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Rayne Kruger
Charles Rayne Kruger (January 29, 1922 - December 21, 2002) was a South-African writer, born in Queenstown, in the Eastern Cape, to an unmarried 17-year-old daughter of a British o...view moreCharles Rayne Kruger (January 29, 1922 - December 21, 2002) was a South-African writer, born in Queenstown, in the Eastern Cape, to an unmarried 17-year-old daughter of a British officer who had served in the Boer War, Rayne’s father had disappeared and his mother married Victor Kruger, a Johannesburg estate agent.
Kruger attended Jeppe High School and Witwatersrand University. He became an articled clerk in a Johannesburg law firm and during WWII, unsuitable for joining the Army, worked as a steward on a merchant ship, which became the basis for his first novel, Tanker (1952).
After war end, he returned to qualify as a lawyer, and in his spare time joined a theatrical company led by the West End actress Nan Munro. Following Kruger’s marriage to Munro in England, he became a newsreader with the BBC World Service.
His play The Green Box, about a woman who disguised her sex to serve as a doctor in the Boer War, was briefly performed at the Chepstow Theatre in London, and it was then Kruger began to start writing in earnest: his first novel, Tanker, was followed by The Spectacle (1953), a gripping crime story; Young Villain With Wings, an account of forger poet Thomas Chatterton; My Name Is Celia, a romance set in post-war Berlin; and the thrillers An Even Keel and Ferguson. All were noted for their realistic use of material and skilful plotting.
His non-fiction work on the Boer War, Goodbye Dolly Gray (1959), would go on to become a bestseller and cement his reputation as a noted author.
Kruger was in the process of writing a one-volume history of China, All Under Heaven, when he died on December 21, 2002 at the age of 80.view less