African — Noir African Crime Fiction Keeps Getting Better by Michael Stanley

In recent years, there’s been a tsunami of excellent books from Nordic countries, often called Nordic Noir. However, a cold look at many of these stories suggests they should be stacked under Fantasy rather than Mystery. Why? Because there are more murders in each book than there are real murders in a year.

For really dark stories, you need to look in very hot places. After all, the shadows are darkest where the sun shines the brightest. Sunshine Noir, as Yrsa Sigurdardottir calls it. And what is hotter and darker than Africa?

The quality of African crime fiction has built momentum with excellent recent books set in Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania, joining those from southern Africa. If you like a dash of armchair travel laced with exploring different cultures added to characters you care about in challenging mysteries, then these books are for you.

Let’s start in Nigeria where Femi Kayode sets his mystery thrillers featuring psychologist-detective Philip Taiwo. In Kayode’s debut, Lightseekers, three students are beaten and set on fire by a mob angry about the gangsterism they associate with the nearby Okriki university. Taiwo is asked to investigate the mob violence, and to try to get to the heart of the matter. Kayode, himself a clinical psychologist, imagines a gripping and believable scenario, and the reviews were stellar. For example, The Independent said it was ‘A standout thriller... A stunning murder mystery... The suspense is expertly handled’.

(The book was inspired by the horrific real murder of four young men near Port Harcourt.)

Now Taiwo is back in an excellent sequel, Gaslight, where he comes up against the power of a hugely popular evangelical church in Nigeria. Again, the pages drip with the flavours and realities of Nigeria and its patriarchal society. The wife of the leader of the church disappears, and seems to have been murdered at her home. Suspicion points to her husband, but Taiwo soon shows that the police have the wrong end of the stick. However, that’s not the end of the case but the beginning. It’s great to have Taiwo back!

Moving to Ghana, we meet Emma Djan, Kwei Quartey’s resourceful PI. In The Missing American she has to trace an American man lured to Nigeria to meet a woman who almost certainly doesn’t exist outside the computers of the sakawa boys, the internet scammers. They play their victims like game fish, but they are only part of a vicious web of corruption and witchcraft that reaches all the way to the top echelons of society. Emma has her work cut out for her in this excellent first outing. What initially looked like a simple missing person case rapidly escalates to a twisty thriller as Quartey shows us the ups and downs of Ghana. The Missing American won the Shamus award for best first PI novel and was nominated for an Edgar. The Emma Djan series continued with Sleep Well, My Lady, and most recently with Last Seen in Lapaz, all first rate.

For something completely different we go to New York Times best-selling author Chris Bohjalian’s gripping Tanzania historical thriller, The Lioness. In the mid-sixties, Hollywood was at the height of its star-generating power and the Serengeti in Tanzania was becoming a magnet for wealthy international tourists.

A rising movie star decides to celebrate her wedding by taking her closest family and friends on an African safari. All goes well until a gang of white men attacks the safari, killing a guide and seizing the tourists. Almost immediately it’s clear that this is not a straightforward kidnapping. The attackers have Russian accents and are somehow involved with what’s going on in the Congo where Patrice Lumumba has just been killed.

Some of the tourists manage to escape, but then they face the Serengeti alone. They were fine as long as they were outside looking in, but once they are inside looking out, they are completely out of their depth, unable to understand or cope with the wildness of the area. The real thing, they discover, is nothing like the adventure
movies in which they have been involved. Jodi Picoult said, ‘The Lioness feels like the best possible combination of Hemingway and Agatha Christie…’

Speaking of Agatha Christie, let’s move to Zimbabwe and meet Bryony Rheam’s Chief Inspector Edmund Dube in All Come to Dust. Marcia Pullman is discovered dead in her Bulawayo home with a letter opener sticking out of her chest, but there’s not enough blood and it’s obvious that she was dead before she was stabbed. Dube goes to the scene, having to wheedle a lift from a man who is at the police station arguing a speeding fine. The pathologist, a friend of Marcia’s husband, says she died of natural causes, and the senior officers at the police station seem intent on thwarting Edmund’s efforts to get to the bottom of the case.

Superficially the book seems to follow the tropes of the detective story genre, but soon we see that it’s nothing like that. The rich characterizations and subtle surprises remind one as much of PD James as Agatha Christie. All Come to Dust was chosen as one of ten top African thrillers by Publishers’ Weekly which described it as ‘a stunning crime debut’.

Finally, we reach the south of the continent with the latest offering from South Africa’s best known crime writer, Deon Meyer. If you haven’t read any of Meyer’s books yet, grab a copy of The Dark Flood – you can read the series in any order – and then catch up on the earlier books later.

At the start of The Dark Flood, detective Benny Griesel and his partner Vaughn Cupido are banished from the elite Hawks to a posting as ordinary detectives in the rural wine-town of Stellenbosch. Their first case seems to indicate a boring future – a student who has disappeared from a residence at the local university, probably off with some friends somewhere. However, other things are going on. They are slipped pictures of a senior police officer holding a firearm they know he shouldn’t have. It seems their fall from grace has convinced someone they can be trusted to try to expose corruption in senior police management.

In the meanwhile, an estate agent struggling to make ends meet for her family, suddenly has the opportunity to earn a huge commission on the sale of an iconic wine farm. But there’s a catch. She has to deal with the crooked businessman, Jasper Boonstra, who caused the slump in the Stellenbosch property market when his business empire there collapsed like the house of cards it was. And then Boonstra disappears…

As Kirkus put it in a starred review, ‘A well-crafted blend of suspense, culture, and humour. Meyer is terrific.’

These six books are a sample of what is coming out of Africa at the moment. Each will intrigue and grip you.

Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip write under the name Michael Stanley. Their award-winning crime series, featuring Detective Kubu, is set in Botswana, a fascinating country with magnificent conservation areas and varied peoples. The latest book in the series is a prequel, titled A Deadly Covenant. They are currently working on their ninth Kubu book, titled Dead Wrong.

 Michael writes a monthly piece on new African mysteries and thrillers for the ITW magazine The Big Thrill.

www.michaelstanleybooks.com

Novels

Detective Kubu
A Carrion Death (2008)
A Deadly Trade (2009)
The Death of the Mantis (2011)
Deadly Harvest (2013)
A Death in the Family (2015)
Dying to Live (2017)
Facets of Death (2020)
A Deadly Covenant (2022)

Freelance Journalist, Crystal Nguyen
Dead of Night (2018)

Anthology of short stories
Detective Kubu Investigates Boxed Set (2020)

www.michaelstanleybooks.com