James McClure (James Howe McClure) Biography

British crime writer, born in Johannesburg; he worked on newspapers in South Africa and, after 1965, in Edinburgh and in Oxford. His novels, often broadly comic, are for the most part set in the South African town of Trekkersburg—which can be identified with Pietermaritzburg, in Natal—and have as detectives the Afrikaner Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and the Zulu Sergeant Zondi. The depiction of South African society in The Steam Pig (1971) and others has been compared to that of Alan Paton and Nadine Gordimer, but the approach seems closer to that of Tom Sharpe's early works. McClure also wrote non-fictional studies of police work in Liverpool (Spike Island, 1980) and San Diego (Copworld, 1984).