Closet novelist Richard de Nooy explores the underbelly of the city in his new book. He speaks to Tymon Smith

Born in Holland, raised in South Africa from the age of four and having lived in Amsterdam for the past 25 years, Richard de Nooy, the author of two books (2007's Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot and now The Big Stick) - has certainly led an interesting life.

After studying journalism at Rhodes University and then leaving for the Dutch New York, a place, which to his mind "was the complete other side of the spectrum in terms of freedom and attitude", De Nooy studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam.

He worked at a variety of jobs, including bouncer, cartoonist, copywriter, editor and translator. But, according to the biography on his website, he "remained a closet novelist throughout".

Arriving alone in the Amsterdam of the 1980s was an eye-opening cultural experience for the wannabe writer. It provided the impetus for his darkly humorous, multi-layered second novel in which a conservative Afrikaans woman, Alma Nel, leaves her Karoo home to retrieve the body of Staal, her gay son who has died in Amsterdam.

With the aid of a Rasta drug dealer, Alma travels through the underbelly of the city, retracing her son's steps, piecing together the story of his life there and coming to terms with her own prejudices.

Although he's not gay, De Nooy explains: "When I arrived in Amsterdam, it was the first sort of nightlife and scene that I discovered. I arrived there alone and I didn't realise it, because maybe I was naive and I was more accustomed to very flamboyant, obviously camp gay people.

"But my boss was a fairly boring, normal-seeming guy who was in love with a guy who was a heroin prostitute, and so we not only went out to these bars - and I was at these bars and thought, "where are all the women?" - but we also went to different pick-up clubs because he was looking for this buddy of his and he was worried about him.

"Also, when I lived in South Africa, I did speech and drama and I had a lot of gay friends and I got on with them really well because I found they were interested in a lot of intellectual topics that my more macho friends weren't interested in, and that really appealed to me.

"I thought to myself that I might be gay, but there was never an erotic component to it. It became a question for the book - what if I had been a gay Richard going to Amsterdam instead of the heterosexual Richard that I was?"

De Nooy intersperses the novel with voices, psychological reports and interviews that give a varied perspective of Staal's difficult life. He suffered at the hands of shrinks intent on bending him straight, leather queens keen to corrupt him and discovered a city far more accepting than any repressed homosexual from the backlands of apartheid South Africa could imagine.

"I translated a lot of sh*t in my life and all of those different things have their own tone, form of expression, their own rhythms. I really enjoy playing around with those and using them in my work," explains De Nooy.

While some might argue that such techniques may prove more distracting than alluring, De Nooy's dedication to structure and his pride in his ability to "set a scene or sketch a person in two or three sentences and not go on and on with descriptive passages and pad it out with things that are irrelevant ... keeps it compact."

At under 200 pages, The Big Stick certainly is compact, but its characters ring true and its darkly humorous approach undercuts what could have become a barrage of overwhelmingly depressing scenes of the underbelly of the city. It manages to encompass a number of overarching and important ideas about difference and acceptance without being flippant or obvious - an achievement for any writer.

A regular blogger, De Nooy approaches his fiction writing with discipline, holing himself up in a friend's holiday cottage and writing for 16 to 17 hours a day. That's a writing load of ridiculous proportions, but it's a task that he approaches with gusto and a belief in the power of fiction to express those ideas that we keep to ourselves but can give to characters on the page.

In his energetic and playful bending of reality to his will, De Nooy has succeeded in creating a compelling, entertaining and honest plea for tolerance from which he hopes readers will take away the idea "that gay people are born that way, they develop like that and there's nothing unnatural about it, that's who they are and there shouldn't be a fear about it".

"In Amsterdam I've got friends who are in their 50s and have been gay their whole lives. And their parents are still asking: 'When are you going to meet a nice girl?'

"I mean, for f**k's sake!"

• The Big Stick, Jacana, R150