“I always hear laughing as well as sobbing when I recall life in Africa.”
For many, the world that James McClure depicted was shocking and unfamiliar. For others, it was one they knew only too well.
Through the lens of the police procedural, McClure explored South Africa at the heart of apartheid in eight novels between 1971 and 1991. It was a place at once full of natural beauty and ugly social, legal, and political institutions —a country that went to great lengths to separate the races and wall off its black population—and his portrait of it was unsparing. He did not preach, however. His plots and characters came from daily life, and, as with all of the best police procedurals, the books were full of humor, insight, complex human relationships, subtle details, and sharp dialogue.
“First and foremost, I decided my obligation was to entertain,” he once wrote, “leaving graver matters—which could be included, but obliquely—to those with the time, money, and intellectual capacity to indulge them.
“I welcomed the neutrality of the crime story. Every novel about South Africa that I’d come across until then had been self-limiting, I felt, in that its anti-apartheid slant made it appeal only to the ‘converted’—you’re not reaching the ordinary guy at all—and this was essentially the reason I’d not been attracted by the form. Crime or mystery novels, on the other hand, appealed to pretty well everyone, including the most conservative, if not downright reactionary, reader. This meant I could simply write ‘the way it was’ and have people make their own moral judgments while the point of the tale remained ‘who done it?’ This seemed very much fairer—and ultimately more valuable.”
As to why he adopted the police procedural in particular, that was easy: “Police have access to every level of society. You can move between all the levels in one book.”
His heroes were the seemingly mismatched pair of Afrikaner Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi, who worked in the city of Trekkersburg, based roughly on McClure’s hometown of Pietermaritzburg.
Kramer is “a farmer’s son, born and bred. We grew a lot of rocks” (The Song Dog, 1991). He has “sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes, and protrudent front teeth. It was a hard face, an ugly face, a face which saved you a lot of beating about the bush” (The Steam Pig , 1971). He uses all that to his advantage in his interrogations and, while in many ways a traditional white South African, Kramer notes in Snake (1975), “I don’t suffer the same way from the blind spots of my people. Not in my work anyway.” As one of his superiors complains, “You, er, have inclinations to be a bit of a free thinker on the quiet” (The Song Dog). He is also a very practical man. “Every prejudice had its virtues, provided it was used correctly,” he notes in The Blood of an Englishman (1980), which meant you used whatever tools at your disposal to handle a situation or get people to open up and talk, a view very much shared by Zondi. In The Steam Pig, for instance, they role-play “an old routine of electrician and electrician’s mate, an act perfected in dozens of unsuspecting homes. Within seconds, the illusion was complete—right down to the feeling that the black man, obsequiously responding to the gruff requests for tools within easy reach, could have done the job much better himself.”
Zondi is a natural match for him: smart, perceptive, analytical, and especially adept at putting other black people at ease, especially servants, laborers, and street denizens. He could pose as one of them easily not only because he is an empathetic shape-shifter, but because he is one of them. When Kramer wonders at one point why a housemaid hadn’t noticed something suspicious about a certain man’s behavior, Zondi gently chides him: “Boss, boss, boss, will you never learn that a black child is only seven years old when he stops wondering at the way of white persons? They do so many strange things, believe so many strange things, that life is just too short” (The Blood of an Englishman).
Zondi had grown up poor at a mission school in Zululand and “lived with his wife and three children in a two-room concrete house which covered an area of four table tennis tables and had a floor of stamped earth” (The Steam Pig). At one point, he compares a well-appointed white residence to his own “packing-case dresser and…the lines Miriam had scratched in the rammed earth underfoot to simulate wooden boards” (The Sunday Hangman, 1977).
Zondi had made the best of it all, though. At that mission school, he had only shared textbooks, so “he read fast, read once, and remembered” (The Steam Pig). Before joining the force, he had spent a year as a houseboy, which “had given him an eye for the details of a white man’s abode which was as fresh and perceptive as that of an anthropologist making much of what the natives themselves never noticed” (The Steam Pig).
And he has…style. Here is the first time Kramer ever laid eyes on him: A crowd parts “of its own volition” and through it comes “Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snap-brim hat, padded shoulders, and zootsuit larded with glittering thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. Yet with them went the feeling that here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought it all up before. The man walked that way because he thought that way, and the crowd had sensed this—just as it had sensed that something special, perhaps even deadly, walked with him.”
As to why he adopted the police procedural in particular, that was easy: “Police have access to every level of society. You can move between all the levels in one book.”Together, the two solve crimes from all levels of society, each book often encompassing two separate investigations that dovetail in some fashion. The murders are often brutal and noir: a policeman blown to bits by dynamite (The Song Dog); a stripper strangled by her own prop, a five-foot python (Snake 1975); a woman stabbed in her home, her “glittering, bluey-green bikini” revealed to be a swarm of angry flies (The Artful Egg, 1984); a petty criminal kidnapped and hung by someone who knows far too much about the hangman’s craft (The Sunday Hangman, 1977).
Through it all, the plots and interactions offer opportunities for McClure’s commentary:
A class of Bantu children banned from a film at the Natural History Museum:
“’For Whites Only’ was in very small writing,’ the teacher replied, showing not anger but a certain stubbornness. ‘To tell you the truth, when I brought my pupils in just now, I again failed to notice the restriction concerning the film theater…I simply thought, sir, as the theater is not even a quarter occupied, that under the circumstances we may be allowed to stand at the back.
“’Not my ruling. Sorry. Don’t make the rules. And I’ve got a boss waiting, so that’s the end of it.’” (Snake)
Major Hamish MacTaggart, Cameron Highlanders Retired:
“Kramer liked these old lunatics, who really should have been dead and buried long ago, but persisted in staining their corners of the globe Empire Red with shakier and shakier pourings from the port-bottle.” (The Artful Egg)
Zondi recalling his mission school:
“There the best dreams of his life had been dreamed; all you had to do, the white nuns had said, was learn your lessons well and then, when you grew up, you could be anything you wanted to be. They had been wrong, those stupid, kind women, who believed all men were brothers, totally wrong.” (The Gooseberry Fool, 1974)
An observation on the similarly despised Asiatic population, especially Indians:
“The storekeeper recognized him and lowered his right hand.
“’Shut up, Mary!’
Every Indian woman was Coolie Mary. She did.” (The Steam Pig)
Zondi relaying the details of an interview to Kramer:
“’The chief garden boy. He lives at Peacevale, so he didn’t know anything of what happened in the night. All he noticed when he came to work was that the dogs from all around were sniffing at the back of the car and peeing on it.’
“’Didn’t that seem unusual to him?’
“’It made him laugh,’” said Zondi, grinning. ‘He said he had felt that way about his employer many times himself.’” (The Blood of an Englishman)
Zondi arriving at a hamlet to arrest a murderer, and getting the wrong initial impression about what he’s found:
“He saw Robert’s Halt across the river—and a sight quite extraordinary. The place was surrounded by policemen, the whites armed with sten guns and the Africans with spears. Their riot vans unfortunately blocked off a proper view of what was going on beyond them….There must have been sudden, dramatic developments in the case he was unaware of….There was the sound of an engine starting up and then, from behind the riot vans, came a truck piled high with villagers and their property. What an idiot he had been. It was an eviction: an ordinary Black Spot eviction, one of hundreds, an everyday event….A bulldozer roared into raucous life and emerged from the scrub to flatten the vacated homes.” (The Gooseberry Fool)
A doctor’s busy day:
“Mackenzie cleared his throat. ‘If you’ve no objections, gentlemen, I’d better keep at it,’ he said. ‘I’ve today’s floggings to supervise at the prison at four, and then some house calls to make to kiddies with this flu that’s going round.’”
***
All these books were at least partly based on McClure’s own experience. After a few years as a schoolteacher, he became both a crime reporter and photographer for Natal newspapers. “When late-night accidents and disasters struck, I would be sent to cover them. This brought me for the first time into regular contact with the South Africa police, and a fascination began to grow….I covered both magistrates’ hearings and the Supreme Court, did police calls, hospital calls, and almost set up home at the fire station, which also provides the city’s ambulance service. I became obsessed, working sixteen hours most days.”
His crime beat soon took him to the dark side of South Africa. His reporting of what he saw—including a black prisoner being dragged through the streets attached by his handcuffs to the back of a police van—led to the authorities taking interest in him; the police would knock on his door in the middle of the night to make sure he knew they were watching him, and he saw friends being arrested. In his words, “I saw too much,” and with his wife and son, he decided in 1965 to move to Britain: “We had two suitcases and less than enough money to last a month.”
Fortunately, he was quickly hired by the Scottish Daily Mail, and from there moved to the Oxford Mail in England. It didn’t pay all that well, though. At one point, he and his wife and now three children “were living in a tiny flat in Oxford so cramped that nobody slept as much as an arm’s length from anyone else.” He tried writing television scripts on the side, to mixed success, moved to the Oxford Times, and then he went out to lunch with a colleague, who stopped to mail the ms of a first novel off to a publisher. Ten days later, the publisher bought it, and McClure thought: Huh.
He had two weeks vacation coming up, and no money for a holiday away. He dragged out a typewriter, wrote a first sentence—“For an undertaker, George Henry Abbott was a sad man”—liked it, and the rest of the chapter unfolded. “Having established that foul play had been committed, it was only natural to introduce a detective in Chapter Two…I learned his name was Kramer…Then Zondi, a Zulu detective sergeant, appeared on the scene. I heard and saw and recorded what went on between them, before hurrying on to find out what would happen next.” He finished the book in those two weeks, sent it off—and it too was bought in ten days.
This would turn out to be his m.o. for subsequent books, until in 1974, he quit newspapering to become a full-time writer, which also included a spy novel set in Africa, Rogue Eagle, and two long nonfiction books about police departments, Spike Island, about Liverpool, and Copworld, about San Diego.
Those last two books reminded him of how much he missed working with others, and he returned to journalism, rejoining the Oxford Times in 1986, then becoming the paper’s editor in 1994, and finally rejoining the Oxford Mail in 2000. He found these to be all-consuming jobs, which is why he wrote no more novels after 1991; but then, after retirement at the end of 2004, he finally got back to it. He was writing a new novel, set in Oxford, when he died in June 2006.
His books were never really accepted in South Africa, at least during the apartheid years, though when he took a trip back there in 1974, he found the books “had a cult status among the South African police, who admitted to a sense of reflected glory.” It was different in the rest of the world. He won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1971 for The Steam Pig and a Silver Dagger in 1976 for Rogue Eagle. Ruth Rendell hailed him as a “great storyteller” and P.D. James praised him as “a distinguished crime novelist who has created in Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi two detectives who are as far from stereotypes as any in the genre.”
They are wonderful books, raw, full of life, brilliantly written, a true window into a time and place mercifully past, though its ramifications echo loudly to this day. And they are pretty damn good police procedurals.
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The Essential McClure
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The Steam Pig (1971)
This is the first Kramer and Zondi book, the one that begins, “For an undertaker, George Henry Abbott was a sad man.” He’s going to get sadder. A mix-up results in the wrong body being cremated, and the intact body is highly problematical. It is that of a beautiful white woman killed by a sharpened bicycle spoke inserted neatly between two ribs into the heart—a signature method of Bantu gang members. There’s no reason for her to have been mixed up with such people, but the alternative is even worse: “It was ugly, it was revolting, it was unprecedented that a white murderer should get a black to do his dirty work.”
What follows for Kramer and Zondi, however, as they slowly unwind the case, is even uglier, even more unprecedented—a nightmare story of double lives, of corruption and the corruptible. It is an ideal introduction to the two main characters and their methods and the society in which they operate.
Here is Kramer on a white woman’s insistence on drying her clothes on a rack inside her house:
“The old dear’s underwear would dry in ten minutes out in the sun. Oh, no, she feared the sight of it might incite the garden boy. It was no good speaking to her about it either. She would only ask again why the law required bikini girls on cinema posters to have decent dresses painted over them. There was no answer to that.”
Here is Zondi blending in to the streets:
“It was easy to remain unnoticed. You could submerge yourself in a jostling crowd around the game played with Coke bottle tops. Or you could sit on the curb and shuffle your feet in the gutters with the others who never earned a glance from passersby. You just took off your tie, turned your jacket inside out to show the satin lining like a farmboy, and went to work.”
And here is our first look at Zondi, as Kramer is startled from a nap:
“The face above him was black. His right fist heaved up, missed, flopped back. Somebody laughed. He knew that laugh; he had heard it where children played, where women wept, where men died, always the same depth of detached amusement. Kramer closed his eyes without troubling to focus them and felt curiously content.”
The reader is curiously content, too. We know we are in good hands.
The Blood of an Englishman (1980)
Tromp Kramer is highly frustrated: “In the six days he had been in charge of the case, he had done nothing but chase up one blind alley after another, getting nowhere.” An antiques dealer named Archie Bradshaw has been shot in the collarbone while walking his dog, and all he can recall was that the gunman was huge, “a massive bloke—like a gorilla, he said, or maybe a giant.” And then a ripe body is found in the trunk of a car, “his hands tied behind him in a knot tightened by some hideous strength, for the bones were broken.”
This can not be a coincidence, a suspicion confirmed by the fact that both men were shot by bullets from the same gun. But what connects them? As Kramer and Zondi pursue the investigation, startling connections turn up in the underworld of Trekkersburg and in the secret, unresolved enmities of World War II. Instead of their hunt getting simpler, the complications multiply—both personal and professional, and from the most unexpected directions.
One of my favorite passages comes when Zondi is establishing a cozy comradeship with Nxumalo, a put-upon Zulu constable assigned to a mortuary:
“’Sergeant Van, the old baboon, decided we must have what he calls ‘spring clean.’ Do you understand what ‘spring clean’ means?’
“Zondi nodded, having a memory of some such thing from his early days as a domestic servant. ‘It is when the whites untidy the whole house, make you wash even the walls, and then tell you to tidy up again.’
“’Ah, so it is a custom,’ sighed Nxumalo, as though this explained a great deal.”
He goes on to mimic his superior:
“What’s this arm doing here, hey? How long have we had this arm? Hau, boss, many, many months—since the big train crash when it hit the petrol tankers. Don’t give me excuses, hey? Chuck the bloody thing out! And this head! What about this head you’ve stuck down at the back of the fridge here? You thought I wouldn’t see it, hey? That head, boss, is the one without a body—you remember, the patrol found the dogs fighting over it in Peacevale township, and Dr. Strydom said it was cut off with a penknife. But it’s just some idle kaffir’s head, Nxumalo!…This is my mortuary, not so? If he wants this head so much, then he can take it home and put it in his deep freeze! Why should I have it cluttering up the place? The junk that man collects! Just chuck it out, you hear me?”
Note the word kaffir, the equivalent in South Africa of the N-word. The language in McClure’s books is as raw and direct as it would have been on the street at the time, nothing papered over.
The Song Dog (1991)
The last book in the series, and one that jumps back in time, to 1962, when Kramer and Zondi first met. Kramer has been transferred only 23 days before to this unit in Natal, hates it, and spends part of his time mentally composing a transfer request to his buffoon of a commander: “Never, in all my born days in the South African Police, have I met such baboons as you and your little band of arse-creeping half-wits.”
It doesn’t help his mood any that he’s been sent to a small, dusty town in northern Zululand to look into the death of a detective who’s died in an explosion. Some of the people there consider the dead man a hero, others have a much more complicated view of a man who apparently had a lot of secrets to hide, and meanwhile Kramer keeps crossing paths with a “cheeky-looking Zulu” with an “alert, cannonball head.”
That is Zondi, on his own case, tracking a multiple killer who just might be his own cousin:
“Kramer raised an eyebrow. ‘You would send your own cousin to the hangman in Pretoria?’
“’I would prefer to kill Mslope myself, sir,’ said Zondi, touching his shoulder holster. ‘There would be some dignity in such a death, which would greatly benefit the sprit of our ancestors.’”
Each soon recognizes a kinship with the other, and as their cases intersect, each finds himself on very unfamiliar and increasingly perilous ground. And the Song Dog itself? You’ll have to read the book to find out what that means.
(ed. note—McClure’s Kramer and Zondi series is available in the US from Soho Press.)
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Book Bonus
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As mentioned above, McClure wrote other books, too, including an award-winning thriller and two nonfiction books on police forces. Rogue Eagle is about an extremist movement in the small mountainous country of Lesotho, which is entirely self-contained within South Africa. The group is modeled on the Ossewabrandwag, an anti-British, pro-German organization in South Africa during World War II. There’s a Scottish undercover agent for the British, a CIA woman, and lots of politics, fanatics, and action galore. McClure has said that Rogue Eagle is “the closest I’ve ever come to being autobiographical. The major who sends Buchanan into the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho is very much a portrait of my father, who spent the war pursuing the Ossewabrandwag.”
For Spike Island and Copland, McClure immersed himself in two distinct police forces—for the first, a notoriously crime-laden division of the Merseyside Police in the heart of Liverpool; for the latter, Second Watch, Central Division, of the San Diego Police Department. Both books focus heavily on the drama-spiked, tedium-filled daily lives, jobs, and challenges of the officers. Said the New York Times, “Spike Island is a book that no crime novelist, journalist, or academic who writes about law enforcement should be without.”
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Meta Bonus #1
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“Yes, thought Zondi, a writer of books would probably have need of a child’s mind, that same capacity for wonder and for making up stories based on little or nothing. Sometimes, being a detective was a bit like that, too.”
—The Artful Egg
“’You must pardon me being so fanciful; it’s the books my wife reads.’
“’Agatha Christie? Or Dick Francis?’
“’Edward McBain. An American gentleman, I fear.’”
—Snake
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First Sentence Bonus
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Like Dick Francis, McClure was expert at crafting first lines that immediately hooked you. Besides the one for The Steam Pig above, here are four more:
“Eve defied death twice nightly, except on Sundays.”
—Snake
“Hugo Swart entered purgatory just after nine o’clock on the hottest night of the year.”
—The Gooseberry Fool
“Tollie Erasmus looked at the room in which he was about to die, and saw there the story of his life. Nothing had ever turned out quite the way he’d imagined it.”
—The Sunday Hangman
“A hen is an egg’s way of making another egg. This was the thought uppermost in the mind of Ramjut Pillay, Asiatic Postman 2nd Class, at the start of the horrific Tuesday morning that altered the course of his life.”
—The Artful Egg
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Meta Bonus #2
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In The Song Dog, the local police in northern Zululand are puzzled that Kramer has been brought in to investigate their colleague’s death. Everyone had expected their own Captain Bronkhorst to do it:
“One man said maybe Captain Bronkhorst was afraid he would look bad if he failed to catch the person who had made the explosion. But later, Mtetwa, the Bantu sergeant said no, it was not like that. He had spoken with a former CID colleague in Trekkersburg and had been told that Captain Bronkhorst was busy with a very big investigation, assisting the Security Branch to find a certain Bantu male, Nelson Mandela.
“’Who?’ asked Kramer.
“’Oh, some Xhosa,’ said Zondi, with what seemed a very Zulu gesture of dismissal for someone belonging to a lesser tribe. ‘I seem to remember he is also ANC, a lawyer.’”
This was another small piece of personal history for McClure. As he said to an interviewer in 1994, “I was in the police station the afternoon they came in all excited and said they’d caught this man Mandela up at Howick, and I didn’t know what they were on about, nor did the charge officer. [But] when I wrote The Song Dog, I knew the whole story was going to begin there.”
