and Vaughan case. They've become inseparable to me as the author, and I think in terms of my writing as well. So for me, he's a co-protagonist. There has been, I think, Cobra, where I think Vaughan played a bigger role than Benny did. But it's a difficult thing to juggle because there are a lot of people who love Benny and there are a lot of people who love Vaughn. And if I leave one of them out or, heaven forbid, have one of them die, I would be crucified. So I think they'll continue to be a team with– you know, various parts of the book where they will be, they've taken us for that part.
00:19:00
Speaker 1: I'm so relieved to hear that. I'm sure many others are too.
00:19:04
Speaker 4: I mean, you've touched on the reality of the policeman's world. And one of the things that was interesting in this book is Benny, of course, has PTSD. And he's seeing a therapist. He's doing the healthy thing of putting in the work and working on it. And His psychologist has told him one of the things he needs to do is open up more to Alexa, his wife, and share more about what he actually endures and sees at work. But he still feels difficulty doing that because he wants to shield her from.
00:19:30
Speaker 1: What he sees.
00:19:31
Speaker 4: That must be a very common conundrum, I would imagine, for knowing about the caseload, the workload, and the levels of violence the average South African cop will see.
00:19:39
Speaker 2: Exactly, and not wanting to take that home because you don't want to taint your loved ones with the scenes that they see, the things that they experience. And that is a major problem because the psychologists that I've spoken to who treat people with PTSD say that one of the biggest things that you can do is to open up, to talk about it to loved ones where it's a safe space for you to talk about it. So it remains a real conundrum for for policemen and women in South Africa, I think all over the world. That's just one of the things. I think the other one is often survivor guilt. The other thing is that fear that what you see here, what humans are able to do to other humans, that you want to shield your loved ones from that. How do you protect them? And you feel that you cannot keep on protecting them because there's just so much of it, and that brings on even more PTSD, and that's the reason why Benny is an alcoholic, because he really suffers to cope with it.
00:20:38
Speaker 6: Join the live studio conversation on Cape Talk.
00:20:44
Speaker 4: We are back in conversation with writer Dion Mayer about his new novel, Scorpio Rising, which has just hit the shelves, the English translation of Scorpio, the Afrikaans novel. And in a little while, we'll also talk about his work on the new TV series of one of his former novels.
00:20:58
Speaker 1: First, though, a couple of listener questions.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: And just before we get to those, if I can circle back, we were talking before the break, Dion, about PTSD and the real world of what cops go through. Alcoholism is unfortunately a common factor as well for many of them because of what they see. And as you've referenced, you've taken Benny on a real roller coaster with this. Now, in this book, Touch Wood, he's stable. He's doing fine. He's happily married. He is kind of going, I can't quite believe this world is mine. But he's also working very hard to repair relationships with his children.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:21:30
Speaker 4: And, I mean, let's talk about the research into this aspect of addiction because it's a very real portrait of somebody going, things are okay here, but I can never undo the damage I've done in the past. You've referenced speaking to psychologists about PTSD. Did you do some of the research on addiction journeys as well?
00:21:46
Speaker 2: I did. The late Madeleine van Belyon took me to some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I experienced that. I'm a constant, as a matter of fact... I have a reader, and I won't say his name, who's an alcoholic who lives in Cape Town that I speak to with every book. He goes to the same Alcoholics Anonymous chapter that Benny goes to. It's called the Green Door chapter, so I know exactly what that looks like and when they meet, what time they meet. So, you know, for me, that was the one thing that I could do with Benny, being the alcoholic cop, being a bit of a cliché, to take it seriously, to look at Why are so many people under stress? Why do they become alcoholics? How do you struggle with it? I mean, it's a constant battle, the things that people go through, and also the damage in the case of his family, the damage that he's done, especially in his relationship with his son, Fritz. So that was another part of Benny's journey, was to try and mend this relationship with his son. Okay.
00:22:57
Speaker 4: Now, Caro heard your reference to the very first novel and the copies that were published and the one that didn't succeed. Caro wants to know, did that original first publisher ever reach out to you again since you have become world famous to ask to work with you again?
00:23:11
Speaker 2: Yes, they did. Well, what happened was they actually bought the little publisher that published my second book. So I became one of their, I never published under that imprint again, but it became part of my Afrikaans publisher, the bigger company. And I'm happy to say that they haven't pulped any of my other books so far.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: Touch wood.
00:23:32
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:23:32
Speaker 4: A lovely story in from Cheryl. She says, my first Dion Mayer book was 13 hours. Bought it immediately after getting home from Matamata in the Kalakadi. There was another man in the pool who was willing to go back into the heat of his caravan to finish his copy of that book and.
00:23:48
Speaker 1: Could not put it down.
00:23:49
Speaker 4: I'd never read him, but I went straight home and bought the copy and I haven't stopped since then. Cheers to a phenomenal author from Cheryl. You're doing something right if somebody's sitting in a caravan in the Kalakadi in the middle of December reading your book.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: It has to be said. Let's go to our first question from the audience. Thank you for being with us. Good afternoon.
00:24:05
Speaker 7: Dion, I'd like to know if you would have to tweak or totally revise your characters, Benny and Cupido, if you took them to the Eastern Cape or if you took them up to.
00:24:17
Speaker 1: KZN or if you put them in Joburg or somewhere else in the country.
00:24:21
Speaker 7: Is it something that's You would consider taking them.
00:24:25
Speaker 2: Elsewhere, really. Benny has been to Joburg once or twice on cases. I don't think I need to revise them. I mean, where they come from, their background, Benny comes from Paddo, Vaughan comes from Mitchell's Plain, that is part of who they are. And I love the idea of taking them out and having this fish-out-of-water scenario where they don't understand when KZN and Gauteng are different countries to the KPNC, really. So it would be interesting. The problem is to write a book where that has enough verisimilitude, where it feels real enough. Because police people work in their area, at their specific police stations. So it's going to be a little bit difficult. I've also had from overseas readers asking, but when are you going to let Benny go to France or go to the Netherlands and that sort of thing? And it's a wonderful idea. And I've often thought, how can I do this? Because I can just see Vaughan in France, you know, trying to speak French and thinking that he does it. I can just see the fun in that. But again, it's got to feel real. It's got to have enough realism there. so that you don't lose the reader. So I'm always thinking of possibilities, but then you get a story and it's set in Stellenbosch or it's set in Cape Town and then you sort of stick to that. That's the world that I write about. If you think of so many crime authors all over the world, Michael Connolly writes about LA, Ian Rankin writes about Edinburgh, and I think That's why people start buying these books is because you show them a specific world and you show them all the nuances of that specific community. So it's not impossible that I might do it one day, but it's not very likely.
00:26:15
Speaker 4: I have to tell you, I was in Edinburgh last year and I went to visit Ian Rankin's pub. It looked like it was full of criminals, Dion. I lasted about two minutes and I left. Do you have like a local watering hole that people in Stellenbosch come looking for you at?
00:26:27
Speaker 2: Not really. I mean, we are more eaters than drinkers. So I think De Freyje burger is probably in Stellenbosch. It's perhaps the one place where Marianne and I hang out the most.
00:26:40
Speaker 1: They've got a Benny Griesel burger, haven't they, on the menu?
00:26:43
Speaker 6: They do, yeah.
00:26:43
Speaker 2: They've been extremely kind. Perhaps my son called me up and he said, Benny is a huge burger fan because Benny has been in love with burgers ever since the first book. He said, what kind of burger would Benny like? And I said, I told him, and he said, well, we're going to make that burger, and we're going to call it off to Benny.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: What a compliment.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: And I think that's one of the greatest things that have ever happened to me, because I'm such a Badger's Poisson fan. I'm a burger fan, and now there's a.
00:27:06
Speaker 6: Benny Friesel burger.
00:27:07
Speaker 3: Now there's a Benny Friesel burger.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: Go and give it a try after you've read the book. We've got another question from the audience. Welcome.
00:27:14
Speaker 5: Your stories are great when it comes to applying the current happenings in the country, the world, and the way that is. How often does it happen that there's a coincidence like when I read the story, Scorpio, about when the guy saw the light and he said, this is a UFO. My first thought was, is Mr. Mayer really that brave to go into UFOs and stuff? I'm going to explain this. And how it worked and played out was beautiful, but What I want to say is the week before I read this story, there was something on world news about the Americans now looking into UFOs for files that's going to be uncovered and stuff like this. And I just thought this coincidence is unbelievable. There's no way you could have written this last week. How often does it happen that something like this?
00:28:10
Speaker 2: You know, the book, your stories are.
00:28:12
Speaker 5: So real and then something like this comes in. It's almost come like this. This is like a living book. How often does it happen? And does it also happen the.
00:28:22
Speaker 2: More you write, the longer you do this? Thank you. It's pure luck. You know, I mean, I read a lot. I read several news websites and I read newspapers and news magazines. The interesting thing is that... The American authorities released some UFO material while I was writing the book, and that was why. And then they released some more when the book was published. And just, I think, two weeks ago, they released a batch again. So they're constantly doing that. But sometimes you just get lucky in terms of what you're writing about. Fever is a great example.
00:29:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, a classic example.
00:29:07
Speaker 2: When I did research for fever, I went and spoke to a virologist at Stellenbosch University, and he and his colleague came up with this coronavirus, which would be the ideal one. And lo and behold, I think it was two years later, there was... the COVID pandemic. So sometimes you just get very lucky in that sense. And then everybody thinks you're a prophet and you can see the future. And they ask you for lotto numbers and that sort of thing. But I'm afraid it's just luck.
00:29:37
Speaker 1: Thank you for that.
00:29:38
Speaker 4: And neatly answering Edward's question about... the inspiration for fever.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:29:42
Speaker 4: Now, I mean, while we're talking about current affairs and overlap with your books, let's talk a little bit about the new adaptation of Blood Safari, which is, again, it's coming to the screens on MNET next week, Wednesday.
00:29:54
Speaker 1: The first episode will air at 8 o'clock. The series is called Invisible, but it is.
00:29:58
Speaker 4: The adaptation of Blood Safari. And this is a book where you had to do a bit of massaging of the storyline in the adaptation because it's been a while since it was initially published and current affairs have moved on.
00:30:11
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: Dion, before we talk about that, let's just talk about the significance of the fact that you are so deeply.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: Involved in this TV production.
00:30:18
Speaker 4: Because you have previously in former interviews said to me, when you sell the TV rights, you so often hand them over, say, here's my character, here's my story, off you go, and you have to take a back seat. And if you're lucky, they might ask you on to set to take a few photos one day.
00:30:31
Speaker 1: That's not what's happened this time, though.
00:30:33
Speaker 2: No, I'm getting more and more reluctant to just sell the rights because I'm not always happy with how they adapt the novels, especially if it's a foreign producer who does not know South Africa. So not all the series and movies that have been made of my books enthralled me. So I'm trying to stay more and more involved. I'm part of a little production company, and we try to do as many of my books as we can, as we can find financing for, which is the biggest problem in South Africa. But this one was one where I was involved. It's also quite a history. We started working with an American production house, and they dictated to us that there had to be another scriptwriter, international scriptwriter. Luckily, the guy that I wrote with, Walt Schneider, is a great Canadian screenwriter with a lot of experience writing. And it was a real pleasure to work with him. But at least I was there to keep the South Africaness of the scripts. But I was very involved in the development of the adaptation. And as you say, the big challenge was, because the book was, I think, 16 years ago, the book was published, and it was about a very specific political environment at that time, an historic environment. And now, 15, 16 years later, that just would not have worked. So you either have the choice of making a period piece where you go back and you set it in that time frame, which gets much more expensive, because everything, all the clothes that people wear, the cars that they drive, all the technology has to be from that period, or you can update it. And we thought there was enough interesting things happening in South Africa politically during that time that we can update it and just present it. But I think the essence of the story is still that you still have The same bodyguard looking after Emma Lerhou who is an expat coming back to South Africa to try and find her long lost brother who got lost in Kruger 30 years ago. So I think the essence of the story is still there.
00:32:48
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:32:48
Speaker 4: It was so interesting last week. So Dougray Scott and Tim Turan, who are both producers and a star in this series, were chatting to us about the shooting of the series Invisible. And they both referenced how closely you worked on this.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: What can we change? What can we adapt?
00:33:04
Speaker 4: Something as simple as Emma's character, the actress who's playing her is an Australian. She does a British accent very well. How do we make this meld with a South African character? We make her an expat who's been out of the country for a long time and work to the strengths of the cast you've got. Are you happy with how it's all played out now that you've had sight of the finished product?
00:33:24
Speaker 2: I'm absolutely delighted. I think it's the best thing that I've been involved with. I think the production values are incredibly high. The cast was just magnificent. And then the crew. I think Doug Ray mentioned.
00:33:36
Speaker 6: That as well.
00:33:36
Speaker 1: He was so complimentary about the crew.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: I think we have the best film crew in the world in South Africa. who work harder and more professionally than anyone else. And they were a delight to work with also on this production. I am extremely proud. I mean, from the music, the editing, the acting. It's been a real blast. I'm very proud of the series. I think it's up there to international standards.
00:34:02
Speaker 4: Really looking forward to watching the first episode, finally, just around the corner. Let's go to a couple of other listener questions and comments.
00:34:09
Speaker 1: And before we go to a voice note from Peter, a message from Michelle.
00:34:13
Speaker 4: She says, please, please, can you ask Dionne, What happened to the body in the freezer that was left there by the real estate agent? She says, it distresses my 86-year-old mother that he may have forgotten about.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: Well, readers do not allow me to forget about it. And my answer usually is, I'm as worried about that body as you are.
00:34:32
Speaker 6: I loved.
00:34:35
Speaker 7: It.
00:34:37
Speaker 2: Ending the book like that with a question mark with we don't really know what happens. But there is a clue. If readers go read Leo, there's a clue in Leo as to what happened. At least a very strong indication of what happened. So those of you who want to go read Leo again.
00:34:58
Speaker 4: Okay, Michelle, there you have it. Please get your mom to read Leo again and put her mind at ease. Let's go to that voice note that's come in from Peter. And a reminder to other listeners, you can send a voice note or text to 0725671567.
00:35:09
Speaker 1: I just have.
00:35:13
Speaker 6: To compliment Dion Mayer on the superb writing of his.
00:35:18
Speaker 2: I have all his books.
00:35:20
Speaker 6: Tomorrow I'm going to go to my local bookstore and pick up his latest one, Scorpio Rising. The only thing I hate is having to hear that the version of the latest book has come out in Afrikaans and I've got to wait nearly a year to get the English translation because if I read it in Afrikaans it would probably take me a year anyway. But absolutely superb writer. I've got all his books and when I run out of reading matter I read them again. I think I've read all of his books at least three times. I've just finished reading The Flood Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous. Congratulations, Dion. You're the best. Peter from Rosebank.
00:36:04
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. And I can say that we're working very hard to make the period of translation shorter. I finished a new novel at the end of July. It's not a Benny and Vaughn novel. It's a freestanding novel. Just a sort of a palate cleanser for me to do something different and Laura is already translating. I think she's about halfway. The big problem, of course, is that I have to work through the manuscript now with my Afrikaans editor, and version control becomes a real problem because if Laura translates and there are changes to the Afrikaans, then she's got to work through it again. So we try to contain that as much as possible, but there's a good chance that this time readers won't have to wait for a whole year.
00:36:54
Speaker 1: Okay, thanks for that.
00:36:55
Speaker 4: For the audience who couldn't hear that question on voice note, it was somebody who's a huge fan expressing their frustration at having to wait so long in between Afrikaans and English translations. A reminder to those who are here, I believe we do have another question from the audience.
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Let's go there.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: Hi.
00:37:12
Speaker 8: Two quick questions about books coming to the screen. A while ago I read that Sean Bean was being considered to play Benny.
00:37:20
Speaker 2: In an on-screen version.
00:37:22
Speaker 8: In my mind, he doesn't look too dissimilar to the picture I have of Benny. And then the other question is, we met Zatopek van Heerden in the TV series Uarion. Might we see him and someone like Matthew Bair again in the future, or have they sort of played their part in what you were thinking?
00:37:37
Speaker 2: I'm always thinking of new stories, and for me, story comes first, and then I have to decide which characters will fit the story the best. So it's not impossible that someone like Zatopek or even Lemur, now with Invisible becoming a TV series, I think the pressure might be stronger to have another Lemur novel or even Machu Picchu. But the biggest, it's not a problem, it's such a privilege, is that most of my publishers all over the world tell me that series sell much better. And Benny and Vaughn are now a series of some 10 books. So the pressure from them, from my agent, is always going to be, please write another Benny and Vaughan. But you never know. Zatopek or Machu Picchu might come back as sort of guest characters in a novel. It all depends on what the story dictates.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: Now, Sean Bean.
00:38:37
Speaker 4: I don't watch Sean Bean cast as Benny, because everybody knows one thing about Sean Bean is that.
00:38:41
Speaker 1: His character dies in everything he does.
00:38:44
Speaker 4: And as you've referenced, we will never forgive you if you kill off Benny Crystal, Dion.
00:38:48
Speaker 1: Any truth to the rumor?
00:38:50
Speaker 2: Well, you know, what producers do is that they put together a package of a scriptwriter, a director, and a few cast members, and then they go and find financing. So Sean has been involved in several of those packages over the years for my books and he's now again just part of a package but whether he's going to be beneficial will depend on whether they find financing if if sean bean is then available during the time of shooting it often happens that the actor or actress who's attached to the package is not available and then we cast someone else but it's not impossible i i I think it's doubtful that Sean Bean will be the next Benny Chrysler, but you never know. Okay.
00:39:37
Speaker 1: We've got another question from the audience.
00:39:38
Speaker 3: Welcome. Hello.
00:39:40
Speaker 7: Thank you.
00:39:41
Speaker 9: And having had the privilege of reading most of your books in Afrikaans and not having to wait for the English translations, The.
00:39:48
Speaker 1: Biggest problem with Dion's books is putting them down.
00:39:50
Speaker 9: So if you want to have a holiday, you'll go and lie in your hot caravan and read the book until it's done.
00:39:56
Speaker 1: My question is, I probably.
00:39:58
Speaker 9: Enjoyed Kurs the most of all of them. Is there another book like that in the horizon which is completely something different? I love Benny and Vaughan, no doubt about that.
00:40:09
Speaker 1: But it was just so gripping.
00:40:11
Speaker 9: Anything like that.
00:40:12
Speaker 4: In the horizon?
00:40:13
Speaker 2: Thank you. I think the book that I've now finished in July, which should be out next year, March, in Afrikaans, is a little bit more, it's not a post-apocalyptic story, it's very much set in modern-day southern Africa, but I think it's a little different. It's called Die Feldwachter, The Gamekeeper, and I think it's more similar to Fever in terms of the content than it is a crime fiction novel. So hopefully you'll like that.
00:40:43
Speaker 7: Interesting.
00:40:44
Speaker 4: While we get to the next audience member, a question from somebody listening at home. Referencing this title of the new book being Scorpio Rising, is that an astrological reference? Is Dion a believer in star signs by any chance? Is he a cancer in the truest sense, asks Amy.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: I have no idea. Marianne and I, every week we will read each other's horoscopes and then have a little bit of laugh because it's never right. So no, I don't believe in it at all, but it's amusing. uh, it, it actually, the reason why this book is called Scorpio Rising is that when I started writing Leo, I'm, I'm terrible with choosing titles for new novels. I find it a schlep. I just want to carry on writing and let someone else, uh, worry about the title. But then again, you have to save the file as something. And I can't save the file until I find the word that feels right, which often becomes the title. So with Leo, it was a star sign. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll do a trilogy of star signs because that'll, uh, minimize the problems I have of choosing titles. So I did Leo, and then I did Scorpio, and now I just started on the third one, and I found that I've used both the coolest star signs available, so now I have to choose from others that are maybe not so sexy and cool. But I'm going to do the trilogy and then move on to something else.
00:42:08
Speaker 4: Does that mean that those of us who are Cancerians are not so sexy and cool?
00:42:12
Speaker 1: Thanks very much for that. No, I love it. Amy, thanks for your question. Another question from the audience. Welcome.
00:42:18
Speaker 3: Thank you, dear. It's related to what you were just talking about, the titles. I was wondering if there's any logic to why the titles and the book covers are not always the same as the English, is not always the same as the Afrikaans.
00:42:31
Speaker 2: There's a very good reason for that. And the problem is that online bookstores, if someone in the UK wants to buy my new novel and they're all called Leo or Scorpio, then they might get the wrong language. So that is the main reason. If you look at Amazon, for instance, my books in several languages are available there. and we have to change the title for every language just to make sure. It becomes a real tough problem because I have three English publishers, one in the U.K., one in the U.S., and one in Canada, and then obviously Pan Mac now also in South Africa, and they all have to agree on one title. So it's a little bit like title by committee because every publisher must feel that this title will work in their market. And it's quite a process to get to a title that is acceptable to everybody.
00:43:33
Speaker 1: Great question. Thank you. We must wrap up.
00:43:35
Speaker 4: And I'm going to finish with a question from two not yet Dion Mayer readers, Paula and Matt both saying, I want to go try the new books now. I've listened to this interview. Which book should I start with?
00:43:45
Speaker 1: Dion, do you think there is a reading order to begin with?
00:43:49
Speaker 2: No, I don't. I try to write every novel in such a way that if you're a first-time reader, you will get into it. You will understand the characters. Obviously, I think it's a lot of fun to read them in the order that they were published. I have a website, dionmayer.com, where the books are in the order that they are published. So if you want to start from the beginning, you're most welcome. But then again, I also feel that I've improved a little over the years, so maybe not start right at the beginning. I think 13 hours, perhaps, you mentioned that. I think that's a great place to start, or fever. I think one of those two would be great to start.
00:44:23
Speaker 1: You'll be fine whichever one you start with, Matt and Paula. More than fine.
00:44:27
Speaker 4: More importantly, for those who want to buy the new book, it is called Scorpio Rising. It's published by Pan Macmillan, and it has just hit the shelves in your local bookstore. And a reminder one last time that if you want to watch the TV adaptation of Blood Safari, it starts on MNET next Wednesday at 8 p.m. under the title of Invisible. Dion, a massive pleasure to have you with us. It's a cracker of a read. I read it cover to cover in a single weekend, which is not something I do very often anymore. So thank you for the wonderful book, and thank you for being with us today and so generous.
00:44:55
Speaker 1: With your time.
00:44:56
Speaker 2: Thank you, Pippa. It's been wonderful.
00:44:57
Speaker 4: Huge pleasure to have you with us. And to our studio audience, thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 1: Lunch with Pippa Hudson.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: We all have a voice.
00:00:05
Speaker 1: Use yours.
00:00:06
Speaker 3: Call 021-446-0567.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: Join the conversation on Cape Talk.
00:00:16
Speaker 4: And with that, we dive into our live studio audience, which, of course, requires a live audience. A very warm welcome to everybody who is with us at our Greenpoint studios to celebrate the launch of the latest Dion Mayo novel. Scorpio Rising is the English translation of Dion's latest mystery involving detectives Benny Crystal and Vaughn Cupido.
00:00:34
Speaker 1: Hit the shelves.
00:00:35
Speaker 4: Virtually at the same time as Dion's new TV series, Invisible, which is based on his previous novel, Blood Safari, and will be hitting our screens this coming Wednesday.
00:00:44
Speaker 1: I know I'm now sounding.
00:00:45
Speaker 4: Like a stuck record, but please make sure you're watching it Wednesday, 8 o'clock on MNET. So a very busy time indeed for one of this country's most beloved writers and one of its busiest writers.
00:00:56
Speaker 1: We're really glad you could fit us in, Dion.
00:00:57
Speaker 4: In between book launches and TV screenings and press junkets.
00:01:01
Speaker 1: Thanks for being here and welcome.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Pippa. Thanks for having me. It's always a great pleasure and a privilege to be here and to talk to you. And hi to the studio audience. Thanks for being here.
00:01:11
Speaker 1: Thanks, Dion.
00:01:12
Speaker 4: To the audience members, just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question or there's something you've always wanted to know about one of the previous books, for example, you're very welcome to do so. Just raise a hand so that Amber in the multicolored shirt at the back there can get a microphone to you so that the audience listening at home can hear. And of course, to the audience listening at home or in the car or at work, you have the usual channels available to you, including the WhatsApp line 0725671567. Dion, before we dive into the book, the new book, let's just kind of take stock of where you are, because.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: Already established as.
00:01:45
Speaker 4: the country's most successful crime novelist, your book's selling around the world, translated into multiple languages, but to have a new book and a new TV series launching literally within 10 days of one another is not something that happens every day.
00:01:58
Speaker 1: It must feel a little bit surreal.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: It is a little bit surreal. It's a coincidence that it happened so close together, but it's wonderful. It's extremely exciting, both Scorpio Rising, now out in English, and the TV series, and The strange thing is that both projects started two, three years ago. So, you know, to come to fruition now is coincidence and fantastic.
00:02:25
Speaker 4: If you think back to the Dion of 20-plus years ago, as he was just making his start as a writer, wondering, can I do this? Am I going to be able to get my first book published? I mean, did he ever imagine that he'd be in this position one day?
00:02:37
Speaker 2: Well, it's 30-plus years ago, but thank you. No, you know, I... My first hope was just to have a novel published, and I never thought that it would be more than that. I was just hoping. As a matter of fact, my very first novel in Afrikaans was a total failure. I think they printed 1,200. They sold about 800, and they sent me a letter saying they're going to pulp the remainder, and I bought 20 copies at one rand each. so that at least my grandchildren would know that I wrote a novel. So back then, I never envisaged that this could ever happen. And even now, it feels a little bit surreal and dreamlike that it did happen.
00:03:23
Speaker 4: Those 20 copies must be collector's items of note.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Have you got them under lock and key somewhere?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: I still have them at home. It was fascinating. I think my manuscript submission back then was the first suspense crime novel in Afrikaans in so many years. I think under apartheid, there just wasn't much of that. And also, it was frowned upon during those times to read crime fiction. A good Afrikaner did not read such lowly fiction as crime fiction. And so the book was published. It was called Wie met Fiesbiel. It was never translated. It was published with a very gaudy sort of a common cover title, sort of a semi, a woman with a décolletage and a guy doing a karate move. And I absolutely hated it. Luckily, it was republished, reprinted several years later with a much more lovely cover. But things have changed a lot since then.
00:04:27
Speaker 1: For one thing, we don't have to put stars on the deck all the time.
00:04:29
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:04:30
Speaker 1: I love it.
00:04:32
Speaker 4: I mean, Dion, you're often cited as one of the very few South African writers who actually does well enough to make a living as.
00:04:37
Speaker 1: A full-time writer. But of course, it wasn't always like that.
00:04:41
Speaker 4: And I mean, a story like that demonstrates you didn't magically become a famous, best-selling international author overnight. There was a lot of Plotting the streets, submitting manuscripts, reworking.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Them, etc. And in fact, I don't know if everybody knows.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: That Dion was a reporter on a newspaper way back before he started publishing books. And what was it like for you being able to make sort of get that first foot into publishing? I know you'd also worked as a brand strategist in between, but that journey from the one world into the other.
00:05:10
Speaker 1: What was it like?
00:05:11
Speaker 2: It was an incredible journey. As I said, my first book didn't do extremely well. As a matter of fact, the publisher who published it did not want to publish anything else. I got very lucky in that a small niche Afrikaans publisher, Quellerie, decided to publish my second novel. And then I got even luckier when the... retired former managing director of Tafelberg, read the book. Isabel Dixon was his daughter-in-law who became our agent. He sent the novel to her. The English title is Dead Before Dying. And Isabel decided to take me on because of that book. But then it took several years for the books to be translated and for her to be able to submit it to European and British and American publishers. So there was a long period in which my books did not sell well in Afrikaans because I think it was very strange for people to read in the genre in Afrikaans. But they started selling overseas much better. I was a A bestseller in France, I think five, six years before my Afrikaans books started selling well.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
00:06:26
Speaker 2: It took a TV series called Oeriont, which was on CakeNet, MNet back in the day, for people to really notice my books for the first time and start buying them in Afrikaans and thinking, well, it's okay for good Afrikaans to read this sort of thing.
00:06:42
Speaker 4: It's fascinating how that process worked. Quite a few people asking the same question around translation, Sue and others.
00:06:48
Speaker 1: Does Dion do his own translations into English?
00:06:51
Speaker 2: No, I don't. I have a wonderful translator, Laura Segers. She lives in New Bethesda. But she only started translating my books after the late Madeleine van Booyen passed away. Madeleine did, I think, the first three or four. She was a larger-than-life character for those who remember her. She was the grand dame of South African books, and she did the first, I think, three or four translations. Then she passed away, and Laura became my translator. Laura is great. We've worked together for such a long time. What was funny initially, Laura is an incredibly decent woman. And when Benny and Vaughn used to use profanity, she toned it down in the translation. So I had to sit with her every time and say, Laura, that's not how policemen and women speak. Let's ramp it up.
00:07:47
Speaker 5: I love it.
00:07:49
Speaker 4: Well, that's answered the second part of the question, which is how much changes in translation, and do you have to sort of allow that and leave your hands off, or can you step in?
00:07:58
Speaker 2: No, no, we work together closely. Laura would do half of the novel in translation, and then she'll send it to me, and I'll work through that while she carries on. Initially, when we got to know one another and she got to understand my style, I had to do a little bit more work, but these days I do very little. So I'm very happy with your relationship with your editor, your translator, and your agent. It's a lot like a marriage. There has to be utmost trust for it to work.
00:08:35
Speaker 4: We're going to talk about the marriages in the new book and the trust issues there in just a second. The new book is Scorpio Rising. It was Scorpio in Afrikaans when it came out originally. And as you've heard Dion reference, it brings back your, I think we can call them much loved duo of Benny Chrysler and Vaughan Cupido. Two men with a nose for detective work. They can track down the smartest of criminals. Dion, it's just a pity they can't manage their own marriages and love life with quite the same degree of confidence. I'm sure most of the audience have read at least one of their stories before, but there might be somebody listening who hasn't met them. So before we talk about where they go in the new book, will you just introduce us to Benny and Vaughn?
00:09:13
Speaker 2: Right. Benny Griesel, he's a recovering alcoholic. He's 49 years old in... Scorpio and he's had a very messy personal life he was divorced when he was much younger then finally fell in love with a woman again and Alexa Barnard and they in Leo they got married right at the end of Leo they got married so in Scorpio Benny is a newly married guy for the second time and coming to terms with this new life and pinching himself to have found such a wonderful woman while Vaughn Cupido who hails from the Cape Flats. He lives in Stellenbosch. He lives with... his partner, Desiree Kutsia. And Vaughan is too afraid to ask her to marry him. So he's constantly on a diet, saying he's got this target weight of 99 kgs. And when he reaches that, he'll ask her to marry him. And Benny keeps on telling him, you're just afraid that you'll say no. That's why your diet never works.
00:10:23
Speaker 4: Every time he hits 100 kilograms, he goes on a burger run, and.
00:10:25
Speaker 1: It's backwards again.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: So I don't want to give too much away of the plot, but just to set the scene for those who haven't read the book yet, this book opens with a report of arson, a very small crime. It targets a shepherd's hut, a derelict shepherd's hut on a farm outside Stellenbosch.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Nobody is hurt. The damage is limited. It seems fairly insignificant.
00:10:46
Speaker 4: And then a second incident targets a caravan on another property outside Stellenbosch, but this time somebody is killed. And at the same time, Benny and Vaughn are asked to look into an apparent suicide of a local private investigator.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: Vaughn's convinced it's not what it seems.
00:11:01
Speaker 4: And then as the book continues, these crimes and investigations converge and turn out to be something much, much bigger with the shades of international criminal conspiracy. I think I'm leaving enough for the reader to discover for themselves there. What intrigues me, Dion, is I read somewhere that you actually came up with the sort of the broad concept for Scorpio back in the 2010 World.
00:11:21
Speaker 1: Cup or so.
00:11:21
Speaker 2: Yes. One half of the story idea comes from back then. And I had the idea and I just couldn't make it work because the technology was not available back then. to make it credible, because that's the one thing that I think is of the utmost importance, and especially crime fiction, is verisimilitude. It's got to have that texture of the truth, that feeling that this could happen. And then the other half of the idea, I actually had lunch with a wonderful South African journalist who told me a true story. And that was when I remembered this idea from 2010, and suddenly I realized that Today, the technology is so advanced that it would be absolutely possible to do what I wanted to do. So it was very serendipitous.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:12:12
Speaker 4: I mean, you must have had to do a lot of research, though, because it's quite complicated technology. It's new technology that you're referencing in many respects. And there are elements of it's almost unbelievable, except you know it is real.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: So, I mean, there is that sort of tension between technology.
00:12:27
Speaker 4: Suspending your incredulity with the recognition that this is real tech you're talking about. But you must have had to get to know that tech and understand how it works to be able to write credibly.
00:12:36
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:12:36
Speaker 1: What did that process look like?
00:12:38
Speaker 2: Well, it was a very long process. I was very lucky to find people who could help me, experts in the field. I did not know back then that in South Africa we had a world-famous... expert in AI and missile technology, and I was very fortunate to be able to meet her and to spend time with her, and obviously a lot of other research as well. The big problem was for me to first of all understand it, and then to, this is Vaughan Cupid's case, which is the really complicated one, and to let Vaughan understand it, because I think he's smarter than I am. So if I understood it, he would understand it. But then the real challenge was, how do I present all of this information to the reader so that it's not boring, but it's understandable and it's credible? And that was, I think, the biggest challenge. The research that I did was much bigger than what eventually landed in the book. Because you just can't put everything in.
00:13:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
00:13:41
Speaker 4: But as you say, you need to know that back story to be able to present the front page, as it were. Now, Dion, I mean, you've referenced there finding the experts to help. In all of our interviews, you've referenced how many... police officers have been that expert for you over the years, have helped you look at the procedural elements which are so crucial to these books and the ins and outs and say, you know, yes, it is conceivable that that could happen or really an investigation wouldn't work that way. And I know you've previously expressed a lot of gratitude to them. I'm assuming it was the same this time around?
00:14:12
Speaker 2: It was the same this time around as well. When I finish a manuscript, I have Colonel Elmery Mayberg who has since left the South African Police Service quite recently. But she reads all of my manuscripts, and she points out if I make any procedural mistakes or anything else that concerns the way that the police work. And if she's happy, then I know it's credible in that regard.
00:14:40
Speaker 1: How do your police readers respond?
00:14:42
Speaker 4: I mean, have you ever had that kind of interaction where an actual police officer comes to you and says, you got this so right, or, dude, you got this so wrong?
00:14:49
Speaker 2: I haven't had the, you've got it so wrong so far, thanks to people who read the manuscript before it goes to print. But I do have policemen and women who come and say, thank you for presenting our world in a way that is sympathetic and is real. And to me, that is one of the biggest compliments is when a detective comes to me and he says, you got it right. I love that.
00:15:13
Speaker 4: And we're going to talk about some of those aspects of their world that you touch on in this book. And in this book, in some cases, in more depth than before, I just want to say for anybody who's tuning in on air halfway through this interview and wondering who you're listening to, I'm sure you recognize the voice anyway, but it belongs, for the record, to Dion Mayer, our best-selling crime novelist. in studio with us chatting about the launch of his newest book, Scorpio Rising, is the English translation of Scorpio in Afrikaans. And we have a live studio audience with us, who I'm hoping will join the conversation as well with some questions just now.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: A question quickly from Keith.
00:15:46
Speaker 4: You have referenced before the naming of characters and the naming of Benny Grissel, but Keith wants to know where you got Benny's name from.
00:15:53
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, Benny was never supposed to be a protagonist in the Dead Before Dying, I needed a drunken cop to spoil the fun of the protagonist. When it's a character that you know is only going to be in the book for two or three pages, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the name. And in my head, he looked a little bit like the son of one of my favorite teachers at high school, Mr. Ben Griesel. And his son is called Benny. And I thought, well, as a homage to Mr. Ben Grissel, I'll just call this character Benny Grissel because the son looked like Benny. And then when I started writing the character, he was so much fun to write about. He gave me so many creative options in terms of the story that he just didn't want to go away. And eventually he became a substantial character in that novel. And By the end of it, I thought, well, he's got the potential to have his own book one day. And then when I eventually got to that, which was Devil's Peak, I had the main problem of now I have an alcoholic cop, which is such a cliche. What do I do with him? And the journey with Benny has always been interesting ever since those days. But there's a little tale to this story. Benny, the real Benny Gressel, Mr. Benny Gressel's son, Benny, he's also a Cantonian, and he's been to several book launches, and he told me the wonderful story some years ago when he lived in Blobeck Strand. He said one of his great pleasures is in December when the bikini girls are lying on the beach reading one of my novels, he says the greatest pick-up line in the world is to walk up to them and to say, Hi, my name is Benny Gressel.
00:17:48
Speaker 4: A second career as a dating coach lies ahead here. Now, speaking of characters who sort of grew beyond what you initially thought they were going to be, Mark in OBS emailing to ask whether the same is going to happen with Vaughn Cupido, because Vaughn has become a bigger and bigger presence, partly because his character is.
00:18:04
Speaker 1: Maturing and his police work is maturing.
00:18:07
Speaker 4: But Mark asking, do you foresee a possibility of Vaughn having his own book on his own one day?
00:18:13
Speaker 2: I think for me, I don't think in terms of a Benny Griesel mystery, I think it's a Benny and Vaughan case. They've become inseparable to me as the author, and I think in terms of my writing as well. So for me, he's a co-protagonist. There has been, I think, Cobra, where I think Vaughan played a bigger role than Benny did. But it's a difficult thing to juggle because there are a lot of people who love Benny and there are a lot of people who love Vaughn. And if I leave one of them out or, heaven forbid, have one of them die, I would be crucified. So I think they'll continue to be a team with– you know, various parts of the book where they will be, they've taken us for that part.
00:19:00
Speaker 1: I'm so relieved to hear that. I'm sure many others are too.
00:19:04
Speaker 4: I mean, you've touched on the reality of the policeman's world. And one of the things that was interesting in this book is Benny, of course, has PTSD. And he's seeing a therapist. He's doing the healthy thing of putting in the work and working on it. And His psychologist has told him one of the things he needs to do is open up more to Alexa, his wife, and share more about what he actually endures and sees at work. But he still feels difficulty doing that because he wants to shield her from.
00:19:30
Speaker 1: What he sees.
00:19:31
Speaker 4: That must be a very common conundrum, I would imagine, for knowing about the caseload, the workload, and the levels of violence the average South African cop will see.
00:19:39
Speaker 2: Exactly, and not wanting to take that home because you don't want to taint your loved ones with the scenes that they see, the things that they experience. And that is a major problem because the psychologists that I've spoken to who treat people with PTSD say that one of the biggest things that you can do is to open up, to talk about it to loved ones where it's a safe space for you to talk about it. So it remains a real conundrum for for policemen and women in South Africa, I think all over the world. That's just one of the things. I think the other one is often survivor guilt. The other thing is that fear that what you see here, what humans are able to do to other humans, that you want to shield your loved ones from that. How do you protect them? And you feel that you cannot keep on protecting them because there's just so much of it, and that brings on even more PTSD, and that's the reason why Benny is an alcoholic, because he really suffers to cope with it.
00:20:38
Speaker 6: Join the live studio conversation on Cape Talk.
00:20:44
Speaker 4: We are back in conversation with writer Dion Mayer about his new novel, Scorpio Rising, which has just hit the shelves, the English translation of Scorpio, the Afrikaans novel. And in a little while, we'll also talk about his work on the new TV series of one of his former novels.
00:20:58
Speaker 1: First, though, a couple of listener questions.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: And just before we get to those, if I can circle back, we were talking before the break, Dion, about PTSD and the real world of what cops go through. Alcoholism is unfortunately a common factor as well for many of them because of what they see. And as you've referenced, you've taken Benny on a real roller coaster with this. Now, in this book, Touch Wood, he's stable. He's doing fine. He's happily married. He is kind of going, I can't quite believe this world is mine. But he's also working very hard to repair relationships with his children.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:21:30
Speaker 4: And, I mean, let's talk about the research into this aspect of addiction because it's a very real portrait of somebody going, things are okay here, but I can never undo the damage I've done in the past. You've referenced speaking to psychologists about PTSD. Did you do some of the research on addiction journeys as well?
00:21:46
Speaker 2: I did. The late Madeleine van Belyon took me to some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I experienced that. I'm a constant, as a matter of fact... I have a reader, and I won't say his name, who's an alcoholic who lives in Cape Town that I speak to with every book. He goes to the same Alcoholics Anonymous chapter that Benny goes to. It's called the Green Door chapter, so I know exactly what that looks like and when they meet, what time they meet. So, you know, for me, that was the one thing that I could do with Benny, being the alcoholic cop, being a bit of a cliché, to take it seriously, to look at Why are so many people under stress? Why do they become alcoholics? How do you struggle with it? I mean, it's a constant battle, the things that people go through, and also the damage in the case of his family, the damage that he's done, especially in his relationship with his son, Fritz. So that was another part of Benny's journey, was to try and mend this relationship with his son. Okay.
00:22:57
Speaker 4: Now, Caro heard your reference to the very first novel and the copies that were published and the one that didn't succeed. Caro wants to know, did that original first publisher ever reach out to you again since you have become world famous to ask to work with you again?
00:23:11
Speaker 2: Yes, they did. Well, what happened was they actually bought the little publisher that published my second book. So I became one of their, I never published under that imprint again, but it became part of my Afrikaans publisher, the bigger company. And I'm happy to say that they haven't pulped any of my other books so far.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: Touch wood.
00:23:32
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:23:32
Speaker 4: A lovely story in from Cheryl. She says, my first Dion Mayer book was 13 hours. Bought it immediately after getting home from Matamata in the Kalakadi. There was another man in the pool who was willing to go back into the heat of his caravan to finish his copy of that book and.
00:23:48
Speaker 1: Could not put it down.
00:23:49
Speaker 4: I'd never read him, but I went straight home and bought the copy and I haven't stopped since then. Cheers to a phenomenal author from Cheryl. You're doing something right if somebody's sitting in a caravan in the Kalakadi in the middle of December reading your book.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: It has to be said. Let's go to our first question from the audience. Thank you for being with us. Good afternoon.
00:24:05
Speaker 7: Dion, I'd like to know if you would have to tweak or totally revise your characters, Benny and Cupido, if you took them to the Eastern Cape or if you took them up to.
00:24:17
Speaker 1: KZN or if you put them in Joburg or somewhere else in the country.
00:24:21
Speaker 7: Is it something that's You would consider taking them.
00:24:25
Speaker 2: Elsewhere, really. Benny has been to Joburg once or twice on cases. I don't think I need to revise them. I mean, where they come from, their background, Benny comes from Paddo, Vaughan comes from Mitchell's Plain, that is part of who they are. And I love the idea of taking them out and having this fish-out-of-water scenario where they don't understand when KZN and Gauteng are different countries to the KPNC, really. So it would be interesting. The problem is to write a book where that has enough verisimilitude, where it feels real enough. Because police people work in their area, at their specific police stations. So it's going to be a little bit difficult. I've also had from overseas readers asking, but when are you going to let Benny go to France or go to the Netherlands and that sort of thing? And it's a wonderful idea. And I've often thought, how can I do this? Because I can just see Vaughan in France, you know, trying to speak French and thinking that he does it. I can just see the fun in that. But again, it's got to feel real. It's got to have enough realism there. so that you don't lose the reader. So I'm always thinking of possibilities, but then you get a story and it's set in Stellenbosch or it's set in Cape Town and then you sort of stick to that. That's the world that I write about. If you think of so many crime authors all over the world, Michael Connolly writes about LA, Ian Rankin writes about Edinburgh, and I think That's why people start buying these books is because you show them a specific world and you show them all the nuances of that specific community. So it's not impossible that I might do it one day, but it's not very likely.
00:26:15
Speaker 4: I have to tell you, I was in Edinburgh last year and I went to visit Ian Rankin's pub. It looked like it was full of criminals, Dion. I lasted about two minutes and I left. Do you have like a local watering hole that people in Stellenbosch come looking for you at?
00:26:27
Speaker 2: Not really. I mean, we are more eaters than drinkers. So I think De Freyje burger is probably in Stellenbosch. It's perhaps the one place where Marianne and I hang out the most.
00:26:40
Speaker 1: They've got a Benny Griesel burger, haven't they, on the menu?
00:26:43
Speaker 6: They do, yeah.
00:26:43
Speaker 2: They've been extremely kind. Perhaps my son called me up and he said, Benny is a huge burger fan because Benny has been in love with burgers ever since the first book. He said, what kind of burger would Benny like? And I said, I told him, and he said, well, we're going to make that burger, and we're going to call it off to Benny.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: What a compliment.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: And I think that's one of the greatest things that have ever happened to me, because I'm such a Badger's Poisson fan. I'm a burger fan, and now there's a.
00:27:06
Speaker 6: Benny Friesel burger.
00:27:07
Speaker 3: Now there's a Benny Friesel burger.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: Go and give it a try after you've read the book. We've got another question from the audience. Welcome.
00:27:14
Speaker 5: Your stories are great when it comes to applying the current happenings in the country, the world, and the way that is. How often does it happen that there's a coincidence like when I read the story, Scorpio, about when the guy saw the light and he said, this is a UFO. My first thought was, is Mr. Mayer really that brave to go into UFOs and stuff? I'm going to explain this. And how it worked and played out was beautiful, but What I want to say is the week before I read this story, there was something on world news about the Americans now looking into UFOs for files that's going to be uncovered and stuff like this. And I just thought this coincidence is unbelievable. There's no way you could have written this last week. How often does it happen that something like this?
00:28:10
Speaker 2: You know, the book, your stories are.
00:28:12
Speaker 5: So real and then something like this comes in. It's almost come like this. This is like a living book. How often does it happen? And does it also happen the.
00:28:22
Speaker 2: More you write, the longer you do this? Thank you. It's pure luck. You know, I mean, I read a lot. I read several news websites and I read newspapers and news magazines. The interesting thing is that... The American authorities released some UFO material while I was writing the book, and that was why. And then they released some more when the book was published. And just, I think, two weeks ago, they released a batch again. So they're constantly doing that. But sometimes you just get lucky in terms of what you're writing about. Fever is a great example.
00:29:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, a classic example.
00:29:07
Speaker 2: When I did research for fever, I went and spoke to a virologist at Stellenbosch University, and he and his colleague came up with this coronavirus, which would be the ideal one. And lo and behold, I think it was two years later, there was... the COVID pandemic. So sometimes you just get very lucky in that sense. And then everybody thinks you're a prophet and you can see the future. And they ask you for lotto numbers and that sort of thing. But I'm afraid it's just luck.
00:29:37
Speaker 1: Thank you for that.
00:29:38
Speaker 4: And neatly answering Edward's question about... the inspiration for fever.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:29:42
Speaker 4: Now, I mean, while we're talking about current affairs and overlap with your books, let's talk a little bit about the new adaptation of Blood Safari, which is, again, it's coming to the screens on MNET next week, Wednesday.
00:29:54
Speaker 1: The first episode will air at 8 o'clock. The series is called Invisible, but it is.
00:29:58
Speaker 4: The adaptation of Blood Safari. And this is a book where you had to do a bit of massaging of the storyline in the adaptation because it's been a while since it was initially published and current affairs have moved on.
00:30:11
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: Dion, before we talk about that, let's just talk about the significance of the fact that you are so deeply.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: Involved in this TV production.
00:30:18
Speaker 4: Because you have previously in former interviews said to me, when you sell the TV rights, you so often hand them over, say, here's my character, here's my story, off you go, and you have to take a back seat. And if you're lucky, they might ask you on to set to take a few photos one day.
00:30:31
Speaker 1: That's not what's happened this time, though.
00:30:33
Speaker 2: No, I'm getting more and more reluctant to just sell the rights because I'm not always happy with how they adapt the novels, especially if it's a foreign producer who does not know South Africa. So not all the series and movies that have been made of my books enthralled me. So I'm trying to stay more and more involved. I'm part of a little production company, and we try to do as many of my books as we can, as we can find financing for, which is the biggest problem in South Africa. But this one was one where I was involved. It's also quite a history. We started working with an American production house, and they dictated to us that there had to be another scriptwriter, international scriptwriter. Luckily, the guy that I wrote with, Walt Schneider, is a great Canadian screenwriter with a lot of experience writing. And it was a real pleasure to work with him. But at least I was there to keep the South Africaness of the scripts. But I was very involved in the development of the adaptation. And as you say, the big challenge was, because the book was, I think, 16 years ago, the book was published, and it was about a very specific political environment at that time, an historic environment. And now, 15, 16 years later, that just would not have worked. So you either have the choice of making a period piece where you go back and you set it in that time frame, which gets much more expensive, because everything, all the clothes that people wear, the cars that they drive, all the technology has to be from that period, or you can update it. And we thought there was enough interesting things happening in South Africa politically during that time that we can update it and just present it. But I think the essence of the story is still that you still have The same bodyguard looking after Emma Lerhou who is an expat coming back to South Africa to try and find her long lost brother who got lost in Kruger 30 years ago. So I think the essence of the story is still there.
00:32:48
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:32:48
Speaker 4: It was so interesting last week. So Dougray Scott and Tim Turan, who are both producers and a star in this series, were chatting to us about the shooting of the series Invisible. And they both referenced how closely you worked on this.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: What can we change? What can we adapt?
00:33:04
Speaker 4: Something as simple as Emma's character, the actress who's playing her is an Australian. She does a British accent very well. How do we make this meld with a South African character? We make her an expat who's been out of the country for a long time and work to the strengths of the cast you've got. Are you happy with how it's all played out now that you've had sight of the finished product?
00:33:24
Speaker 2: I'm absolutely delighted. I think it's the best thing that I've been involved with. I think the production values are incredibly high. The cast was just magnificent. And then the crew. I think Doug Ray mentioned.
00:33:36
Speaker 6: That as well.
00:33:36
Speaker 1: He was so complimentary about the crew.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: I think we have the best film crew in the world in South Africa. who work harder and more professionally than anyone else. And they were a delight to work with also on this production. I am extremely proud. I mean, from the music, the editing, the acting. It's been a real blast. I'm very proud of the series. I think it's up there to international standards.
00:34:02
Speaker 4: Really looking forward to watching the first episode, finally, just around the corner. Let's go to a couple of other listener questions and comments.
00:34:09
Speaker 1: And before we go to a voice note from Peter, a message from Michelle.
00:34:13
Speaker 4: She says, please, please, can you ask Dionne, What happened to the body in the freezer that was left there by the real estate agent? She says, it distresses my 86-year-old mother that he may have forgotten about.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: Well, readers do not allow me to forget about it. And my answer usually is, I'm as worried about that body as you are.
00:34:32
Speaker 6: I loved.
00:34:35
Speaker 7: It.
00:34:37
Speaker 2: Ending the book like that with a question mark with we don't really know what happens. But there is a clue. If readers go read Leo, there's a clue in Leo as to what happened. At least a very strong indication of what happened. So those of you who want to go read Leo again.
00:34:58
Speaker 4: Okay, Michelle, there you have it. Please get your mom to read Leo again and put her mind at ease. Let's go to that voice note that's come in from Peter. And a reminder to other listeners, you can send a voice note or text to 0725671567.
00:35:09
Speaker 1: I just have.
00:35:13
Speaker 6: To compliment Dion Mayer on the superb writing of his.
00:35:18
Speaker 2: I have all his books.
00:35:20
Speaker 6: Tomorrow I'm going to go to my local bookstore and pick up his latest one, Scorpio Rising. The only thing I hate is having to hear that the version of the latest book has come out in Afrikaans and I've got to wait nearly a year to get the English translation because if I read it in Afrikaans it would probably take me a year anyway. But absolutely superb writer. I've got all his books and when I run out of reading matter I read them again. I think I've read all of his books at least three times. I've just finished reading The Flood Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous. Congratulations, Dion. You're the best. Peter from Rosebank.
00:36:04
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. And I can say that we're working very hard to make the period of translation shorter. I finished a new novel at the end of July. It's not a Benny and Vaughn novel. It's a freestanding novel. Just a sort of a palate cleanser for me to do something different and Laura is already translating. I think she's about halfway. The big problem, of course, is that I have to work through the manuscript now with my Afrikaans editor, and version control becomes a real problem because if Laura translates and there are changes to the Afrikaans, then she's got to work through it again. So we try to contain that as much as possible, but there's a good chance that this time readers won't have to wait for a whole year.
00:36:54
Speaker 1: Okay, thanks for that.
00:36:55
Speaker 4: For the audience who couldn't hear that question on voice note, it was somebody who's a huge fan expressing their frustration at having to wait so long in between Afrikaans and English translations. A reminder to those who are here, I believe we do have another question from the audience.
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Let's go there.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: Hi.
00:37:12
Speaker 8: Two quick questions about books coming to the screen. A while ago I read that Sean Bean was being considered to play Benny.
00:37:20
Speaker 2: In an on-screen version.
00:37:22
Speaker 8: In my mind, he doesn't look too dissimilar to the picture I have of Benny. And then the other question is, we met Zatopek van Heerden in the TV series Uarion. Might we see him and someone like Matthew Bair again in the future, or have they sort of played their part in what you were thinking?
00:37:37
Speaker 2: I'm always thinking of new stories, and for me, story comes first, and then I have to decide which characters will fit the story the best. So it's not impossible that someone like Zatopek or even Lemur, now with Invisible becoming a TV series, I think the pressure might be stronger to have another Lemur novel or even Machu Picchu. But the biggest, it's not a problem, it's such a privilege, is that most of my publishers all over the world tell me that series sell much better. And Benny and Vaughn are now a series of some 10 books. So the pressure from them, from my agent, is always going to be, please write another Benny and Vaughan. But you never know. Zatopek or Machu Picchu might come back as sort of guest characters in a novel. It all depends on what the story dictates.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: Now, Sean Bean.
00:38:37
Speaker 4: I don't watch Sean Bean cast as Benny, because everybody knows one thing about Sean Bean is that.
00:38:41
Speaker 1: His character dies in everything he does.
00:38:44
Speaker 4: And as you've referenced, we will never forgive you if you kill off Benny Crystal, Dion.
00:38:48
Speaker 1: Any truth to the rumor?
00:38:50
Speaker 2: Well, you know, what producers do is that they put together a package of a scriptwriter, a director, and a few cast members, and then they go and find financing. So Sean has been involved in several of those packages over the years for my books and he's now again just part of a package but whether he's going to be beneficial will depend on whether they find financing if if sean bean is then available during the time of shooting it often happens that the actor or actress who's attached to the package is not available and then we cast someone else but it's not impossible i i I think it's doubtful that Sean Bean will be the next Benny Chrysler, but you never know. Okay.
00:39:37
Speaker 1: We've got another question from the audience.
00:39:38
Speaker 3: Welcome. Hello.
00:39:40
Speaker 7: Thank you.
00:39:41
Speaker 9: And having had the privilege of reading most of your books in Afrikaans and not having to wait for the English translations, The.
00:39:48
Speaker 1: Biggest problem with Dion's books is putting them down.
00:39:50
Speaker 9: So if you want to have a holiday, you'll go and lie in your hot caravan and read the book until it's done.
00:39:56
Speaker 1: My question is, I probably.
00:39:58
Speaker 9: Enjoyed Kurs the most of all of them. Is there another book like that in the horizon which is completely something different? I love Benny and Vaughan, no doubt about that.
00:40:09
Speaker 1: But it was just so gripping.
00:40:11
Speaker 9: Anything like that.
00:40:12
Speaker 4: In the horizon?
00:40:13
Speaker 2: Thank you. I think the book that I've now finished in July, which should be out next year, March, in Afrikaans, is a little bit more, it's not a post-apocalyptic story, it's very much set in modern-day southern Africa, but I think it's a little different. It's called Die Feldwachter, The Gamekeeper, and I think it's more similar to Fever in terms of the content than it is a crime fiction novel. So hopefully you'll like that.
00:40:43
Speaker 7: Interesting.
00:40:44
Speaker 4: While we get to the next audience member, a question from somebody listening at home. Referencing this title of the new book being Scorpio Rising, is that an astrological reference? Is Dion a believer in star signs by any chance? Is he a cancer in the truest sense, asks Amy.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: I have no idea. Marianne and I, every week we will read each other's horoscopes and then have a little bit of laugh because it's never right. So no, I don't believe in it at all, but it's amusing. uh, it, it actually, the reason why this book is called Scorpio Rising is that when I started writing Leo, I'm, I'm terrible with choosing titles for new novels. I find it a schlep. I just want to carry on writing and let someone else, uh, worry about the title. But then again, you have to save the file as something. And I can't save the file until I find the word that feels right, which often becomes the title. So with Leo, it was a star sign. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll do a trilogy of star signs because that'll, uh, minimize the problems I have of choosing titles. So I did Leo, and then I did Scorpio, and now I just started on the third one, and I found that I've used both the coolest star signs available, so now I have to choose from others that are maybe not so sexy and cool. But I'm going to do the trilogy and then move on to something else.
00:42:08
Speaker 4: Does that mean that those of us who are Cancerians are not so sexy and cool?
00:42:12
Speaker 1: Thanks very much for that. No, I love it. Amy, thanks for your question. Another question from the audience. Welcome.
00:42:18
Speaker 3: Thank you, dear. It's related to what you were just talking about, the titles. I was wondering if there's any logic to why the titles and the book covers are not always the same as the English, is not always the same as the Afrikaans.
00:42:31
Speaker 2: There's a very good reason for that. And the problem is that online bookstores, if someone in the UK wants to buy my new novel and they're all called Leo or Scorpio, then they might get the wrong language. So that is the main reason. If you look at Amazon, for instance, my books in several languages are available there. and we have to change the title for every language just to make sure. It becomes a real tough problem because I have three English publishers, one in the U.K., one in the U.S., and one in Canada, and then obviously Pan Mac now also in South Africa, and they all have to agree on one title. So it's a little bit like title by committee because every publisher must feel that this title will work in their market. And it's quite a process to get to a title that is acceptable to everybody.
00:43:33
Speaker 1: Great question. Thank you. We must wrap up.
00:43:35
Speaker 4: And I'm going to finish with a question from two not yet Dion Mayer readers, Paula and Matt both saying, I want to go try the new books now. I've listened to this interview. Which book should I start with?
00:43:45
Speaker 1: Dion, do you think there is a reading order to begin with?
00:43:49
Speaker 2: No, I don't. I try to write every novel in such a way that if you're a first-time reader, you will get into it. You will understand the characters. Obviously, I think it's a lot of fun to read them in the order that they were published. I have a website, dionmayer.com, where the books are in the order that they are published. So if you want to start from the beginning, you're most welcome. But then again, I also feel that I've improved a little over the years, so maybe not start right at the beginning. I think 13 hours, perhaps, you mentioned that. I think that's a great place to start, or fever. I think one of those two would be great to start.
00:44:23
Speaker 1: You'll be fine whichever one you start with, Matt and Paula. More than fine.
00:44:27
Speaker 4: More importantly, for those who want to buy the new book, it is called Scorpio Rising. It's published by Pan Macmillan, and it has just hit the shelves in your local bookstore. And a reminder one last time that if you want to watch the TV adaptation of Blood Safari, it starts on MNET next Wednesday at 8 p.m. under the title of Invisible. Dion, a massive pleasure to have you with us. It's a cracker of a read. I read it cover to cover in a single weekend, which is not something I do very often anymore. So thank you for the wonderful book, and thank you for being with us today and so generous.
00:44:55
Speaker 1: With your time.
00:44:56
Speaker 2: Thank you, Pippa. It's been wonderful.
00:44:57
Speaker 4: Huge pleasure to have you with us. And to our studio audience, thank you so much for being here.
