The Steam Pig (Thorndike Large Print Popular Series) [Large Print] [Paperback]

James McClure (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1990 | Series: Thorndike Large Print Popular Series

In this crime story a body of a woman is sent to the police surgeon by mistake. He discovers that she died not from cardiac weakness, but from an almost imperceptible wound made by a bicycle spoke - a method of murder peculiar to certain Bantu gangsters. James McClure won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for "The Steam Pig" and later won the Silver Dagger for one of his other novels. He has also written a number of short stories and two works of non-fiction on policing in Liverpool and San Diego.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 371 pages
• Publisher: G K Hall & Co; Lrg edition (October 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 185057636X
• ISBN-13: 978-1850576365
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,490,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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, December 15, 2010

By 

Patto (Vermont) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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, May 13, 2008

By 

K. Sandness (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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 A well-written mystery wrapped in the barbed wire of apartheid, February 18, 2012

By 

Cathy G. Cole (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Steam Pig: A Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi Investigation (Kramer and Zondi Investigations Set in South Africa) (Paperback)

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.