ALL THAT GLITTERS: A STUDY IN GOLD:

RHYS BOWEN: One of the benefits of being part of Jungle Red Writers, apart from the incredible

sense of community we've established, is learning about new authors. Kwei Quartey is someone I hadn't read before but when I heard that he grew up reading Enid Blyton, I felt an immediate connection. I absolutely lived the Famous Five and the Secret Seven when I was a child.  A perfect grounding for anyone who wanted to be a crime writer in later life. So I'm delighted to introduce him to you now: 

KWEI QUARTEY: When I was a boy of about ten living in Ghana, West Africa, I entered a writing contest with an essay I called "My Ambitions." The list included becoming a teacher, veterinarian, ventriloquist, artist, pop star, and a writer. The latter stayed with me the longest. My childhood home was full of books, and I continually found new ones to read. The genre that attracted me most was crime fiction. I consumed mysteries by British children's author, Enid Blyton, who isn't very well known in the States but is still published widely in the British Commonwealth. Sometimes I was up to two Blyton novels in a day. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was another series in which I immersed myself.

All those books around me at home stimulated me to write, and my black American mother and Ghanaian father—both lecturers at the University of Ghana—encouraged my efforts. I wrote several short stories and three novellas, which I covered with cardboard jackets I illustrated myself. One was called, "Cougar, Hero Of The Jungle." Another was about a group of five kids who went around solving mysteries. I wrote them in longhand (until I learned to type later on) and bound them with jacket covers I illustrated myself. Nowadays, we call that self-publishing.

By the time I was a teenager, I had chosen medicine as my intended profession. When I was nineteen, the death of my father, awful political and economic conditions in Ghana, and my brush with the military government (another story altogether) drove my mother to return to her native New York with my three brothers and me. By then, I was in premed and faced the task of getting into a US medical school. It wasn't easy. Eventually, I succeeded in gaining admission to Howard University College of Medicine, where I got my MD degree.

During medical school and residency training, I did no creative writing at all, but once my boards were out of the way, I rediscovered my love for writing fiction. It was to be a couple of decades before I created Inspector Darko Dawson, the hero of my present murder mystery series. Each novel, including the upcoming April 26 release, GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, is set in Ghana.

I live in the States, but my connections to my birthplace will remain strong, especially since I visit Ghana once or twice a year to conduct research. I pick an outstanding Ghanaian social issue (what country doesn't have them?) and then I work a murder and story into it.

Ghana was called the “Gold Coast” until its independence in 1957. In the fifteenth century, Europeans had known the West African coastal region as the source of the gold that reached North Africa via the trans-Saharan trade roots. Gold had been sold to Europe at least as early as the tenth century. When the Portuguese came to the shores of the Gold Coast in 1471, they called their landing area La Mina, or The Mine, a reference to the gold they discovered. That name became corrupted to the present-day Elmina, a town in the Central Region of Ghana.

The phenomenon of foreigners raiding Ghana's resources hasn't ceased since as far back as the 15th century. To this day, the British still have an ancient gold mask purloined from the Ashanti Region in 1874.

 SOLID GOLD MASK, (8 X 6 INCHES) SEIZED BY THE BRITISH FROM KUMASI, GHANA, IN 1874, NOW IN WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON

Around 2010, Chinese illegal miners in the tens of thousands began immigrating to that same Ashanti Region in search of gold. A couple of years later, I read an article detailing an exchange of gunfire between Ghanaian police officers and Chinese nationals. Two fatalities resulted, and the story was a diplomatic embarrassment for both Ghana and China. But to me, it spelled murder mystery, igniting my creative energies and setting up my next novel in the Inspector Darko Dawson series.

Before I set off to Ghana to conduct research, I had been aware that digging for gold involved substantial disturbance of farmlands and lush forests, but I had not realized the intensity of destruction the illegal gold miners had inflicted on the landscape. During my expeditions into the remote interior of the Ashanti Region, I was stunned by the vast swathes of land laid waste by excavators and earthmovers.

As I explored, what emerged was a milieu rich with conflict and corruption. Some of the locals battled with the Chinese, who had obliterated cocoa farms and palm groves, but village chiefs—whom the Chinese paid off—welcomed the foreigners. Young Ghanaians, attracted by the quick and easy way to make money from gold, were uninterested in the slow business of farming cocoa, and thus generational resentments arose. Throw in harsh, squalid conditions and jittery mine guards with pump action rifles, and I had a story to tell of the dirty, ugly side of gold.

Of all the human and social conditions I have researched for my detective series, I found this one the most affecting. The environment has always mattered to me wherever I've lived, but what dismayed me about what I found in the Ashanti Region was the enabling role Ghanaians played as the Chinese illegals bulldozed their way across the land. I tried to convey this complicated relationship in GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, and I experienced a torn feeling over a grim reality that was so perfect a setup for a fictional work.   

RHYS: Doesn't this sound absolutely fascinating? I love reading about places and situations I knew nothing about before, how about you?