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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nasty murder in a hellish world,
By
This review is from: Steam Pig: A Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi Investigation (Kramer and Zondi Investigations Set in South Africa) (Paperback)
Soho Press is usually a good source of exotic crime fiction, so I picked up this book on impulse at a bookstore. Reading The Steam Pig was not a pleasant experience, although, once begun, I never considered not reading it.
The aggressively edgy prose makes the plot hard to follow at times. Yet the style can be seen as a reflection of the uncomfortable locale: apartheid-era South Africa. There are police informers everywhere. Black and white streets, washrooms and counters are strictly delineated. At any time, the Race Board may reclassify a white family as black, if their pigmentation strikes someone as questionable. And it's a serious crime to have intercourse with a person of another color. In this racially tense world, white police lieutenant Tromp Kramer, the best investigator in Trekkersberg, invariably chooses to work with Zondi, a black sergeant. Playing at "boss" and "boy" when anyone's around, Kramer and Zondi are in fact true partners who like and respect each other. This book, the first Kramer and Zondi mystery, deals with the murder of a beautiful young woman who lives quietly on a white street giving music lessons. The nearly invisible killing method, however, is a Bantu gang technique - not at all compatible with a respectable white victim. The madness of a state built on racial oppression permeates the plot - and gives rise to an interesting cast of characters, black and white. But Kramer himself is not as yet very developed as a character, aside from his secret lack of prejudice and his occasional couplings with an amorous widow. Maybe he'll acquire more dimensions in the books that follow. I'd recommend this book if you don't mind a gritty style and a grim setting. Otherwise, maybe not.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Well-Written Mystery Now of Historical Interest,
By
This review is from: The Steam Pig (Paperback)
Now that the South African apartheid system has been dismantled, James McClure's mystery novels are historical artifacts, but they remain well-written, absorbing portraits of a society obsessed with racial purity.
In The Steam Pig, McClure, a South African who left to live in England, takes some incredible-sounding incidents (based on things that actually happened in South Africa in those days) and makes the reader understand what it was like to live under apartheid. A young woman is murdered, and the investigation of her murder leads to her family of origin, who have been suddenly and arbitrarily reclassified from white to "Coloured" (mixed race) without explanation or appeal. The account of how this reclassification affects every aspect of their lives vividly illustrates why South Africa earned worldwide condemnation for its internal policies. In charge of the investigation is Kramer, an Afrikaner (descendant of early Dutch settlers), who over the course of the books has developed a respect for the detecting smarts of his Zulu driver, Zondi. While Kramer conducts investigations in the normal way, Zondi gossips with the suspects' black household servants and casually asks exactly the right questions to learn their employers' deepest secrets. We eventually learn who killed the young woman, and the solution has everything to do with the country's warped racial politics. While South Africa still has many problems, the society portrayed in McClure's novels no longer exists, for which we can be grateful.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Neither Black nor White,
By
This review is from: Steam Pig: A Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi Investigation (Kramer and Zondi Investigations Set in South Africa) (Paperback)
Before his death four years ago, the author wrote four novels in this series, featuring a white CID lieutenant, Tromp Kramer, and his black assistant, Sgt. Zondi. The setting for "The Steam Pig" was apartheid South Africa, and the descriptions of that society are poignant and overwhelming, while the plot follows the unraveling of a murder investigation. Thanks to Soho Press, it is now back in print, along with one other in the series.
An attractive blonde is murdered in an unusual way: a bicycle spoke through to the heart, a signature method of the Bantus. Little by little Kramer and Zondi follow a mixed trail to find out shy she was killed and by whom. Along the way the reader is treated to subtle and not so subtle elements of the horrid aspects of apartheid in South Africa. The interplay between Kramer and Zondi, stressing the advantages of each (the Bantu obviously is able to obtain information from his black counterparts more easily than his white superior), quietly demonstrates the inadequacies of apartheid, while the fact that the victim, who was reclassified "colored" from "white," points up just one unfortunate aspect of the system. The whole, of course, is more than the sum of its parts. A good, well-written mystery, interesting characters and a very different style makes for an excellent read, which brings this reviewer next to the second book made available by the publisher, "The Caterpillar Cop." Recommended.
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