Diale Tlholwe, an exciting new (to me) South African crime novelist

Diale Tlholwe reminds me of his late, great countryman James McClure.  Like McClure, South Africa's greatest crime writer, Tlholwe writes with an amused, detached narrative voice that makes his social observations all the sharper.

McClure wrote during South Africa's apartheid era. Tlholwe sets his books amid the hangover after the euphoria of apartheid's overthrow, thus observations such as the following, from his second novel, Counting the Coffins:

“`Oh, Jacky. He used to be a journalist too. Now he is a spokesperson for some high official.'

“`Which one? The official, I mean.'

“`There’s been so many of them. Jacky is always moving around, advocating one cause today and another the next. He is a typical new South African. Right now, I think it’s small-business enterprise. After the mall mess he was in public works. Anyway, the same people are usually involved in all these things in different ways – public, private and everything in between.'”

or this, in which the protagonist, an investigator named Thabang Maje, indulges in high spirits on the job:

“`Evening, ladies and gents of the majority, as we used to say a million dark years ago just before looting and burning down your houses. I’m . . . I’m Lebogang.' For some reason my mind was back at the blazing season of my school days when we would terrify ineffectual people like these whom we suspected were fence-sitters in the liberation struggle.” 

That's funny and sad and scary at the same time, I'd say, enough by itself to make the novel worth reading.  The book so far also reminds me of the best of Northern Ireland crime fiction, in its invocations of ghosts that remain, however, very much alive.

I still have about half the book left to read, but Counting the Coffins bids fair to be my most exciting crime fiction discovery this year. I'll also look forward to reading Tlholwe's Ancient Rites.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Back to South Africa in James McClure's shorts

Detectives Beyond Borders has long been a fan of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi novels, which pair a white Afrikaner police lieutenant and his Zulu assistant in apartheid-era South Africa, and do not spare the reader the harsh words that swirl around, about, and between the two. (Read all Detectives Beyond Borders' McClure posts; click the link, then scroll down.)

So I was especially excited to hear from the good folks at Crime Beat (South Africa), about God It Was Fun, a collection of McClure's short stories and scripts. These include the screenplay for a film adaptation of his novel The Steam Pig, a production "halted in circumstances that remain a mystery to this day," according to a short, informative biographical introduction by McClure's children.

It has been a while since I've read South African crime fiction, a body of work I've called second only to Ireland's in international crime writing, and it's good to be back.

*

Want to join me in exploring South African crime fiction? Here's a Crime Beat list of twenty top South African crime novels. I might have chosen different books by Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, but it's an exciting list, including a few authors new to me, one of whose novels I have just bought.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Books to Die For, Part I

I've begun my reading of Books to Die For with the essays by Scott Phillips on Charles Willeford, Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith, John McFetridge on Trevanian, Mike Nicol on James McClure, Qiu Xiaolong on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Elmore Leonard on George V. Higgins.

In each case but one, the essay is by a crime writer whose work I've read and the subject is another crime writer (or writers) whose work I've also read. In that exceptional case, the setting of the novel under discussion is my home town, so I feel that I can bring multiple perspectives to all six essays.

Each of the six probably says at least as much about its author as about its subject, with the possible exception of Nicol's on The Steam Pig, first of James McClure's six Kramer and Zondi novels set in apartheid-era South Africa. I can think of no author whose work looms larger over his country's crime fiction than McClure's does over South Africa's. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that Nicol's fine summation of the great McClure seems to me more self-effacing than the other essays I read.

Scott Phillips (lower left) simulates
a larcenous act as, from left,
John McFetridge, your humble
blogkeeper, and Declan Burke
look on. (If this were a newspaper
rather than a blog, McFetridge,
Y.H.B.K. and Burke would not
just be looking on but also
sharing a laugh.) 

Elsewhere, McFetridge on Trevanian's novel The Main offers the same keen eye for social history that I know from McFetridge's own books. And Scott Phillips' observation that Charles Willeford's heroes "cheat, brawl, lie, and seduce their way, unencumbered by notions of fair play, through a postwar American landscape Norman Rockwell never painted" reminded me of nothing so much as the unsentimental but very funny world of Phillips' own novels.

And now, as Bob Dylan said, the hour is getting late. So I'll leave you with the thought that I see no reason Books to Die For and its editors, Declan Burke and John Connolly, ought not to be considered for next year's Edgar, Dagger, and other crime fiction awards in the critical/non-fiction categories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Among the liars, and a bit more James McClure

I made no post yesterday because I spent the afternoon with Philadelphia's Liars Club when I could have been reading.

The Liars Club is a group of writers, associated professionals, and people who want to join them. That means that its monthly writers' coffeehouses tend to be at least as much about agents, copyrights, and shifting business models as they are about muses. That means the attendees are serious about writing and know the value of editing. And that means I got to pitch my freelance editing services. I even came pretty damn close to exhausting my supply of business cards.

***

Back in the reading world, I found that James McClure knows how to keep a running gag going: He uses it sparingly, and he builds it up a bit each time.

On Friday, I wrote about this amusing, non-politically correct bit from Page 17 of The Blood of an Englishman

"`Boss Bradshaw is a tall tree,' Zondi remarked primly, `and there is saying among my people—""`Bullshit,' interrupted Kramer, `you're making this up!'"They laughed together, then peered over the cars in front of them..."

One hundred sixty-three pages later comes this:

"`So now you know the meaning of Black Man's Choice, which is a saying among my—""`Bullshit!' said Kramer, and they both laughed."

I like that McClure waited so many pages before using the joke again, and I like the effect he achieved by having Kramer interrupt Zondi before he could get to the word people the second time.

The man knew a good joke, and he knew how to build it up for comic effect. That's another reason to enjoy this great South African crime writer.

If McClure repeats the gag yet again, he could have Kramer cut Zondi off even earlier, both increasing the humor and reinforcing the good-natured intimacy between the two characters.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Blood of an Englishman

Here's a bit from The Blood of an Englishman (1980), sixth of James McClure's novels about his Afrikaner police lieutenant Tromp Kramer, and his Zulu sidekick, Sgt. Mickey Zondi:

"`Boss Bradshaw is a tall tree,' Zondi remarked primly, `and thee is saying among my people—'

"`Bullshit,' interrupted Kramer, `you're making this up!'

"They laughed together, then peered over the cars in front of them..."

How refreshingly unsanctimonious, how unpolitcally correct and yet enearingly human is that?  I wrote a few months ago that I knew of nothing else in crime fiction like the Kramer and Zondi books: "The writing sparkles with the wit and concision of the best traditional mysteries even though the subject matter is sometimes as dark as that of the darkest hard-boileds. The social criticism is of a deftness that Stieg Larsson could never have managed if he'd written a thousand books, and the sympathetic eye for character is something like Andrea Camilleri's."

Nothing has changed my mind since. McClure was one of the great originals in crime fiction, a defier of categories, and very much worth reading for crime-fiction-lovers of all stripes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

James McClure on television

A skeptical commenter yesterday asked for a few more excerpts to justify my enthusiasm for James McClure.  I'll suggest an entire category: McClure's descriptions of South African landscapes. Here's one, from The Sunday Hangman:

"Apart from some thorn scrubs, there were no trees except those gathered  together for a definite purpose: to shade a tin-roofed homestead, or to provide a trading store with its windbreak. The sort of God's own country where every farmer began his day with a very deep sigh."

The same commenter mentioned that television came to South Africa only in 1976 and presumed that McClure's novels reflected this. I had noticed no such reflection, I replied. But when I picked up The Sunday Hangman to resume my reading, I came across a series of comic set pieces involving television — no surprise in a novel published in 1977 and possibly written in the crucial television year:

"`Tomorrow night the TV's in Afrikaans,' she said, keeping hold of his hand, and they went automatically through to the kitchen for their coffee. `They've invited us again, so can you come over?' 

"`What's on?' 

"`An Australian baritone singing translations form real Italian opera. I'm going.' 

"That, thought Strydom, was exactly what the old Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had warned against when describing television as the Devil's instrument. Not once that week had they sat down together as man and wife and talked over his more interesting cases."

Elsewhere we get scenes of Strydom haggling over the price and features of a television set and amazing onlookers with the weird results of his fiddling with the color dials. But that one excerpt will suggest that McClure has an eye for social history and gentle comedy as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More James McClure on the way

I'd already known that Alan Glynn's Bloodland and Donald Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished were due in February. I now have in my hands Soho Crime's upcoming reissue of James McClure's The Sunday Hangman (1977), fifth of the late, great South African crime writer's eight Kramer and Zondi mysteries, and it's due on the 7th. February is the coolest month.

I've read four of Kramer and Zondi novels, and I know of nothing else like them in crime fiction. The writing sparkles with the wit and concision of the best traditional mysteries even though the subject matter is sometimes as dark as that of the darkest hard-boileds. The social criticism is of a deftness that Stieg Larsson could never have managed if he'd written a thousand books, and the sympathetic eye for character is something like Andrea Camilleri's.

It helps that McClure had a dramatic background against which to set his stories: apartheid-era South Africa. They pair a white Afrikaner police lieutenant (Kramer) and his Zulu assistant (Zondi), and McClure does not spare the reader the harsh words that swirl around, about, and sometimes between the two.

"Perhaps the most surprising aspect of McClure's apartheid-era novels to readers almost forty years later," I wrote after reading The Steam Pig, "is the blend of breezy banter in the English style with acute portraits of the period's ugliness. The result may shock today's more sensitive readers, at least American ones, but I call it an impressive achievement."

So I'm excited about The Sunday Hangman. Here are two few samples that ought to give a fair idea why:

"The veld all around them was as parched as an old tennis ball and much the same color."

and

"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."

Good stuff, ja?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

James McClure and why I want to read his biography

I asked recently which crime writers deserve to be subjects of biographies. Here's someone I want to read about: James McClure.

Why McClure? Because he's a seminal figure in South African crime fiction, cited and paid homage to by such disparate authors as Michael Stanley and Roger Smith. Because he was born and began his professional life in South Africa but published no crime novels until after he'd left for the U.K. But mostly because he combined unsparing looks at apartheid-era South Africa with an obvious affection for English village mysteries, and because he did all this in suspenseful, skillfully written police procedurals. His books include amusement, irony and reflection that might remind readers of William McIlvanney. If nothing else, I want to know what books McClure liked.

The immediate occasion for this post is 1975 story "Scandal at Sandkop," available at Crime Beat (South Africa). It's not quite up there with the Kramer and Zondi mysteries, but its combination of village-mystery devices (the story even includes arsenic) and convincing local detail, hard edges included, is typically McClure.

***

Soho Crime has reissued The Steam Pig and The Caterpillar Cop, the first and has plans to reprint the remaining six. That worthy house has rendered to greater service to crime-fiction readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A James McClure story online

Mike Nicol, whose mother probably cried, "He's indefatigable!" when she gave birth to him, has come up with another special treat on his Crime Beat (South Africa) Web site: a short story by James McClure, author of the seminal Kramer and Zondi mysteries. The story is called "Scandal at Sandkop," and you can read it by clicking on the title.

I've written quite a bit about McClure in the past year. Read those posts and discussions here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Homage, sweet homage

I was excited recently when, reading James McClure's 1991 South African crime novel The Song Dog, I found an off-stage character whose name was (and the detail escapes me) either Khubu or Bhengu.

Michael Stanley's protagonist, hero of A Carrion Death and The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (A Deadly Trade outside North America) is named David "Kubu" Bengu, and Stanley collectively and the Stanley Trollip half of the team on his own have called The Song Dog one of the great African crime novels. Surely, I thought, their hero's name must be an homage to McClure.

Nope, said Trollip, just coincidence.

But I'm not giving up so easily this time. I've just glanced again at a passage from Roger Smith's Cape Town novel Mixed Blood that I cited in February:

"The wind howled across the Flats, picking up the sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses."

McClure's protagonists are Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi. Furthermore, the passage is part of Smith's acknowledged homage to Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind," so what's one more homage? Now, don't tell me this one is a coincidence, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Nelson who?

Michael Stanley rated James McClure's The Song Dog (1991) one of the ten best African crime novels. I'd rank it behind The Gooseberry Fool among the four of McClure's South African-set Kramer and Zondi mysteries that I've read, but it contains some good, bracing stuff. Among the highlights:

A Zulu character's dismissive reference to some Xhosa lawyer named Nelson Mandela. (1962 is the year both of the novel's setting and of Mandela's arrest.)

Lt. Tromp Kramer consoling a colleague thus:

"`Listen,' said Kramer, certain he had heard somewhere it was better for a bloke to be allowed to express his deep feelings than to suppress them, `get up off your fat arse, hey, and help me go get this bloody animal!'"

This memorable pen portrait (Before dismissing the passage for a word that would be racially insulting today, remember that the book portrays apartheid-era South Africa — and that the passage's tone is one of amazement and admiration):

"Then, all of a sudden, the crowd had parted of its own volition, and through it had come a coon version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snap-brim hat, padded shoulders, and zootsuit larded with glinting 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."

***

I neglected to note it at the time, so the precise name slips my mind, but the novel includes an off-stage minor character named either Khubu or Bhengu. Michael Stanley's own protagonist, hero of A Carrion Death and The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (or, in its more prosaic non-North American title, A Deadly Trade) is David “Kubu” Bengu. A tribute to McClure, perhaps?

(In a late-breaking bulletin from Stanley Trollip, the answer is no, the names are coincidental.)

***

Read James McClure's obituary and browse a list of his books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

James McClure's last novel and Kramer and Zondi's first case

I'm taking Stanley Trollip's advice on this one. Trollip, one half of the team that writes as Michael Stanley, talked up James McClure's The Song Dog at Crimefest 2010 in May, recommending it at the convention's forgotten-authors panel.

The Song Dog is the eighth and last of McClure's South African series about the Afrikaner Lt. Tromp Kramer and the Zulu Sgt. Mickey Zondi. The novel is a prequel, set in 1962, that will give readers of the previous books the pleasant sensation of meeting old friends.

It was a thrill to see Kramer, dispatched to a town in northern Zululand so small that it lacks a hotel, compelled to board with a woman who rents rooms — and to realize that she is the Widow Fourie, who will loom large and happily in Kramer's life in the books set later but written earlier. And McClure brings Kramer and Zondi together in a manner entertainingly worthy of origin stories.

As in the earlier novels, McClure combines humor with unsparing looks at human depravity, local politics, and the toll exacted on human dignity by apartheid. Here's one of my favorite bits of wit so far:

"As Terblanche had predicted, it did not take Kramer long to reach the main rest camp, his progress through that last mile or so of long, dry grass and flat-topped thorn trees being completely uneventful. He found this disappointing, never having been in a game reserve before, and having rather hoped he'd spot at least one species of lumbering brute he wasn't accustomed to handcuffing."

The Song Dog appeared in 1991, twenty years after the first in the series, The Steam Pig. Ellis Peters and Reginald Hill similarly wrote origin stories for popular fictional detectives years after those detectives had become established hits. Who else has done this? Why do you think authors do it?

(Happily, McClure is no longer forgotten, at least in the United States. Soho Crime is reissuing The Steam Pig and Book Two, The Caterpillar Cop.)

***

Trollip and his writing partner, Michael Sears, ranked The Song Dog among the top ten African crime novels. Read their appraisal here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

James McClure's Kramer and Zondi split up ...

The Gooseberry Fool (1974) is the third of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi novels, following on The Steam Pig and The Caterpillar Cop, and it may be the best of the three.

McClure splits Kramer and Zondi up, keeping the former in Trekkersburg fighting bureaucratic battles and sending the latter into a series of chilling encounters that may well explain why McClure did not start publishing mysteries until after he left his native South Africa for England.

Zondi tracks a murder suspect to a poor Zulu settlement, only to find it being destroyed by police, "an eviction. An ordinary Black Spot eviction, one of hundreds, an everyday event—and he had allowed his imagination to distort his vision."

I'm not sure apartheid-era South African governments of McClure's 1970s would have wanted the population reading such things.

Nor might everyone have felt entirely comfortable with the following, though it is pretty funny:

"Colonel Du Plessis lived with his unlovely family in a large bungalow on a small holding two miles west of Trekkersburg along the Tierkop road. There he boasted of maintaining the great agricultural traditions of his pioneer forefathers by employing three Kaffirs to grow flowers for market. His specialty was delphiniums."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The World Cup of soccer, crime fiction and beer

The official ball of soccer's World Cup, currently reaching the end of group-stage competition in South Africa, is called the Jabulani. Its name means celebration in Zulu.

Imagine, then, how pleased I was to come across the following earlier today in The Gooseberry Fool, third of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi novels:

"Jabula is a word with more than one meaning in colloquial Zulu: It is used for happiness, and for beer."

Who said crime fiction is not educational?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Why James McClure's South African crime fiction is still fresh

James McClure's The Steam Pig violates one rule against which guides to mystery writing sometimes warn would-be authors, but in the end it doesn't matter much.

Why not? For one thing, the literary device in question may have been in greater fashion in 1971, when McClure published the novel, than it is now.

For another, as incisive as the book is in its portrayal of apartheid-era South Africa and the people who live in it, as worthy a winner as it was of the CWA Gold Dagger, it's a first novel. McClure may simply have been in the early stages of developing his craft. And finally, the writing, even in the passage in question, is vivid and compelling.

McClure may remind readers of William McIlvanney, with his breaks in the action for passages of description or reflection. That's a risk in a plot-driven genre such as a crime; the author has better have the writing chops to pull it off. McClure has them.

In his case, the breaks contribute to a sense of ironic amusement and detachment. These form a surprising, dynamic, occasionally shocking contrast with the harsh portrayals of apartheid-era life and hints of police violence. That contrast remains exciting almost four decades after the books' initial publication.

What other older crime fiction remains fresh today? What keeps it that way?

***

Read about the second Kramer and Zondi novel, The Caterpillar Cop. Read more on South African crime fiction at Detectives Beyond Borders. (Click link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Steam Pig: James McClure's South African reality check

How's this for a breathtaking bit of local setting? (It's from The Steam Pig, first of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi South African police procedurals, first published in 1971 and newly reissued in the U.S. by Soho):

"You were born in the Cape?"

Her scornful laugh brought his head up sharply in surprise.

"Why do you people always think coloreds are all born in the Cape?"

Again, that curious overreaction on her part.

"Where then?"

"Durban."

"And—?"

Kramer's ballpoint hovered, ready to set the date down. But the pad slid unheeded from his knee a moment later.

"And I was born white," Mrs. Francis said. "We were all born white. The whole family. And we lived white, too."

Not bad for a first novel, I'd say. It must be passages like that that moved a contemporary reviewer to call McClure "a writer of great skill and humanity."

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of McClure's apartheid-era novels to readers almost forty years later is the blend of breezy banter in the English style with acute portraits of the period's ugliness. The result may shock today's more sensitive readers, at least American ones, but I call it an impressive achievement.

Here's one example:

The Colonel was flattered.

"Put it this way, Lieutenant—I never allow a wog to touch my delphiniums," he said.

Here's another, the opening of the novel's second chapter:

A suspect in the next room screamed. Not continuously, but at irregular intervals which made concentration difficult. Then the typewriter unaccountably jammed. The report was not going to be finished on time.

That's good stuff, and more damning than a straightforwardly angry polemic would have been.

The Steam Pig won the CWA Gold Dagger for best novel of 1971. Read about the second Kramer and Zondi novel, The Caterpillar Cop, here. Read more about South African crime fiction at Crime Beat, and browse the table of contents and selected articles from Mystery Readers Journal's Spring 2010 issue on African mysteries. Finally, read this touching obituary of McClure, who died in 2006.

McClure was born in Johannesburg and educated in Pietermaritzburg, seen by many as the model for his fictional Trekkersburg. He moved to Britain with his family in 1965. Here's an intriguing footnote from Wikipedia's article about the Kramer and Zondi series:

Perhaps inevitably the books received lukewarm reviews in his home land. The mystery of McClure's Trekkersburg mysteries: Text and non-reception in South Africa Peck, R; English in Africa; May95, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p48, 24p

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

James McClure's outsider's eye on South Africa

It's probably inevitable that sociology barge in when the discussion turns to South African crime fiction.

The Caterpillar Cop (1972), second of James McClure's novels about the Afrikaner police Lieutenant Trompie Kramer and the Zulu Sergeant Mickey Zondi, is full of the telling glimpses at race relations in apartheid-era South Africa we outsiders will look for, and the glimpses are richer than what Americans usually get.

There is the sharp separation between black and white, of course, blacks addressing whites as "father" or "boss." There is the jovial familiarity with which Zondi interviews black witnesses, contrasted with Kramer's more formal interaction with whites. Beyond this, the shabby treatment of South African Indians is graphically invoked, as is the burning contempt of some English South Africans for the Dutch-descended Afrikaners.

There is the casual indignity to which a white cop subjects Zondi ("`Sorry, I can't think straight,' he said. `This cold is a bastard. Can Zondi go out for some tissues?'" The resolution of this tissue issue is a nice example of Zondi and Kramer's partnership.) And there are the novel's closing words:

"But Kramer laughed. `Don't blame me, Captain — blame Professor Aardvark.'

"And he thoroughly enjoyed his little in-joke.

"Zondi was able to share his amusement. It was he who had shown the Lieutenant that the first word in any English language was, in fact, Cape Dutch."

Now, that's a passage that could not have come from a crime novel set anywhere else.

Back to outsiders. McClure was born in Johannesburg and began his journalistic career in South Africa before moving to England in 1965. His first crime novel, Steam Pig, won the 1971 CWA Gold Dagger for best novel. Thirteen books followed. McClure died in 2006.

I wonder whether he found it easier (and safer) to cast a critical eye on South African society once he had left the country. (Caterpillar Cop also contains bits that the Dutch Reformed Church could not have been happy with.)

***

Read Detectives Beyond Borders' discussions of South African crime writing here (click link, then scroll down). Read James McClure's obituary and browse a list of his books. Soho Crime will reissue Steam Pig and Caterpillar Cop this summer, but I found my copy in Hay-on-Wye on an excursion from Crimefest 2010. Thanks to young Emily Bronstein for spotting it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crimefest goes to the world capital of used books

The Hay-on-Wye festival doesn't start until Thursday, so we were able to beat the crowds today.

Your humble blogkeeper's haul in the secondhand-book capital of the world included The Ice Princess by Camilla Läckberg, Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney and The Caterpillar Cop by James McClure for the modest total of just £8.95.

Thanks for the last of those to Stanley Trollip, one half of the Michael Stanley writing team, whose praise for McClure's seminal Kramer and Zondi series reminded me that it was time to get off my keister and read him. Thanks, too, to my fellow browser Emily Bronstein, who came across the McClure on our Hay expedition and said, "Look what I found."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010