Mystery made in Africa
The Missing American Kwei Quartey
Soho Crime Mysteries and thrillers set in Africa that are as good as Kwei Quartey’s are rare. In colonial-era mysteries, plots centred on intrigue among white folks, while African characters showed up mainly as thieves or servants. Post-colonial mysteries weren’t much better at depicting the continent’s vast and varied humanity.
Recent years have been somewhat better. We’ve had Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books and last year’s American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson.
It’s Quartey, though, with his mysteries set in Ghana, who has been regularly bringing a part of the African continent authentically and strikingly to life. He graduated from Howard University and has been working as a physician in California while also releasing, among other books, his Inspector Darko Dawson mysteries.
With The Missing American, Quartey has launched a new series with private investigator Emma Djan. This 26-yearold is the daughter of a homicide detective who aims to follow in her dad’s footsteps. After police department training, though, Djan gets stuck in a bureaucratic backwater. And when she shyly appears for an interview, hoping to be transferred to the homicide unit, the police commissioner tries to rape her. She is promptly fired for insulting her superior. Djan finds work with a private detective agency run by an honest former cop, Yemo Sowah.
Both Sowah and the reader soon begin to enjoy the way Djan learns to use her proper-young-lady manner as an investigative tool. She’s a wonderful mix of decent values and applied canniness.
Djan’s first big case is the one in the book’s title. A middle-aged American named Gordon Tilson travels to Ghana to track down whoever swindled him out of $4,000 in an internet scam. The widower had been lured into a romance with a nonexistent woman, the creation of internet tricksters. But then Tilson disappears, and his son Derek hires the Sowah Agency to find him.
One of Quartey’s most admirable characters is investigative journalist Sana Sana. He saves Djan when she’s about to be on the receiving end of some fatal “rough-rough” and is probably modelled after the real-life Ghanaian reporter the book is dedicated to, Ahmed Hussein-Suale. He was assassinated last year following his exposés of rigged soccer matches.
Sana survives an attempt on his life in The Missing American, and here’s hoping he shows up in future entries, along with the delightful Djan.