Customer Reviews

Steam Pig

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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.

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.

First Line: For an undertaker George Henry Abbott was a sad man.

In this first book in the Kramer and Zondi mystery series set in South Africa and originally published in 1971, a beautiful blonde has been killed by a bicycle spoke to the heart. The use of bicycle spokes as murder weapons is the signature of Bantu gangsters. Why would the Bantu kill a white woman in this manner? It's something that Kramer and his Bantu partner, Zondi, are going to have to find out.

This is a series that I've been meaning to sample for a long time because I've heard so many good things about it. Although I found McClure's gritty, almost terse, writing style a bit confusing from time to time and his characters not very well fleshed out, I found a lot to like about The Steam Pig.

I found the well-paced plot to contain several surprises, but more than anything I loved McClure's subtlety. This book was written during the time of apartheid, and McClure's books were wildly popular in South Africa when they were first published. This means that these mysteries had to appeal to both supporters and opponents of the system of racial segregation that finally came to an end in 1994.

You can find the language of racism in The Steam Pig. There are kaffirs, "boys", etc.-- but the language is applied with a light touch. The races are segregated. The laws are being upheld. But they are being upheld by a mixed race partnership that is really a friendship if you take the time to look deep enough. And it will take time because Kramer and Zondi are experts at toeing the "boss and boy" line when in company. They don't stand out; they blend in. But for anyone who cares to observe closely, it's easy to see that the laws Kramer and Zondi insist upon being upheld first aren't the laws of racial segregation; they're the laws of human decency and finding killers regardless of the color of the victim's skin.

Although I really wish Kramer and Zondi had been fleshed out a bit more, I was-- and still am-- in awe of McClure's skill. He put together an engrossing mystery that's all about what's beneath the surface. I'm looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

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.

Set in Trekkersburg, a small unfashionable town just north of Durban, South Africa this police drama sets itself down smack dab in the middle of 1960's apartheid. Bantu gangsters fill the town with crime which Kramer and his surprising side kick, Sergeant Zondi, a Bantu native get to solve. Zondi is able to get the other kaffirs to open up to him where they would not have to a white police officer and so the remarkable team gains a foothold on local crime.

The surprise we find in The Steam Pig is that the criminals are local politicians who get themselves mixed up with a Miss Le Roux, who it turns out is a mixed-race female passing herself off as white. Unable to face that they have had a relationship with the young lady she turns up on the slab at the mortuary.

Kramer seems to stumble through the mystery, the debut novel in a series starring the two policemen, as clues seem to get dropped at his feet. Luckily for him he is astute enough to recognize them and along with the information passed on from the Bantu informant, the unfortunate Shoe Shoe, and the invalid Indian Moosa, who watches the neighborhood from his upstairs bedroom window, the mystery begins to unravel as the pieces fall in place.

Just the title alone, The Steam Pig, spoke of a juicy, mouth-watering story. I knew in an instance that is somehow referred to the beautiful blonde laying on the stone slab, but McClure keeps the secret literally until the last page. A taut, secretive story that leans on the hate of an apartheid society, to the shocking conclusion that shows that nothing is as it appears, and that even a mother cannot grieve publically for her daughter in case the secret of their life is revealed.

The Steam Pig: A Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi Investigation (Kramer and Zondi Investigations Set in South Africa)

A beautiful young woman is murdered in South Africa and the investigation is hindered by the stark reality of apartheid. James McClure's first novel THE STEAM PIG follows the path of a traditional detective story with great clues and twists, but it is set against the South Africa of late 60s when racial purity was a given. A fascinating read for any age, but a product of its time.
This novel is being reissued and deserves a wider audience, even if it will not be consider a historical.
Nash Black, author of SINS OF THE FATHERS.

the startling beauty of the remains did not distress the undertaker, Mr. Abbott. But, when he got to the toes, and found the name-tag had there, he was deeply distressed.