Red Herrings: Looking Back at Apartheid through James McClure's Detective Novels

McClure's Kramer and Zondi detective novels play on issues of race, gender, oppression, and resistance in apartheid‐era South Africa while all the time the detectives try to solve the case. While McClure has a devoted readership, reception has been inconsistent. Are the books meant to be ironically critical of a racist cop upholding an illegitimate regime? Are they accurate and sympathetic portrayals of a pair of buddy cops doing their best against the odds? Or are they unreconstructed, violent, racist, and misogynistic indulgences? Part of what makes them intriguing is that they are far from simple fictions but, instead, feed into all of these readings. This is perhaps most clear in The Song Dog, the book McClure wrote last, as apartheid was ending, but set as the first in the series, when apartheid was peaking. This article probes the connections between the moment of.writing and the moment of the narrative and asks how the preauel reveals a range of anxieties about the end ofapartheid, from the clash between the personal and political, to tensions over imposing law and order, to the competition between magical prediction and rational detection. The article argues that the books display not a competen t pair of crime solvers, but detectives whose habitual practice is to misread the situation, the evidence, the body, and the crime as a result of the distortions of the apartheid system that render them unable to see clearly their own implication in the politics of everyday life and the failures of the system itself.