Coronet Books
3 total works
In this crime story a body of a woman is sent to the police surgeon by mistake. He discovers that she died not from cardiac weakness, but from an almost imperceptible wound made by a bicycle spoke - a method of murder peculiar to certain Bantu gangsters. James McClure won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for "The Steam Pig" and later won the Silver Dagger for one of his other novels. He has also written a number of short stories and two works of non-fiction on policing in Liverpool and San Diego.
Tollie Erasmus, an unsavory bank robber on the run, is hung from the neck until dead. Unfortunately, execution was administered without the benefit of South African judge or jury. Somewhere there’s a killer who knows far too much about the hangman’s craft, and Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and his Bantu assistant Mickey Zondi must find him before his trail of death continues.
Naomi Stride was a wealthy woman, and her death has left several people richer--none more so than her twenty-six-year-old son Theo, with whom she had long had bitter differences over money. She was also a controversial woman, a writer whose novels had been banned in South Africa. But was it for money, politics, or some other unknown reason that she was killed? And why was her naked corpse strewn with flowers and herbs? These are the questions South African Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and his Zulu partner, Mickey Zondi, must answer. But this task becomes much more difficult when Kramer is unexpectedly taken off the case. Ordered by his superiors to discreetly "wrap up" a fatal accident that could be embarrassing for the South African police, he is plunged into a second investigation, and (fighting to keep it free of political whitewash) he and Zondi find themselves moving inexorably toward a haunting and horrifying climax.