James McClure

• Born: October 9, 1939
• Birthplace: Johannesburg, South Africa
• Died: June 17, 2006
• Place of death: Oxford, England

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series: Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi, 1971-1991

Contribution

With the procedurals that develop the Tromp Kramer-Mickey Zondi partnership, James McClure fashioned a neutral portrayal of South African apartheid society as seen from within. Amassing much historical and cultural information in the course of his exposition, characterization, and plot, McClure nevertheless maintained a carefully guarded distance from any direct, judgmental commentary. Indeed, McClure claimed that “the neutrality of the crime story” is the primary appeal of the genre. Of the South African novel, he said, “Every novel . . . that I’d come across . . . had been self-limiting . . . in that its antiapartheid slant made it appeal only to the ’converted.’” By guarding the neutrality of his novels, he believed that he can “leave people to make their own moral judgments.” Seeking to appeal universally to his readers, McClure considered his first obligation to be entertainment, “leaving graver matters—which [can] be included, but obliquely—to those with the time, money, and intellectual capacity to indulge them.”

Although conscious of his craftsmanship and the psychological complexity of his characters, McClure made his procedurals hew closely to the facts of daily existence under apartheid, so that the culture and place, evoked even descriptively, are integral to his success as a crime novelist. That McClure’s readership included not only mystery devotees but also international antiapartheid activists and academic literati as well as the South African police attested his achievement of neutrality without compromising the serious, socially significant framework of his novels. McClure’s Kramer and Zondi novels are taught in creative writing courses at the college level in the United States.

Biography

Born on October 9, 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of a military intelligence officer, James Howe McClure was, from his earliest years, witness to the violence and compassion of the paradoxical South African lifestyle. During World War II, while the family was living at military headquarters near Pretoria, antiaircraft guns were installed in the family garden. When the family moved to Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal and the hometown model for Trekkersburg, the violence shifted from international war to domestic but bloody strife among the servants and workers. McClure’s mother was able to temper that violence, however, through her close, compassionate relationship with Miriam Makhatini, the family’s Zulu nanny, whom McClure considered a second mother. Along with his natural mother’s relative openness within apartheid, the boy received, from his father—an avid reader, occasional writer, and master of seven languages—a respect for books, languages, and people that kept him reading actively, despite his marginal interest in formal education.

Growing up and remaining in Pietermaritzburg, McClure developed interests in art and photography, working for a commercial studio in 1958-1959 after his graduation from high school. He then taught art and English at a boys’ preparatory school until 1963. Although he had written stories, plays, and a young adult novel, McClure did not yet think of himself as a writer, preferring instead to hone his editing skills, to practice photography, and to develop a new career in journalism. From 1963 to 1965, he worked for Natal newspapers, often in regular contact with the police and the courts as a reporter. The paradoxes of such an inside look at law enforcement under apartheid, however, led to his working long hours; during that time, he “saw too much.”

In 1965, McClure, his American wife, Lorly, whom he had wed in 1962, and the first of his three children left South Africa for Edinburgh, Scotland, where he worked for a year as a subeditor. During the following three years, the McClure family lived in a small apartment in Oxford while he worked for the Oxford Mail. After a momentary triumph when he sold a script, “The Hole,” about an American in Vietnam, to Granada Television and could then afford a modest house, a television directors’ strike left that play and another, “Coach to Vahalla,” without hope of production. Feeling that success depended on more than his writing, McClure stopped working for television drama, and in 1969 he switched employers, intent on developing a features department for the Oxford Times. Then, encouraged by the success of a fellow subeditor, facing a vacation during which he could not afford to travel, and bored with television for entertainment, McClure began his first Kramer and Zondi novel, The Steam Pig (1971). Ten days after he submitted the typescript, he had a contract—and The Steam Pig went on to be named the Best Crime Novel of 1971 and to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award.

With the success of this first novel and the continued favorable reviews and critical acclaim of those that followed, McClure turned to writing professionally in 1974, winning the Silver Dagger Award for his spy thriller Rogue Eagle (1976). He continued to garner praise not only for his series but also for his nonfictional studies of police departments in Liverpool and San Diego. His last novel in the Kramer and Zondi series, The Song Dog, was published in 1991, three years before the formal end of apartheid. He died in Oxford, England, in 2006.

Analysis

Rather than emphasize the obvious political contexts of his South African crime novels, James McClure focused on providing his readers with the straightforward entertainment of detection. Clues are not withheld, but the rationale for the solutions to which they lead is so deeply enmeshed in apartheid that one leaves the resolution of a case knowing who committed the crime but pondering circumstance and motive in an effort to understand why it was committed—even when a superficial answer is readily apparent. Weaving observations of daily survival, the historical background, and the social tensions of life in South Africa into exposition, dialogue, and description, McClure, like antiapartheid novelist Naomi Stride, who was later murdered, did in The Artful Egg (1984), kept the political undertones oblique. Consequently, the polemical themes of much South African fiction are muted, and the novels are not so much subversive as they are compassionate toward all races suffering from the bleakness of a rigidly racist society.

McClure maintained his neutral stance by means of a shifting point of view controlled by the perspective of his characters. Although he avoided explicit judgment of the society he described, he nevertheless showed so much of South African life that, once having been offered the material, his readers were virtually compelled to arrive at their own moral judgments. Scene shifts are rapid and diverse; Kramer and Zondi often pursue parallel and sometimes related cases that take them into the country as well as through various sections of the city, bringing them into contact with blacks and whites, rich and poor. Besides describing the center of these diverse scenes, Central Intelligence Division headquarters, McClure, throughout the series, developed portraits of a rural Zulu village, a library, an illicit township drinking house (shebeen), the city council chambers, a liberal’s mansion, a white nationalist’s farm, a township shack, a zoological institute, a prostitute’s bungalow, a forensic laboratory, a prison gallows, an apartheid hospital, and a decaying resort, among many other locales. His precise details and evocative images are interspersed so carefully among plot development, characterization, and exposition that readers are never distracted from Kramer and Zondi’s detective work, yet each scene, on reflection, reveals the subtle effects of apartheid.

McClure’s knack for shifting the point of view in his scenes permitted his characters, even minor ones, to express their values through dialogue and in the contextual narration that reflected attitudes varying from crude, overt racism to blind revolutionary zeal. Many of Kramer’s fellow white police officers are proponents of Afrikaner nationalism, yet McClure refrained from stereotyping his characters. He also allowed his African characters the same extended range of responses to conditions under apartheid. Zondi, in The Gooseberry Fool (1974), is nearly killed by a rioting crowd of people evicted from their homes by the Security Forces—the crowd believes that all police officers, whatever the branch, are racist murderers. Lenny Francis, in The Steam Pig, arranges his own sister’s murder, in part because of his envy of her ability to pass as white. Mario Da Gama and Ruru, in Snake (1975), use apartheid’s blindness to shape a white-black alliance in crime, certain that such a partnership is beyond suspicion. Because the viewpoints and values expressed by McClure’s characters embody such a range of sensibilities, he deterred readers from easy, snap judgments about South Africa and its peoples.

In the rapid exchanges between Kramer and Zondi and in more extended dialogues, McClure suggested that the messy search for clarity not only in solving the case but also in understanding apartheid would not come easily. Ethnic pride and linguistic heritage permeate the dialogue, both directly and subtly. Spiked with humor, yet provoking consistently a sense of doubt, hostility, or fear, his dialogue includes occasional Afrikaans and Zulu words and phrases even as his characters find bemusement in the irregularities of English. Although McClure’s dialogue models the process of detection, it also illustrates the fragility and tension both within a racial group and across racial lines. Characters, as a result, seem tentative and fearful of speaking their minds. Just as Kramer and Zondi probe and push to crack the alibis of their suspects, so McClure’s dialogue probes and pushes his readers to crack their narrow views of South Africa.

The Steam Pig and The Sunday Hangman

The exotic plotting of McClure’s novels is so integral to their South African setting that even this basic element of the procedural provokes thought long after the entertainment has faded. In The Steam Pig, the Zulu murderer uses a sharpened bicycle spoke as a weapon, seeking to make the death appear to have resulted from heart failure. The murder itself, however, is one of the disastrous consequences of an arbitrary reclassification of a family’s race. In The Sunday Hangman (1977), a group of Boer farmers become obsessed with the technical lore of hanging in their self-righteous sentencing of criminals who have escaped the courts through legal loopholes; these vigilantes undermine the authority of the very laws on which their privileges depend.

Snake

McClure’s plots suggest through their surface construction the deeper, psychological turmoil of apartheid. In Snake, a wealthy white liberal, son of a Supreme Court justice, strangles an exotic dancer, making it appear that her own pet python was the culprit. His motive is an obsessive desire for illicit sex with a black woman, but his victim is instead a darkly tanned, racist white. In no other setting but South Africa would such complex ironies and the thematic possibilities they raise be possible.

The essence of McClure’s novels, however, is found in the complicated relationship between Kramer and Zondi. Despite their growing affection and understanding, they must present the mask of master and slave to others around them: Everyone expects the conventions of apartheid, especially the police. Consequently, Kramer must feign racism and Zondi must act subservient. Only when they are alone can they tease each other with racial humor or comment on the blindness of others. They may save each other’s lives while on the job, but neither can inhabit the social world of the other, however well they may know and understand it. McClure illustrated the stark contrast in their personal lives in each novel. In The Sunday Hangman, the Widow Fourie suggests to Kramer that, should Zondi lose his job as the result of a lingering leg injury, he might work for them as their gardener. Zondi’s family dwells in a two-room, dirt-floor shack while Kramer and Fourie live in Blue Haze, a sprawling old farmhouse. The couple’s admiration for Zondi, even Fourie’s charity in The Gooseberry Fool, cannot change the circumstances of his life. In the same novel, Kramer waits while Zondi lies in a coma and grapples with his anguish because he cannot show his compassion for fear of being perceived as a black sympathizer, thereby losing his authority as a detective among his white assistants.

Kramer and Zondi, however, work so well as partners that they serve as a symbol of not only the failures but also the hopes of South African culture. Although they demonstrate the limiting effects of historical and cultural racism on their individual lives and friendship, they also testify to the potential of individuals to overcome those dehumanizing constraints.

The Song Dog

The Song Dog is a “prequel” to the Kramer and Zondi series, in that it reveals how they first met in the early 1960’s. Kramer is still new to Natal and appears more uncouth, more Afrikaner and hard-line than he is in the later works. The book was inspired by the arrest of the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in Howick, which McClure heard about when he was visiting the police station that very afternoon. McClure told an interviewer that he intended the book to be the last in the series as well as the first, and to dramatize the relationship between Kramer and Zondi as they get to know each other and to “get it right.”

McClure’s allusions to previous books in the series suggest that, on the whole, the series itself sought to fulfill that potential of an identity based on personal qualities and capabilities rather than on race and class. These books offered no definitive, absolute answers to the questions they raised; just as Kramer noted his reluctance to confront the truth in Snake, McClure’s fictions provided a limited truth, “having solved a problem without supplying any real answers.” Readers, however, found that beneath the surface of entertaining detection they had to confront the turmoil of apartheid in South Africa. McClure’s vivid material, well-crafted writing, and neutral stance provided just that opportunity for his readers’ own cultural detective work—if they so chose.

Principal Series Characters:

• Tromp Kramer , a lieutenant on the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad, South African Central Intelligence Division, is an unmarried Afrikaner. As the series progresses, he matures from a youthful, lusty, irreverent, and independent man into a more introspective, sympathetic detective. He retains his compassionate but antisocial stance, observing quietly the vagaries of South African apartheid. Kramer’s observations in detection are astute, but he depends on others for information on which he can speculate, using wit, luck, and an uncanny intuition to develop leads and solve cases.
• Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi , Kramer’s assistant, partner, and friend. A Zulu from a rural village who worked as a houseboy for a year before joining the Central Intelligence Division and who was educated by missionaries, Zondi lives in the Trekkersburg township of Zwela Village. He thus has insights that Kramer can only discern intuitively or have reported to him. Gifted with a photographic memory, Zondi frequently contributes as much to a crime’s solution as Kramer does, often using recall and logic while Kramer relies on experience and intuition.
• The Widow Fourie , Kramer’s slightly younger lover, who despite her sense of propriety agrees to live with Kramer on a small farm, Blue Haze, just outside the city. Supportive and attentive to Kramer’s domestic needs, Fourie is not only his sexual companion but also his confidante, providing refuge from his hectic job; her questions often provoke Kramer to further insights into the case at hand.
• Dr. Christiaan Strydom , the district surgeon, is a pathologist for the Trekkersburg Central Intelligence Division. A man of relatively liberal views, Strydom craves data, often being so thorough in researching background information that he misses the obvious conclusions at which Kramer arrives. Whether by uncovering the constrictive powers of a python or by discovering a little-known treatise on the hangman’s art, Strydom provides an exotic technology of death in the series.

Bibliography

Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. Discusses McClure’s contribution to police procedural literature and the relationship of the subgenre to the larger crime-fiction genre.

Hausladen, Gary. Places for Dead Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. This study of the settings of crime fiction includes a chapter discussing McClure’s representation of South Africa. Bibliographic references and index.

Lockwood, Bert B., Jr. “A Study in Black and White: The South Africa of James McClure.” Human Rights Quarterly 440 (1983). Examination of McClure’s representation of race and racial politics.

McClure, James. “A Bright Grey.” In Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, edited by Robin W. Winks. New York: Scribner, 1986. McClure offers his personal perspective on the craft of mystery fiction.

Peck, Richard. A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Compares McClure to other writers working during Apartheid in South Africa.

Peck, Richard. “The Mystery of McClure’s Trekkersburg Mysteries: Text and Non-reception in South Africa.” English in Africa 22, no. 1 (May, 1995): 48-71. Discusses the reception of McClure’s work in his native country.

Tomarken, Edward. “James McClure’s Mickey Zondi.” In The Post-colonial Detective, edited by Ed Christian. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Discusses McClure’s character and fiction from the point of view of postcolonial theory. Bibliographic references and index.

Wall, Don. “And the First Shall Be Last: James McClure’s Kramer and Zondi Series.” In In the Beginning: First Novels in Mystery Series, edited by Mary Jean DeMarr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995. Study of the first books in each of McClure’s two series and their relationship to later entries. Bibliographic references.