The Steam Pig

James McClure

Murder with a bicycle spoke. A technique perfected by Bantu gangs. "All quite simple if you have the stomach for it," Dr Strydom explained. "You take your spoke, and slide it in here between the third and fourth rib." It looks like a flea bite.

So reads the back cover of The Steam Pig. For some reason I found it irresistible.

The murdered woman is Theresa Le Roux, young, attractive, but seemingly with very little past, no friends and living very quietly. There are few leads to follow but for the strange business of the tinted contact lenses and an old lady heard asking questions a few days after the funeral. An old lady who later disappears at the bus station, having given a false address.

The detectives assigned to the case are Trompie Kramer and his assistant Mickey Zondi. Kramer is bluff, gruff Afrikaans, none too bright but he'll always get his man in the end. Zondi is black and has the sharper brain but he will never rise above sergeant. This is 1970s South Africa, after all.

I've read several other books in the "Kramer and Zondi" series and all of them make for uncomfortable reading at times. "Wog" and "kaffir" are never far from the mouths of Kramer's colleagues and Kramer has to hide his high regard for Zondi behind a gruff exterior, not wanting to be labelled "kaffir-loving", that most extreme of Afrikaans insults. Kramer himself is no liberal and is no stranger to handing out a beating in the "non-white" cells. This is 1970s South Africa and the courts won't look too hard at the marks on the defendant. But The Steam Pig is the first to weave some of the bureaucratic ghastliness of apartheid into the plot. There is the coloured family, so faintly coloured they think they may be able to fool the "Classification Bureau" and "try for white". In Kramer's world, it gave me a jolt to remember, this is a crime.

This is not one of your searing anti-apartheid novels, just a detective thriller. But in its everyday depiction of the apartheid engine ticking over it's just as chilling as any Booker nominee. And it's still a good thriller.