Crime books

James McClure’s first crime novel featuring Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and Constable Mickey Zondi, The Steam Pig, appears on a couple of Top Ten lists for police procedurals. The setting, like that of my first crime story, is South Africa. So I was very keen to read the book. Doing so, however, wasn’t the unmitigated pleasure I had hoped for. The reasons are complex.

It is clear from the first line that McClure is a witty writer: For an undertaker George Henry Abbott was a sad man.

If that’s not a great first line, I don’t what is. The Steam Pig has a great many equally delightful sentences and some wonderful twists, though partly offsetby a few plodding passages. And how often does it happen that the title of the book itself delivers a kick to the gut, once the reader catches its meaning?

The plot is an impressive achievement, becoming even more so in retrospect. It runs rings around the vast majority of crime novels and, impressively, does so without losing credibility. The motivations and chain of events are both amazing and utterly believable.

The characters are great, and not only Kramer and Zondi. Many of the minor characters are vividly imagined and drawn with unexpected insight.

Given all these positives, why do I have such misgivings?

There are a few superficial irritations, for instance the repeated misspelling of Afrikaans character and street names. One character, clearly meant to be Jannie Koekemoer, has both his name and surname spelled wrong – Janie Koekemoor. Though this kind of thing is unnecessarily sloppy, international readers wouldn’t know and perhaps even the readers who do notice wouldn’t care the way I do.

More of an issue is the rampant racism of the characters. I found this hard to take, but perhaps I am oversensitive to this because of my personal history, having lived in South Africa for most of my life.

The book is set in the late 1960s, with apartheid showing no signs of cracking. In fact, this is reportedly one of the reasons James McClure decided to leave South Africa in the mid-Sixties – he was drawing unwelcome attention from the state security apparatus. This book was written at the end of the decade, from the author’s new home in the UK.

By the way, expat Southern African crime writers could be a good area of study for some aspiring academic, with highly regarded Australian crime writer Peter Temple and Alexander McCall Smith of No.1 Ladies Detective Agency fame also born in the region. There are probably more.

But back to James McClure. As always, it would be wrong to ascribe his characters’ or even narrator’s point of view to the author. While it could be that the racism of the time was so insidious that it even contaminated the thinking of its opponents, the author deserves the benefit of the doubt. The racism in the book is not his.

In fact, the Kramer-Zondi series was in all likelihood purposely written as an exposé of apartheid. Issues of race and the legislation of the time provide key plot points in The Steam Pig – the story would’ve been unthinkable anywhere else or at any other time.

And in a way this very fact undermines the book for modern readers.

While many crime books set in earlier decades and exotic locations remained current and relevant, James McClure’s book hasn’t. The kind of thing the reader experiences as local or historical colour in books as varied as those by Raymond Chandler, Andrea Camilleri or Sjöwall and Wahlöö become a hindrance in The Steam Pig. There are too many references and motivations that only make sense in that particular environment and to informed readers.

It’s hard to appreciate the story without knowing that the Group Areas Act assigned different residential areas to each race, the Immorality Act outlawed sex between people of different races or that people could be born in one race and then be reassigned to another based on the kinkiness of their hair or some other potentially spurious characteristic – a decision that forces those affected to move house, change schools, lose their friends, change their salary and career prospects, and force them to use different public amenities from transport to toilets.

The setting of The Steam Pig is not only unfamiliar to modern readers, but almost unimaginable… even for someone who had experienced it first hand.

(Or do I find it unimaginable precisely because I had experienced it? There may be some psychological force at work that cannot allow me to acknowledge the insanity of the times I had witnessed and keep my own sanity. But that’s something for another day, another couch.)

My evaluation of James McClure’s The Steam Pig may be unduly coloured by personal experience. While I have no intention of reading another of his books, others should probably find one of this author’s books to read and make up their own mind. James McClure is a very good writer burdened with unpopular subject matter.

After reading seven Swedish crime novels in a couple of weeks, I’m even beginning to think of street names as Thisgatan and Thatgatan. But even more curious is the fact that Swedish crime books have become so popular in the English-speaking world.

Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson may have become popular on their own merits anyway, but perhaps neither of them would even have written crime stories if it hadn’t been for the police procedurals their compatriots Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote in the 1960s and 70s. They are the people who laid the foundation for the success of Swedish crime stories in the wider world.

Had Sjöwall and Wahlöö been Norwegian or Latvian, perhaps we would have had a spate of popular crime books from those countries today.

I have now in short succession read a book by Mankell, Larsson’s three and three by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. While reading Larsson was a first, I had read the other authors before. Mankell I liked from the start, but think now that I had underestimated Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s achievement at first.

Their books are dry, police procedurals written like police reports. On this day, this happened. Then nothing happened for a couple of days and then a lot happened on the Tuesday. The weather was like this. At 11.47, a man walked into a hotel lobby. He had a large nose and close-set blue eyes…That sort of thing.

Though I was a crime reporter for a brief period in my twenties, I cannot claim to know much about how the police really operate. However, I can well imagine that Sjöwall and Wahlöö get closer to the truth than most crime writers. They seem to enjoy describing the drudgery of an investigation in detail, all the dead ends and the interminable waiting.

If you want to skim from major event to major event, you miss the essence of this series.

A common denominator of the books I’ve read is the long time that passes between the crime and its being solved – it could be many months. Another is that the crimes are often solved by a lucky break away from the main investigative team, a local cop on the beat who spots something useful, rather than by the strict application of logic, carefully compiled evidence or psychological insight that usually feature in fictional crime busting.

Basically, Martin Beck and his team of detectives stick doggedly to their task until that break comes, so it’s not sheer luck. Their chief virtues are thoroughness and persistence.

The characters are also very unromanticised. Martin Beck is not only a very ordinary man with an ordinary home life, but his crime solving ability does not seem to be exceptional or beyond the realm of probability. This is most unusual for a fictional detective. As indicated above, he doesn’t get sudden insights that solve the crimes. The only gifted character is his colleague Melander, who has a phenomenal memory, one that puts the detectives on the wrong track about as often as it helps.

The only element where these books stretch the reader’s credibility even slightly is the portrayal of the two klutzes Kvant and Kristiansson – blonde, handsome patrolmen who appear in some of the books and are virtually guaranteed to get things wrong.

Much has been made of the authors’ Marxist leanings and the social commentary in the series. As can be expected, the rich murder victim in Murder at the Savoy is portrayed as hateful – an arms smuggler who trod on the lives of little people. There are many comments on the decline of sexual morals and growing drug abuse, though much of the described behaviour seems rather pale compared to the world described in more recent crime novels.

Rather than social commentary, what gives Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books their power is their verisimilitude. We recognise their truth, which makes the relatively unsensational crimes in these books more shocking than the outrages in the books of Mankell and Larsson.

It was a few years after everyone else had read the Millennium trilogy and halfway through the second book that I realised author Stieg Larsson was having us on. The books about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are elaborate jokes.

If Wikipedia can be believed, Stieg Larsson had only considered publishing these manuscripts shortly before his death, when he was already deep into the fourth book of what is now, weirdly, marketed as a “trilogy”. The author’s otherwise puzzling hesitance to publish makes sense if yourecognise the books as parodies, a bit of fun the author was having, perhaps primarily for his own amusement.

They are compelling reading, make no mistake – page-turners, even if there are too many pages in some parts. I lined up the second book even before I had finished the first. And I’ll read the third as soon as I can get hold of it. The books are written in an unobtrusive journalistic style, each book has enough plot for five and Lisbeth Salander is a great fictional character.

At least, she is in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson stretches his reader’s suspension of disbelief too far. Here Lisbeth Salander is presented as nothing short of a superhero. She’s the size of a pixie, but beats up two Hell’s Angels types and goes a few rounds with the book’s other de facto superhero, the fantastically strong “blonde giant” who is impervious to pain and is untroubled in a fight with a champion boxer.

Not only this, but near the book’s climax, Salander solves Fermat’s Theorem in her head while stalking her prey! This is a problem that has had the world’s top mathematicians baffled for centuries. Don’t tell me Larsson wrote this with a straight face.

The reviewer who compared his work with that of Ingmar Bergman got it very wrong. Bergman is also Swedish, and that’s about it. The filmmaker was self-consciously serious. Larsson is self-consciously funny. He is to Bergman as Chaplin is to Nijinsky; his genius is of a different sort.

But back to the plot aspect, which makes it even more clear that Larsson was having fun with these books. His approach to plot reminds me of that unforgettable scene in My Cousin Vinny where Vinny (Joe Pesci) stamps his foot and says: “Is there any more shit we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this case?

Let’s look at some of the plot elements of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

• • Framing an innocent in a court case (Blomkvist)
  • Financial fraud on international scale (Wennerström)
  • Financial fraud on individual scale (Salander)
  • Whodunit – a murder committed by one of a closed group of people
  • Computer hacking (Salander)
  • Institutional injustice
  • Vigilante revenge
  • Family intrigue that would put Falcon Crest to shame (the Vangers)
  • Nazis (various)
  • A sadistic rapist (Bjurman)
  • Two serial killers!

The second book adds a biker gang, international sex trafficking, Cold War espionage, domestic violence and a chainsaw massacre to some of the elements of the first. The body count would not be out of place in a Schwarzenegger movie.

Most thriller writers would be happy to spin a yarn featuring one or two of these plot lines. Not Larsson. I can imagine him sitting in front of his Powerbook. Let’s see… What other form of villainy is there? Add it in!

Rumour has it that the German one-hit wonders Trio wrote their immortal song “Da Da Da I Don’t Love You You Don’t Love Me Aha Aha Aha” in response to a rival band’s music that they considered boring and monotonous. So they wrote the worst song they could and, lo and behold, they had a massive hit!

Whether the story is true, I don’t know. But I can imagine Stieg Larsson being similarly motivated. He tried to write books that took the thriller genre to ridiculous extremes.

And, like Trio, he’s had amazing success. He deserves it too. The so-called Millennium trilogy speaks of genius. But it’s the genius of a fun fair attraction – most enjoyable, in the way of a roller-coaster ride or a house of horrors.

If the author had lived to see the incredible success of his work and the seriousness of some of the praise, my guess is he would’ve had a good laugh. Not for the first time.