Piemburg Books in Order

The Piemburg books gather Tom Sharpe’s earliest and angriest satires, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Both novels are set in the fictional South African town of Piemburg and follow a catastrophically incompetent police force as it tries—and fails—to uphold apartheid. Through escalating farce and grotesque set‑pieces, Sharpe turns the mechanics of a racist state into material for blistering comedy.

In Riotous Assembly, the trouble begins when eccentric English spinster Miss Hazelstone calmly admits to killing her Black cook with a massive elephant gun. Kommandant van Heerden, a small‑time policeman who dreams of being an English gentleman, rushes to Jacaranda Park hoping to hush things up. Instead, his panic, the blood‑thirsty zeal of Konstabel Els, and the paranoid interference of Security Branch officer Lieutenant Verkramp turn a single crime into a massacre and a political catastrophe for the town.

Indecent Exposure returns to the same police station and the same trio of officers, this time fixated on “protecting” white policemen from sexual contact with Black women. Verkramp enlists a psychiatrist to subject the rank and file to a bizarre course of aversion therapy. The experiment goes spectacularly wrong, leaving almost the entire police garrison convinced they are homosexual and sparking another round of cover‑ups, witch‑hunts and slapstick disaster in Piemburg.

Sharpe drew heavily on the decade he spent living and working in South Africa, and on his own arrest and deportation for sedition after writing an anti‑apartheid play. That personal anger fuels the books’ relentless mockery of racial laws, institutional corruption and the petty egos of men who wield power badly. At the same time, the novels avoid pious preaching; instead they stage the regime’s logic to the point of absurdity, using sex scandals, courtroom travesties and out‑of‑control police operations to show how a system built on fear and hierarchy eventually implodes.

Readers coming to Piemburg can expect cartoonish violence, off‑colour jokes and characters pushed far beyond the bounds of realism, all in the service of attacking a real historical injustice. The books are tightly linked: Riotous Assembly introduces the town and its policemen, while Indecent Exposure assumes you already know who they are and simply pushes them into even more preposterous territory. For that reason, they are best read in publication order, as a two‑part chronicle of how a brutal system makes fools and monsters of the men who try to enforce it.