Wessel Ebersohn

Wessel Ebersohn (born 1940, Cape Town, S. Africa) - a prominent South African novelist and magazine editor known for his gritty crime thrillers and anti-apartheid themes. Yudel Gordon, an unconventional Jewish prison psychologist, appears in many of his books. [Google, AI]

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #1], (A Lonely Place To Die [hc, Pantheon Books, 1981]) 978-0394520766 [pb, Littlehampton Book Services, 1983] 978-0600207191 [Published in 1979, the novel is set in apartheid-era South Africa and uses a crime plot to expose the racial and class tensions of the period. The son of a politician dies after eating poisoned mushrooms on a farm. Muskiet Lesoro, a Black farmworker, is accused of poisoning him, and the authorities treat it as an open-and-shut case — the “obviously mad” suspect is convicted with little further inquiry.

Yudel Gordon is a Jewish psychologist employed by the Department of Prisons in Pretoria, brought in not as a detective but in his official capacity —to assess whether the accused is mentally fit to stand trial. Yudel finds the farmhand “obviously mad”, but that’s where his job should end. Instead, because he’s fascinated by “the intricacies of the criminal mind,” he goes beyond the boundaries of his job and starts investigating the crime itself — he’s convinced a poisoning requires a level of planning and control the accused man simply doesn’t have, meaning the real killer is still free.

Yudel travels to the small country town where the crime took place — a closed, fearful community where the truth is being carefully guarded. As he questions the friends and family of both victim and accused, he runs into hostility on all sides and eventually becomes a target himself, with his life at risk as he keeps asking questions no one else dared to ask. Things come to a head when he’s savagely beaten and has to survive a harrowing night pursued through the veld before uncovering the truth. The ending isn’t a tidy one — Yudel eventually exposes a disturbing tangle of guilt, rape, and incest behind the killing, and the solution is one he wouldn’t have chosen, if he’d had a choice

This book introduces Yudel as a more introspective, psychology-driven detective figure than his South African crime-fiction contemporaries — an outsider (a Jewish civil servant working inside the apartheid prison system) whose sympathy for the powerless and stubborn curiosity about the human mind repeatedly pull him into moral territory well beyond his actual job description. It set the template for six further Yudel Gordon novels across the decades that followed, tracking South Africa’s political changes right up through the post-apartheid era. - Kirkus Reviews]

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #2], (Divide The Night [hc, Pantheon Books, 1981]) 978-0394520766 [pb, Littlehampton Book Services, 1983] 978-0600207191

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #3], (Closed Circle [hc, Victor Gollancz, 1992]) 978-0575048485

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #4], (The October Killings [hc, Minotaur Books, 2011]) 978-0312655952 [pb, Minotaur Books, 2011] 978-0312552732

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #5], Those Who Love Night [hc, Minotaur Books, 2012]) 978-0312655969 [pb, Minotaur Books, 2012] 978-1250013385

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #6], (The Top Prisoner of C-Max [pb, Umuzi, 2012]) 978-1415201794

Ebersohn, Wessel [Yudel Gordon, #7], (Deluge (2022) [self-published ebook]) 9780639715001

Forthcoming Yudel Gordon thrillers (from Wessel Ebersohn web-site)

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