Peter Hain, veteran British parliamentarian and son of South African anti-apartheid activists, released his latest novel, Smuggler Kingpin, in September 2026. While ostensibly a crime thriller about gold and tobacco smuggling across Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Dubai, it is also a peculiar type of roman à clef. This form, born of a French need to conceal the identities of those embroiled in scandal, represents real people through fictional characters. To those who don’t know, the work reads like a typical story. But for those with the key (clef), a certain truth appears.

Those familiar with the 2023 Al Jazeera documentary series Gold Mafia can easily infer who Hain’s antagonist Sidney Reilly might really stand for. The novel opens with him, a white man born in the former Rhodesia, heavily tied to the illegal cigarette trade, being shot twice in the back while leaving his Johannesburg home in a Porsche Boxster. This powerful underworld figure manages to survive and continue operating his money-laundering empire, echoing the allegations against a certain cigarette trader operating out of Zimbabwe today.

The main woman sent to foil his empire, Thandi, a returning character from Hain’s three other conspiracy thrillers, is less easy to place. At times a spy, but also described as an activist on the book’s blurb, she works with South African security forces, including a South African Revenue Service (SARS) counter-money laundering team, to make sense of how the empire functions and how Reilly can be brought to justice. She trains under an unnamed man, the Veteran, and is protected by a newbie female sniper. Her journey is far less tax tracking and, thankfully, far more adventure.

Author Tract

But within the novel’s underworld, I think there is a more engaging, at times terrifying, figure. This is the author of the text himself. Hain's own thoughts, words, and deeds are scattered throughout the book. While all authors influence their work, what is fascinating is his method. It takes the text beyond the run-of-the-mill South African crime novel to something almost accidentally literary, but certainly tinder to political discontent.

Thandi has a moment early on which gets to what I mean. Before the Veteran phones Thandi to tell her about her mission to take down Reilly, we meet her through a series of her own supposed thoughts, largely of South Africa. At one point we get, “If that high priest of aggressive misogyny Andrew Tate had been black, he’d have had hero status, Thandi feared.”

Of interest, first, is how the thought is signalled as Thandi’s and not the author’s: simply by tacking on the phrase “Thandi feared” to the end like a quick edit akin to sweeping dirt under a carpet. The second is the mention of Andrew Tate. I admit I know few female spies in South Africa, but I’d reckon the majority are not as invested in the manosphere as a Labour member of the House of Lords. I’d reckon, as all writers do, that Hain’s reached for and wrote an example from his own head and ascribed it to the inner mind of Thandi.

Thandi becomes more vessel, less person, for the interloping of a politically active mind other than her own. And such interloping presents harm to both plot and political motives. The sentence that precedes the thought – “the sheer mountain of male domestic violence and rape amongst the black majority in South Africa appalled her” – points to a racially framed sidebar claim which has no actual bearing on the plot of a novel ostensibly about the gold-smuggling networks in Southern Africa.

Then, take another moment about halfway through the text. Two smugglers working for Reilly, Fanie Minaar and Piet van der Merwe, discuss affirmative action and black economic empowerment (BEE) when they meet to discuss their next shipment of gold. Van der Merwe provides a typical complaint of BEE, ending rhetorically with, “Discriminating against us whites?” But after Minaar agrees with his own rhetorically dead question, Van der Merwe both agrees, “then offered a qualification. ‘But blacks are still more than three times more likely than whites to be without a job.’”

Only in this novel will you find the stereotypical Afrikaner, using their training in the apartheid air force to smuggle gold from the post-apartheid state, with racism a defining feature of his character, yet still capable of countering his own racist views with the kind of statistic fresh from an Institute of Race Relations briefing.

Dulling

Such moments extend from dialogue to plot, at times dulling an otherwise exciting adventure. There is the flight of gold in a small prop airplane from Wonderboom to Dubai. The crew must stop every few countries, conceal their identity, bribe their way through customs, manage locals seeking to short-change them by providing fuel, which nearly causes them to crash, and at one point are shot at over Yemen. Yet Hain, a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, leads up to this by going into an interlude about one passenger's experience of the Troubles.

I do not think this is a bad novel or thriller. It is exciting, and there is a modicum of sense to Hain’s otherwise boring injections into a plot that would be tighter without them. They make the novel viscerally his, and viscerally exciting in a political way. Otherwise, it could have been an explanation of how to receive a 15% VAT exemption from SARS customs or, worse, of how the South African Reserve Bank's Balance of Payments code system functions as an absolute relic of international cross-border payments.

Most arguably, the interludes can prove valuable should Hain ever face a SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) lawsuit, given the novel’s insistence on fiction while repeatedly drawing on recognisable political and criminal realities. Reilly himself discusses using such litigation against a noisy MP. The ending is fictionalised, and the characters’ actions sway far enough towards excitement for Hain to argue that it is a work of fiction. His writing style confirms that it comes from his mind.

That is what makes Smuggler Kingpin such a peculiar roman à clef. Its fictionality obscures the real world, but Hain’s own political consciousness repeatedly gives the game away. The characters may be invented. The underworld may be dramatised. The smuggling networks may be fictionalised. But every so often, unmistakably, Hain cannot help but barge into the room waving a manifesto and pointing you away from the obvious.

Kris van der Bijl is a writer and researcher from Cape Town, South Africa. His work has appeared in African Arguments, World Literature Today, and The Sociological Review Magazine.