Sleep Well, My Lady, Kwei Quartey
I’m a fan of Kwei Quartey’s. In proof, check my review of his Wife of the Gods (June 4, 2020, https://www.pauleberly.com/criticism/wife-of-the-gods-kwei-quartey). Quartey, like many who plumb the fictional crime universe — particularly the fictional detective universe — peoples his plots with serial protagonists. In the case of his latest, Sleep Well, My Lady, that serial sleuth is Emma Djan, junior detective at Ghana’s Sowa Private Detective Agency. In Sleep Well, Emma and her compatriots investigate the murder of Lady Araba, doyenne of Ghana’s fashion scene.
In some respects, Sleep Well, My Lady strikes one as a throwback or, perhaps, homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, that being the era of Sayers, Christie, Marsh, and their predecessors and contemporaries. Sleep Well is at heart a locked room mystery, the locked room being a staple of early Twentieth Century detective fiction (see note).
The detectives of the Sowa Agency rely heavily on work undercover, impersonating as the plot unspools, reporters, construction laborers, journalism students, and — in Emma’s case — an out-of-work cleaning woman. Almost by definition, the characters who populate crime novels are suspects in whatever outrage animates their various plots and so, I suppose, are reasonably subject to the subterfuge that undercover work requires. Still, I admit I found myself discomforted on a moral basis by Sleep Well’s surplus of this — in some cases, the targets of the Sowa Agency’s misrepresentation are well-meaning citizens, innocent of any wrong-doing.
The first of the Emma Djan novels, The Missing American, focused on computer fraud and its purported connection to traditional Ghanaian shamanism. Its action plays out across multiple continents and involves official corruption at the highest level. Emma and Gordon Tilson, the novel’s victim, are characterized deeply, and indeed each of its large cast of important characters is sensitively drawn. The Missing American is a rewarding piece of fiction and I recommend it.
Thin characterization, however, is a historic weakness of detective stories, likely owing to their original incarnation as literary puzzles. This lack is often compensated by satisfying characterization of the detective him- or herself. There is one mind, the detective’s, that is vividly portrayed, into which the reader can vest her concern, onto which she can project her caring, her need for resolution.
In the case of Sleep Well, My Lady, detectival efforts are allocated not to Emma in particular but are spread among the Sowa Agency’s team. The novel’s most effective characterization is reserved for Lady Araba, its victim. This is a defensible choice — we readers must necessarily care for the murdered to desire her killer be brought to justice.
One misses, however, that central, analyzing eye. In short, one misses Emma. Surrendering her controlling point of view, so integral to The Missing American, reducing it to one among multiple others, saps this latest novel of some of its interest. Literary conventions are good things to violate. But if one is to violate them, one must gain something in trade. More, compared to its predecessor, Sleep Well, My Lady feels like a constricted stage.
Sleep Well does have its merits. Quartey continues to use his fiction to highlight endemic ill-treatment of women, particularly in Ghana, a traditional society in transition. This is a subject to which he brings a Nicholas Kristof level of passion and concern. For him, the detective novel serves as a prism through which he can parse society’s ills. If the locked room mystery is a thing of old, use of the detective tale to comment on social issues is altogether a thing of the present.
I hope to see the courageous, stubborn, and resourceful Emma Djan in other Quartey novels to come, hopefully ones in which she resumes a defining role.
Buy the Emma Djan books at your local bookstore or bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its profit to independent booksellers. Particularly at this moment when so many small businesses struggle, we need to support those folks who make love of the written word their business.
Note: The “locked room” mystery, as exemplified by Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, is one in which the murder occurs or seems to occur in, well, a locked room without any obvious method of ingress or egress on the part of the perpetrator. The device was most popular in the first half of the Twentieth Century and its primary literary practitioner was John Dickson Carr (1906 to 1977). See Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel.
