The Steam Pig

A glimpse of apartheid-era South Africa

Kramer is an Afrikaner policeman, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers, and Zondi is his Zulu driver. At first, Kramer treats Zondi as an inferior but gradually comes to recognize his intelligence and his ability to get information from the black servants of both suspects and victims. In this particular novel, a young woman has been murdered, and the reasons lie in her background and in the odd turns that apartheid-era South Africa's racial politics could take. Author James McClure was from South Africa, and like many white South Africans of good conscience, he left his country, but his novels reveal in subtle and obvious ways just how the politics of the era affected people of all races and ethnicities.