What We’re Reading: Foreign Mysteries, Part 2

Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma Wa Ngugi (Melville International Crime 2013)

This detective novel was one of those happenstance indie bookstore finds. I wandered into Minneapolis’ Boneshaker Books earlier this summer, hoping to find something. Of course, like most of these occasions, I wound up carrying more books than I could afford. Thankfully, I kept Black Star Nairobi in my downsizing.

The main characters are an unlikely pair of detectives who used to be cops, now running their own detective agency (Black Star): O, a Kenyan, and Ishmael, an American and our narrator. The book opens with a mysterious dead body in Nairobi’s Ngong Forest, and a terrifying hotel bombing the next day (reading this book now hit very close to home with the recent mall siege in Nairobi). The atmosphere buzzing around these events are an elevated 2007 political climate with the recent Kenyan elections, and news of a certain Senator Barack Obama campaigning for President in the United States. As Ishamel and O navigate this case, they discover connections between the two events, and find themselves waist deep in an international case much bigger than they’d imagined. The deeper they go, the more local forces try to deter them from the case, and extreme violence and more dead bodies start cropping up against the two detectives.

At the surface level, this seems like a typical plot line of the detective fiction genre. It has the troubled, but ultimately good main detectives, shady sidekicks, love, loss, and dead bodies. On the other hand, the story is completely unique in its setting and complex portrayal of Kenya’s politics, crime, and daily life. From the very beginning pages, it becomes clear that crime in Kenya is a murky business, and the prescribed method of detective work is wholly different from the standard detective novel. Everyone has ulterior motives, but slowly, we begin to see the way these motives work in Kenya. While everyone is juggling good and bad motives, their actions (and reactions) are relatively straight-forward and common sense. O’s conflicting hemispheres of good and bad become another a main thread in this story, as is Ishmael’s internal struggles with his American cop “upbringing” in the crime world juxtaposed with the convoluted Kenyan way of dealing with right and wrong.

This chaotic scene in the opening pages after the hotel bombing demonstrates how Ngugi weaves the fabric of Kenya into every scene:

The wounded were being rushed to the hospital and the dead to the city mortuary. There were pieces of flesh and bone here and there, some recognizably human, others so torn apart that they looked like something you would see at the back of a slaughterhouse. The scents of blood, oil, water, and dust mixed with the whispery tangy smell of whatever explosive had been used to make the bomb, a smell that stung the back of your throat. Seeing the destruction in the late morning light drove the cruelty of the terror home. There were aged police dogs, given to Kenyans by the Americans after the last bombing, sniffing in the rubble, looking for survivors. There would be occasional yells of hope from the policemen guiding them, followed by the overmanned fire truck finally pouring water on the area. And then deflated sighs as it turned out to be nothing.

There were questions of jurisdiction, arguments back and forth. Americans had died, so the U.S. government had a right to conduct its investigations, but it had happened on Kenyan soil and the majority of the dead were Kenyans. Eventually it boiled down to the fact that the Kenyans didn’t have the technology to deal with this kind of thing.

The international scope of this crime novel is apparent at every step in O’s and Ishmael’s case. It all adds to the complexity and uniqueness of Black Star Nairobi.

The setting of Kenya and all that it entails is what sets this book apart from any other in its genre. Aptly put, a quote from Ellah Allfrey on the front cover reads, “[Ngugi’s detective] may not as yet have taken over from Kurt Wallander in our affections, but…it’s only a matter of time.” (Read my first foreign mystery review of Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell featuring detective Wallander here.) While I maintain Wallander is also a unique detective in the fiction world, his character still fits more cleanly into the detective fiction genre than Ishmael or O.

This isn’t to say that everything is believable. It doesn’t have to be—it’s crime fiction. Of course, this book, like many crime novels, explores contemporary societal issues. But in Black Star Nairobi, it’s a very different society than the typical crime novel. “It allows you to look at very, very extreme situations, extreme violence, a society just about to explode in a way that I don’t think you can do with realist fiction,” said Ngugi in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered (if you’re curious for more, here is the full interview). Ngugi’s hold on Kenya as a society is strong, right on the pulse.

The prose is straight-forward, but can border on clumsy or self-conscious at times in Ishmael’s moments of self-reflection. But most of the time, the prose stays out of the way, and lets the characters take the lead in this compelling plot.

While I’ve classified this as a “foreign mystery,” Ngugi was actually born in Illinois to well-known African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o (here‘s a short clip of an interview with Ngugi and his father on BBC News) before moving to Kenya where he grew up. He came back to the U.S. for college, and is a professor at Cornell University. He’s written both poetry and fiction, including the prequel to Black Star Nairobi called Nairobi Heat.

Have you read other detective novels that refuse to follow the prescribed plot lines of the genre? Who is your preferred detective? What other authors capture the atmosphere of their foreign setting so completely?