Apex Book Company

Earlier this year I spent a couple of months back in South Africa, a country I had lived in for a number of years. For a week, I went, with my brother and his girlfriend, to stay in the Kruger Park and, on the way back to Johannesburg, we drove through what was once called the Eastern Transvaal and is now called Mpumalanga, and stopped for breakfast in a small town up in the mountains. Across the road from the coffee shop was a bookshop, and so, after the food, I wandered over to – as collectors like to say casually – ‘take a look.’

Remote bookshops, in the middle of what is practically nowhere, are a collector’s dream, although they tend to remain just that – a dream. One always hopes to find that first edition set of Lord of the Rings nestling on a shelf at the back of the store, available for the taking for a handful of coins. It never really happens. That

The Artful Egg

day, however, as I browsed leisurely in the empty shop with only the elderly proprietor keeping me company behind his desk, where he was nodding off, I came across a find that was, for me, just as exciting. It was a paperback called The Artful Egg, and it was by a writer called James McClure, and the reason I was excited was that it was a novel in his Kramer & Zondi series – and I hadn’t yet read it.

For some reason, I was, for a number of years, under the impression that I’d read every one of the Kramer & Zondi mysteries. My find proved me wrong – happily. I read the book in the back seat of the car that day, only stopping when the sun went down and I could no longer see, and finished it that same night in Johannesburg.

James McClure was born in Johannesburg and worked as a crime reporter in Pietermaritzburg, a dusty farmers’ town in the province of Natal (now Kwazulu-Natal), about seventy kilometres from Durban. He left South Africa aged thirty, and moved to Britain, where he worked as a journalist in Oxford. In 1971, however, McClure’s first novel came out, and it was entirely about South Africa, then at the height of Apartheid.

The Steam Pig was published by Gollancz in the UK, and won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award that year. The story, set in the fictional town of Trekkersburg (a thinly-veiled Pietermaritzburg), concerns the murder of a music teacher as investigated by two detectives of the South African police – Afrikaaner, Tromp Kramer, and Zulu, Mickey Zondi. It was followed by others: The Caterpillar Cop, The Gooseberry Fool, The Sunday Hangman and more, as well as a couple of thrillers and non-fiction books.

I first learned of McClure when I picked up, at a bargain price, several copies of an American magazine

The Armchair Detective

called The Armchair Detective. This was back in the early nineties, and the shop was somewhere in Johannesburg, although I no longer recall which one it was (I suspect it’s also where I picked up an entire run of a sort of low-budget Fortean Times magazine which I still have. It’s full of UFOs, alien abductions and Loch Ness monsters). The Armchair Detective had an article about the politics in one of McClure’s novels (I think it was The Gooseberry Fool), and I determined to try and locate a copy for myself.

Which proved not to be so easy.

McClure’s Kramer & Zondi novels are wonderful. They display the ugly reality of Apartheid almost without comment. The irony is in the spaces, in the things not being said – and they can be both horrible and very, very funny. The humour is almost never absent, even when the reality is truly horrifying, and it’s what makes McClure’s novels such good reads. They are like a funhouse mirror being held up to South African society. Reading them today, they are still as fresh, as captivating and as true as any good novel should be. They are also almost virtually unknown in South Africa, and mostly out of print elsewhere. In the early nineties, when I was making my first tentative steps to try and find them, most book dealers had never even heard of McClure.

But I persisted. And here and there, rummaging through second hand bookshops, I began to find them: worn, battered paperbacks, read many times, read again by me, and put on the shelf to be read again at a later date; here and there, hardcovers – although I never became a true McClure collector. I read him for the pleasure it gave me: for that accurate, sharply satirical portrait of South Africa, which is still so relevant today, and simply for the enjoyment of being in the company of two very different men, a White and a Black in a world where the two could not be friends, and yet were.

James McClure died in 2006. He was sixty-six when he died, and he had stopped writing the Kramer & Zondi stories when Apartheid finally collapsed. My friend, Richard Kunzmann, writes a series of crime novels set in South Africa and similarly featuring a mixed duo of detectives (the third book, Dead-End Road, was published earlier this year in the UK. The first two novels, Bloody Harvests and Salamander Cotton, are available in lovely hardcover editions in the US) but his novels are darker. McClure used humour to underscore the darkness, even though it was always present (he had left South Africa when police attention on his reporting became pronounced) and is a writer worth reading as much now as he was thirty years ago. Whether you want to splash out on some hardcover first editions, or just get hold of a cheap paperback, the payoff would be the same: the discovery of a writer who caught a world in words, and maybe helped change it just a little.

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.