There's a new Meyer in town

Captain Benny Griessel of the Hawks is back, and he has got some issues.

The grizzled protagonist of Deon Meyer's crime novels is awash with problems - and we are not just talking about the double murder of bodyguards at an upmarket Franschhoek guesthouse and the kidnapping of a mysterious British tourist that opens his new book, Cobra.

No, there are personal issues. His battle to stay sober, for instance. And, just as his love life appears to take a turn for the better, Griessel kind of loses it in the sexual functionality department.

"Ja," Meyer explained, when we met yesterday. "It's stress, you know. It's the one thing that really has an influence on impotence, in addition to age."

Age, naturally, has not necessarily softened Griessel - moody brute Sean Bean has been earmarked to play the cop in a proposed movie adaptation of Meyer's Thirteen Hours - but he is now a more complex individual than the desperate, last-chance we were first introduced to in Devil's Peak.

"It's the nature of the beast. Suspense writing is all about conflict - conflict being the mother of suspense - and the easy part is the external conflict, of the good guy against the bad guy, right against wrong, justice against injustice," Meyer said.

"But I think what readers respond to on a personal level is the internal conflict of characters. So, if you're going to have a guy with no issues, it's going to be a very boring book - and a very boring character. The big challenge is to keep that internal conflict going because readers want to see some sort of growth in a character."

Police work is psychologically scarring stuff.

"When I do research and visit the Hawks, that's one of the things that fascinates me: What is the damage that gets done when people work in the underbelly of a really dark and violent society? Because there is damage, no doubt about that."

And there is political pressure - though, as Meyer pointed out, cops "who actually work the cases", tend to be a little removed from that; it is the commanders and senior offices who get that sort of flak.

But foreign critics tend to praise Meyer's novels for what can broadly be termed their "politics".

In singling out Thirteen Hours as one of the 50 best thrillers and crime novels of the last five years, The London Sunday Times noted, "What makes [the] novel so outstanding is its setting - the new South Africa, where jaded white detectives are still getting used to working with black and 'coloured' colleagues. Meyer gives rare insights into the texture of everyday life in a country still troubled 20 years after the release of Nelson Mandela."

There's an aspect to this vision of the "troubled" country that does annoy Meyer - and it's partly why, in recent years, his plots have been getting more, for want of a better term, "geo-political". The bad guys come from all over the place - not just the underbelly of our dark and violent society.

Look at the number of recent news reports about extraditions, he explained.

"It seems that South Africa is becoming a haven for European criminals who come and hide here. So it's a little bit of a personal hobbyhorse. When I go to Europe and do interviews, I get a lot of questions that are based on wrong perceptions of South Africa, that it's this absolute crime-ridden society. I'm not saying that our crime stats are not high, but the problem with that perception in Europe is that it influences tourism. Tourism is now our biggest industry, the one that creates the most jobs.

"So for us to have such a bad rap overseas, it has a direct effect on our economy and disadvantaged peoples' employment opportunities. I honestly believe that the perception that Europeans and Americans have of us is unfair. So I decided to make that part of the book, Europeans bringing their trouble to South Africa and we get the bad reputation."

• 'Cobra' by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton/Jonathan Ball), R285