Word: pig
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...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...
...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...
...they'll talk to this curious listener. Toujours Provence contains an intricate aria of shoptalk from an expert truffle hunter who has even filmed his pig at work, "its snout moving rhythmically back and forth, ears flopping over its eyes, a single-minded earth-moving machine." A similar cameo on the history of pastis ("the milk of Provence") is written with an unpompous sense of discovery and an appropriate amount of thirst...
Another fellow Silber supporter and Mather resident, Andrew J. Mirabella '91, says that, while he doesn't think Gallagher picks fights intentionally, he seemed to thrive on "fighting constant battles against people who were saying that Silber was a pig...
...next month, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations arrived at its guinea pig site, Stanford University, and the government discovered significantly, costly improprieties. As their interest piqued, investigators then broadened the scope to Harvard Medical School and MIT. And now, after nine months, what began as a low-key fact-finding mission has snowballed into a massive federal inquiry that has drawn the interest of at least seven independent federal agenices and has engulfed nearly 300 colleges and universities...