Wife of the Gods, Kwei Quartey
Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee novels, police procedurals set in the Navajo Reservation of the American Southwest, first alerted me to the suppleness of the detective genre. As a reader, my pathway into the world of crime fiction ran through the hardboiled end of the street. Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s genre-defining ur-heroes were rough-hewn (white) American males, knights errant with fists like rocks and hearts perennially vulnerable to whomever happened to be the latest busty damsel (or more likely, dame)-in-distress to apply her unblemished knuckles to their frosted glass doors.
Since those halcyon days of blackjacks, chloroform, and snub-nose 38s, writers like Hillerman, Richard Crompton, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton, and others have shown that a change in landscape or—more importantly—perspective can extend the detective genre’s mileage and reach.
But Hillerman and Crompton are white men writing (though writing well!) about people of color. And while I have zero sympathy for the current conversation around the ethics of appropriation (the art of fiction is one of making things up, and our pens should range widely and fearlessly), given my druthers I’d sooner read about, in this case, Africa through the lens of an author whose roots in that continent are familial and deep.
Enter Ghanaian-American writer, Kwei Quartey. The serial novel, in which the same lonely hero unwinds caper after caper by dint of his stubbornness, ability to survive concussions, and killer right hook is a mainstay of detective fiction. Quartey’s Detective Inspector Darko Dawson of Ghana’s Criminal Investigations Department in Accra (Ghana’s capitol city) joins such canonical gumshoes as Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, MacDonald’s Lew Archer, and Spillane’s Mike Hammer in this regard. Wife of the Gods is the first of five novels that feature Dawson, and as is the case for all successful fictional sleuths, one dose of Dawson only whets one’s appetite for the next.
The genre’s suppleness reveals itself through the magic of Quartey’s pen. Darko Dawson is a modern man in a society struggling to free itself of the more destructive elements of traditional practice and belief. In Wife of the Gods, Dawson plies his trade in the hinterland village of Ketanu, investigating the murder of medical student and AIDS activist Gladys Mensah, a young woman widely admired for her intelligence, kindness, and beauty. Tracking her killer, Dawson contends with belief in witchcraft and quickness to scapegoat, that belief’s inevitable partner-in-crime. His efforts are further complicated by the Ewe peoples’ deference to the local fetish priest—and by his own outrage at the practice of trokosi, which relegates daughters of families fallen to misfortune to the status of temple slaves. Ghanaian belief in traditional medicine—both in its fallacy and its promise—provides a backdrop to all of this. In Wife of the Gods, Quartey depicts a society and a people in transformation, always aware that societal change is sporadic, painful, and unlikely to produce unalloyed good.
Quartey’s writing is spare without mimicking the staccato cadence pioneered by Chandler and affected by many of his epigones. Even so, the genre’s essential tropes are duly observed. Is Dawson a sucker for a beautiful dame? Yep, though in Quartey’s hands that beautiful dame is Dawson’s wife Christine. Does he have a weakness for intoxicants? You bet, though here they come not in the form of a bottle but in that of a well-rolled joint. Does Dawson suffer an unfortunate tendency to solve problems with his fists? Indeed he does. And once he latches onto a question, will he shake and squeeze it till it divulges its most disturbing truth? Well, what do you think?
Ultimately, in this fine telling, Gladys’ murder is driven by the same angers, fears, and jealousies that drive all humans to do ill. And perhaps that’s the most useful lesson Quartey has to offer here—in our cultures, in the details of life as we live it, we are diverse. But in our capacity for evil, we are the same.
Read this book! And read all the others in the Darko Dawson series! But get them from your local bookseller or from www.bookshop.org, a company that uses part of its proceeds to benefit independent bookstores. Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your money—he’s got enough.
