Seized by a desire for animal-themed mysteries, the next two winners up for review are Paula Gosling’s Monkey Puzzle and James McClure’s The Steam Pig, winners in 1985 and 1971, respectively.
More than their beastly names link these two novels, both of which follow, for the most part, the traditional pattern of following a single charismatic police detective (in fact both Lieutenants, Stryker and Kramer) as he unravels a bizarre case. Both have a loyal sergeant by their side, a powerful sense of justice, and endless energy to chase down the criminals. Interestingly, both restrict themselves to a particular setting that they explore with some depth, a subtle character study of academia and university politics in the case of Monkey Puzzle, and a more bitter than scathing assault on apartheid South Africa for The Steam Pig. Both have their flaws, starting perhaps with the overly elaborate set-up of the initial crime, but both do meander nicely to the final reveal. Both, however, can make for difficult reading, which is why I have a hard time judging them as more than solid pieces of work – perhaps their value is more in their recording of a period of time than in the merits as prizewinners in their genre.
Monkey Puzzle starts conventionally enough – a university professor is murdered in his office and his tongue cut out post-mortem. As Lieutenant Stryker arrives to do his job, it is quickly revealed that the victim was gay but – this being 1985 – the police spit their preferred epithet out with particular scorn. Someone notes that because the victims tongue, rather than his genitals, were cut off, it doesn’t match the “usual pattern.” I wonder if the reader of 1985 would have nodded wisely at this indication that gay men would usually cut each other’s peccant parts off after a murder, but such an early, off-hand display of bigotry immediately unsuspended a large amount of my disbelief. Moreover, as Stryker gathers the English department faculty and intuits that one among them is most likely the killer, it is revealed that one of the professors has a history with him. We know she’s a potential love interest because he comments “Nice ass for a teacher” on their first meeting – thank you, 1985. Her vacillating attitude towards Stryker – it turns out he almost arrested her during a Vietnam war protest decades ago – is tedious, although it does offer a periodic release from the tension of Stryker’s go-go-go investigation. The various faculty members are plausible red herrings (one is described as a “Negro” who is revealed to have also been a professional football player – pulling back that curtain made me sigh aloud) and deftly drawn characters who need not be drawn too deeply as Stryker rarely spends more than a few minutes with them before taking off for yet another interview. There is one faculty member who becomes a suspect early on that Gosling makes particularly unlikeable, but the depth of our and Stryker’s derision comes so early in the book that we know for sure he cannot be the killer. The book suffers from this as we progress, as time and time again another piece of information removes a tertiary professor or comes out against the dislikeable suspect, but we know in our bones it’s all too easy. Gosling tires to have the romantic element of the plot do heavier lifting as we progress, but will-they-won’t-they can only repeat so many times before that, too, begins to feel repetitive.
Perhaps the biggest mistake the book makes is its rear cover summary. We know we are about to read about a murder where the victim’s tongue was cut out, but the summary also reveals a security guard is going to have his eyes removed as well. This particular development comes so late in the novel that it is more a part of the solution than another plot point or mystery of its own, and so makes throws the balance of the whole thing off-kilter. The final reveal is decent enough, but intellectually falls short of the expectations the author has set for us through her frequent references (via the mouth of a faculty member who teaches – hardy har har – a course on murder mystery novels) to other classics in the genre and the rules for writing a good mystery. The tongue-in-cheek references serve as winks to the reader, which is fair enough, but the novel itself doesn’t quite rise to the level of those references. The last few pages created a jarring sense of bathos, especially when the author revealed the original suspect-turned-red-herring was seduced by the gay murder victim years ago and has been ruined ever since. When Stryker, who despite his laughable name is as solid as many other better-known detectives, and his romantic interest finally resolve their differences in the last few lines of the book, it left me pleased he has gotten a good result after so much busy work, but as a mystery I felt it wouldn’t be one of the more remarkable in his career – it certainly wasn’t in mine.
The Steam Pig is different stuff entirely, despite the similarities I discussed above. It is so much a creature of South Africa, and in particular apartheid-era South Africa, that the central mystery itself seems uninteresting at times. To be fair, an American reader who was not alive during the vast majority of the apartheid regime should have a very different reaction to that of a native, or even a British citizen, who was old enough to be consuming this novel at time of publishing. But references to white or “colored” townships, laws like the Immorality Act, the language used by “Bantus” (the K-word is thrown around frequently) to talk to whites – boss, master, and so on – and the attitudes of the characters struck me powerfully. Lieutenant Kramer’s Bantu assistant, Sergeant Zombi, is treated mostly like a colleague rather than a disposable servant, and Kramer himself offers observations – but rarely opinions – on what the system is doing to his country and its people. The crime he investigates – a beautiful but reclusive woman killed with a sharpened bicycle spoke to the aorta – is bizarre and intriguing in its way, but the eventual solution to the crime is so wrapped up in the character of South Africa and apartheid that its conclusion leaves almost no emotional impression, as we know that the system that enabled the whole thing will continue. Kramer and Zombi go on to be the main characters of a series of mystery novels by McClure, and if I continue to read the novels it will be for more of McClure’s ability to capture this moment in time than for his mystery-building capability, which is perfectly solid, even a cut above, but pale beside the setting. His prose, too, seems to reflect its time and place, with language that grates on the sensibilities of the 21st century reader along with wonderfully effective, albeit spare, scenes of different characters colliding and interacting. To my mind, the atmosphere in many of the best murder mysteries is cool, detached, with a dark or morbid sense of humor. McClure’s language is hot, boiling with energy that leaps from the page at times, and sense the plot in unexpected – perhaps South Africa made its way into his very words and cooked off the languor often found in novels from the chilly British Isles. As a mystery, the Steam Pig beats out Monkey Puzzle, if not by much, but its success in capturing a time and place as well as the usual escapist puzzling makes it stand out from the pack.
Updated Ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
- The Steam Pig
- The Rage
- Monkey Puzzle
- Skin Deep (not recommended)
smq.world 