After a trip back home to South Africa, I boarded my flight with Margaret van Klemperer’s Just a Dead Man for my travelling book.
After a trip back home to South Africa, I boarded my flight with Margaret van Klemperer’s Just a Dead Man for my travelling book.
It fulfilled many of the requirements for an aeroplane book: it is strongly located in places I know and love, it is based around a historical incident, it has a middle-aged woman of artistic temperament as the protagonist, and it appeared to have the potential for some entertaining intra-family dialogue.
Laura is a painter and single mother, whose Zimbabwean friend finds a dead body in a plantation near her house.
The investigating officers are Inspector Pillay and Sergeant Dhlomo; and so the stage is set for a rainbow nation whodunit.
Von Klemperer handles this with a light touch – the situation is strongly local, and the tensions between the characters believable and not over-stated.
The dialogue is also understated, to the point of blandness.
All the characters speak in the same voice, and as the most interesting character died in chapter 2, we never get to hear what he has to say.
One person we hear a lot of is Laura, whose crass amateur sleuthing made me wish she’d be arrested for perverting the course of justice and locked away with her paints by halfway through the book.
As I landed and finished the novel, the niceties of the plot had already escaped me.
My hand hovered over the second-hand book bin at the airport, but I decided against it.
I’ve passed it on to a friend who also makes long journeys on public transport. It will keep her awake, but it won’t make her miss her stop.
