Apartheid, He Wrote

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The development of series characters in fiction is almost always a triumph of commerce over art. No matter how interesting a character is, there is usually one right story about him or her, and a good writer finds it the first time. Shakespeare got just one play each out of Hamlet and Macbeth, and it is hard to imagine what remained for a sequel -- or prequel.

Readers, however, have an all but boundless appetite for revisiting accustomed pleasures. That is nowhere more true than in the mystery, whose audiences manifest, by their choice of genre, a taste for restoring established order. Victorians so yearned to watch Sherlock Holmes perform his tricks again and again that after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed him out of boredom, he gave in and resurrected the great detective. Dame Agatha Christie had the same murderous impulse toward Hercule Poirot, but slyly tucked the manuscript away until her demise. To this day, the first thing publishers ask is whether a mystery can become a series, a literary annuity.

The mystery-by-installment plan can, however, record almost journalistically a sequence of social change. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo reflected, in their Martin Beck series, the decay of the socialist dream in Sweden; Joseph Hansen provided a time line on gay life in the U.S. in his Dave Brandstetter series. No current mystery writer has better exploited this potential -- or better served readers with riveting storytelling and acutely observed human nature -- than James McClure in his eight novels about two South African policemen. The cheerily crass Boer, Tromp Kramer, and his wily "kaffir" partner, Mickey Zondi, were introduced in The Steam Pig, published in 1971. Their teamwork, affectionate but circumscribed, full of macho blarney and teasing but also tinged with racial irony, subtly evoked the quirky diplomacy of a society where whites insist on ruling but all parties know that cannot happen without black help. The six succeeding novels brought the relationship into the mid- 1980s and showed each man becoming gradually more sophisticated about the other's world, as in life the barriers have slowly fallen between South Africa's ruling elite and its black majority.

In his latest novel, The Song Dog (Mysterious Press; 274 pages; $17.95), McClure goes back to the beginning -- or, rather, before the beginning. The Song Dog concerns the cases that brought Kramer and Zondi together: two private vendettas, one black and one white, that are misunderstood as political terrorism. The action is set in 1962, mostly during the week when Nelson Mandela was taken into custody. That arrest, and its long-term deforming consequences for South African society, plays an oblique but significant role in the narrative -- especially in the distant fate foretold for the team in the novel's final paragraphs. Despite the deep optimism inherent in depicting their relationship, McClure ends in glints of gloom. He implies that no such bond can survive forever the fire storm of that nation's rage.

Part of what makes any fiction fun is the inversion of expectations. Kramer, the ruling white, is the team's iconoclast, full of scorn for procedure and authority. He is expedient, intemperate, womanizing and often drunk. Zondi, the oppressed black who for reasons of race earns a modest fraction of his partner's pay, is a convent-educated conformist. By the chronological end of the series he is a dutiful husband, attentive father and slightly stodgy bourgeois citizen. Each is responding to his social position: white Kramer can afford the luxury of defiance, but black Zondi cannot.

The series' second great theme, along with race, has been sex. McClure plainly believes that any society so rigidly ordered is also deeply repressed -- and is therefore quite wanton in the back rooms. Nearly all the crimes investigated by the team have involved passion or jealousy, and the solutions have often depended on the ability of one partner to look with an outsider's jaundiced eye on the habits and mores of the other's culture. That technique is evident in The Song Dog, the title of which refers to a tribal folkloric figure who speaks in Delphic riddles. Once Kramer formally meets Zondi, halfway through the book -- after assuming he is a Bantu hoodlum, not an undercover cop -- they quickly form a bond. Kramer is not a white of great racial sensitivity, or Zondi a black of great deference. But they respect each other because they keep reaching the same conclusions -- while reflecting cultural differences by getting there through divergent, if equally plausible, chains of reasoning.

. The third big theme is snooping. Just as South Africa's government engages in constant surveillance, so, in McClure's vision, do its citizens spy on one another, usually out of jealousy or greed. The consequences are often fatal. This peeping and prying is a focus of The Steam Pig and of two other memorable entries: The Caterpillar Cop and The Gooseberry Fool. Fittingly, Zondi and Kramer meet in The Song Dog after surreptitiously trailing each other, each in search of clues to his own case.

McClure writes rich, vigorous prose, full of snarky humor but never in a way that undercuts the deadly drive of the narrative. And he is as sadly witty about individuals as about their troubled nation. Here is Kramer in The Song Dog, surveying the wares at a rundown country store: "On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he'd deserved." Nothing more is said about that father-son relationship -- and nothing is needed. That is characteristic of the eight novels as a whole: they are an unsentimental journey to the heart of a problem.