Novelist Kwei Quartey, Detectives to Remember, and Creating an Unforgettable Sleuth

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Kwei Quartey is a crime novelist (and physician) living in L.A.—and one of my favorite authors. He's written WIFE OF THE GODS, CHILDREN OF THE STREET, MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS, and we can look forward to his forth, GOLD OF THE FATHERS, coming in January 2016. Kwei's blog is is pretty darned amazing, too, and when I read his post on sleuths and archetypes, I had to ask Kwei if we could reprint it here on Jungle Reds. Readers, he said yes! He'll also be stopping by to chat with readers today.

Take it away, Kwei!

KWEI QUARTEY: A memorable detective in crime fiction stays with the reader long after the novel is completed, no matter to which one of the four archetypes the sleuth belongs:

• The amateur (Miss Marple, Easy Rawlins): Not officially within the criminal investigation system, but having knowledge, curiosity, desire for justice, etc.
• The private investigator (Holmes, Marlow, Poirot, Wolfe, Millhone): Working professionally in criminal investigations, but outside the official criminal justice system.
• The police investigator (Dalgliesh, Morse, Wallander): Part of an official investigative body charged with solving crimes.
• The forensic specialist (Scarpetta, Thorndyke): Contributing specialized forensic knowledge rather than solving the crime as a whole.

There may be some overlap, particularly the amateur and the PI. The examples above obviously don’t comprise an exhaustive list, but they are some of the most recognizable detective characters in crime literature over the decades and centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. Incorporating characteristics or features of these famous detectives into one’s own is not so much stealing as it is learning by emulation.

But one’s emulation must fit your creation. Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple and Walter Mosley‘s Easy Rawlins are both indomitable in their quests for truth and justice, but they are radically different characters. In The Murder at the Vicarage, someone describes Marple as “a white-haired old lady with a gentle appealing manner,” while another condemns her as always knowing “everything that happens and draws the worst inferences.” Marple is somehow present even when she doesn’t appear to be, and that so-called “gentle appealing manner” belies her remarkable ability to dig up the truth. She solves mysteries within the rather stuffy confines of manners and modesty expected in the docile English village of St. Mary Mead.

Easy Rawlins, on the other hand, operates in the gritty environment of 1940s to 1960s Los Angeles. Mosley’s novels practically crackle with tension on every page, and we fear that the next time Rawlins turns down an alley off Slauson Avenue, he will run into either a cop with a grudge against him, or an equally unsavory gangster who would prefer Rawlins dead. But don’t fear too much. Easy is a tough customer as well.

Washington as Easy Rawlins in DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Photo: TriStar Pictures)

Just because your crime fiction is set in Iceland or Ghana doesn’t mean Rawlins or Marple are irrelevant to you. From Christie, you can learn the art of misdirection if you’re writing the classic mystery rather than a thriller (more about the distinction in an upcoming blog), and how to manipulate time and alibi in relation to the murder. With Mosley’s novels, study his tense style and the ability to weave multiple characters into a progressively tangled world of crime and corruption. If your detective is an amateur, notice how Easy believably knows many people, both honest and crooked, who can help him out. This is your chance to create a bunch of scary, creepy, slimy, or dangerous folks encountered along the way. Easy Rawlins is charismatic enough to have been played in film by Denzel Washington. When your character gets portrayed in the movies, you are probably doing well.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes is a transcendent and influential figure among detectives. He’s a singular creation, challenging enough to have been played on screen by multiple actors over decades. In the literary version, because he’s seen through the eyes of his companion Watson, who we sense does not always altogether understand Holmes, we as readers don’t ever get inside the great detective’s head or heart–well, rarely, at least. He is only what Watson reveals to us, and that makes Holmes wondrous in many ways. We want to follow him and his magical set of characteristics: an eerie ability to make deductions from keen observation, a nervous, excitable energy on the one hand, and a predisposition to depression and drug abuse on the other. He solves mysteries through logical, scientific reasoning and doesn’t go by gut feeling. “I never guess,” he says. “It is a shocking habit,—destructive to the logical faculty.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as the modern Holmes (Shutterstock)

Sometimes, his inferences can be a little improbable–as when, in The Sign of the Four, he deduced that his companion Watson had been to the post office that morning because Watson’s shoe had a speck of reddish mud found only opposite that post office, where the sidewalk was being dug up–but we are willing to accept these deductions and even marvel at them, no matter how implausible. That is Sherlock Holmes. In many instances, Holmes’s attention to detail foreshadows modern forensics (e.g. as in trace evidence), and it’s interesting that a BBC TV series has successfully portrayed a present-day Holmes.

Your detective can emulate some of Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction, or be as methodical (or not), or perhaps have some of his physical characteristics (unexpected strength for his thin physique), or failings like drug abuse and depression, but even if you use nothing Sherlockian at all, remember one vital principle from the master himself as he declared in The Sign of the Four: “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” Here is the character giving advice to the mystery writer. Perhaps author Raymond Chandler once saw this powerful reflection and took it to heart, because he made a remarkably similar pronouncement in Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949: “The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.”

Ouch, Raymond.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, do you find you have a favorite archetype of detective? I'm a big fan of the amateur, but also adore Sherlock Holmes. What about you? And who's your favorite example?

Kwei Quartey is a crime fiction writer and physician living in Pasadena, California. Having practiced medicine for more than 20 years while simultaneously working as a writer, he has attained noteworthy achievements in both fields. Dr. Quartey balances the two professions by dedicating the early morning hours to writing before beginning a day in his clinic.

Kwei Quartey attended medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1990, he began practicing medicine in California with HealthCare Partners. Dr. Quartey later founded the facility’s wound care center while working as an urgent care physician.

As a crime fiction writer, Kwei Quartey made the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List in 2009. The following year, the G.O.G. National Book Club awarded him the title of Best Male Author. Having published Wife of the Gods (2009), Children of the Street (2011), Murder at Cape Three Points (2014), he anticipates publication of the fourth Darko Dawson novel in the series, Gold of the Fathers, in early January 2016. Death at the Voyager Hotel, a mystery e-novella not belonging to the series, was published July 2013. Dr. Quartey is also a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime, a fiction writers’ organization.

Kwei's web site is here and you can find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Kate Charles--The Dead King and I

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Do you mind if I start on a personal note? At my very first Malice Domestic, which was somewhere in the... mumble mumble... early nineties... mumble mumble... I saw a name among the authors on the program that made my heart go pitter pat. Kate Charles! I'd read the first of her Book of Psalms mysteries, A Drink of Deadly Wine, and absolutely loved it. From that moment, I was determined to meet her, and I asked everyone I ran into if they knew her. Finally, someone pointed her out. I introduced myself, gushing fan and newbie author that I was, and she was as gracious as I would have imagined.

Kate Charles and I have now been friends for more than twenty years, and the only thing that gives me more pleasure than the chance to introduce her here on JRW today is the fact that there is a new Kate Charles book, False Tongues, featuring her curate detective Callie Anson, out this week!

But as long as we've known one another, there were parts of the story she's going to tell you today that I didn't know. I was riveted, as I am sure you will be.

KATE CHARLES:

             The (Dead) King and I: A love story with a (sort of) fairy-tale ending

Like many other mystery readers, especially those with an Anglophile bent, I was introduced to the story of Richard III by the inimitable Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time. What a wonderful book! Through the clever device of a-story-within-a-story, Tey explores the life and times of England’s most controversial king, examines the evidence provided by contemporary sources as well as human psychology, and leads the reader to the inevitable conclusion that he was a man much maligned by history – not to mention by Thomas More and Shakespeare! I was a teenager when I first encountered The Daughter of Time, and I was totally convinced by it. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that I fell a little bit in love with Richard III, but I certainly developed an interest in him which has had lasting consequences.
 
I read all of the novels about him, and many of the factual accounts of his short life and reign. I joined the Richard III Society, took university courses in English history, and bought extra copies of to give to my friends for proselytising purposes.

1983 marked the 500th anniversary of Richard’s accession to the English throne, and it also marked my 10th wedding anniversary. To celebrate the two events, I persuaded my husband to travel from the US to England, where we joined the commemorations arranged by the Richard III Society. I had a booklet called ‘Ricardian Britain’,  published by the Society, which determined the itinerary of our trip. It wasn’t the usual tourist trail by any stretch of the imagination: instead of London-Cotswolds-Oxford-York-Edinburgh, our stops included Gloucester (as in Duke of), Leicester (as in car park), and a charming little town in Shropshire called Ludlow, which possessed a castle where Richard had lived as a child. We made a return trip two years later, in 1985, for the Society’s solemn commemorations of the Battle of Bosworth, ending up at Bosworth Field on the battle anniversary, 22 August.
 
A year after that, I had managed to achieve my life goal of living in England, and began to discover – to my amazement – that most British people I encountered knew next to nothing about Richard III, and if they knew anything, it was likely to be the old hunchback-who-murdered-his-nephews chestnut.
 
My, how that has changed.
 
In August 2012, when those bones were dug up in that Leicester car park, suddenly the whole world became interested in Richard III. What an incredible story it was: due to the intuition and steely determination of one woman, Phillipa Langley, an archaeological dig was conducted on a site in the vicinity of where Richard was presumed to have been buried. On the first day, the very first trench uncovered the skeleton, and it had a markedly crooked spine. The latest advances in DNA technology made it possible to establish his identity beyond doubt. The timing seemed uncanny: had the discovery been made a few years earlier, technology would not have been advanced enough to do the DNA testing, and a few years later, the last surviving inheritors of Richard’s mitochondrial DNA, a Canadian cabinet-maker and an Australian woman, might not have been alive to confirm the match. Too bizarre for any writer to make up – a king in a car park, lost for centuries but now miraculously found.
 
Once the skeleton had a name, the wrangles began over the King’s final resting place. Westminster Abbey, where so many generations of royalty are entombed? Gloucester, from whence he derived his title? York Minster, where he wished to be laid to rest? Or Leicester, which had the bones and wasn’t about to give them up without a fight? My personal preference was for York Minster, not least because if the funeral had been held there, I would have had a pretty good chance of getting in; as a much larger building, it has far more than the 200 seats which were available for members of the public in Leicester Cathedral, and I have Friends in High Places at York Minster upon whose mercies I could have thrown myself. But that was not to be, and Leicester won out.

Of course I put my name in for the ticket lottery, and of course I was unsuccessful. But the king was to lie in repose in Leicester Cathedral for three days for the public to pay their respects, and that was something I wasn’t going to miss.
 
We decided to go on the first day, on the assumption – which proved entirely correct – that once people started seeing it on the news, the crowds would only increase. So on the Monday morning we drove to Leicester and joined the queue several blocks away from the cathedral. Someone came along to tell us that we could expect to spend about 4 1/2 hours in the queue; no one was discouraged into giving up. The weather was overcast and cold, but the atmosphere in the queue was extraordinary. It was by no means a festival atmosphere – people were respectful and a bit subdued, and everyone seemed to share the sense that they were taking part in history in the making. As we all shuffled along, there was quiet conversation, strangers becoming co-pilgrims for just a few hours. Volunteers passed along the queue giving out bottles of water and wrapped sweets, sharing leaflets and information. Photographers and video camera operators were everywhere. Though we didn’t know it, as we stood by the ‘Waiting Time: 2 hours’ sign, someone from a national newspaper snapped our photo and it appeared the next day. It’s an iconic image – me looking sad, resigned and cold; my husband, with a Union Jack bag, appearing a bit more cheerful.
 
In under two hours we were in the cathedral, standing beside the coffin of Richard III. I can hardly  

describe the feeling of the weight of history at that moment. I said a prayer, shed a tear, and we were back outside again.
About 20,000 people filed past the coffin during those three days. I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t been one of them.
 
The funeral itself was broadcast live on television, and I found it intensely moving. The re-uniting of the king with his own prayer book. The lowering of the coffin, bare now of its sumptuous velvet pall, into the ground. The poem, written for the occasion by the Poet Laureate and read by Benedict Cumberbatch: ‘Grant me the carving of my name … Lost long, forever found.’
 
It was an extraordinary event in every sense. The king – my king – was laid to rest at last, with honour and dignity. Josephine Tey would have been very pleased.
 
And the fairy-tale ending?
 
Because of Richard III, and the travels I undertook in his footsteps, I now live in Ludlow, that beautiful town in the Welsh Marches where he spent the early years of his life. His life may have ended brutally, but for myself I couldn’t have written a better ending if I tried.

DEBS: I have goose bumps. What a moving and momentous occasion. I wish I had been there.

How about you, REDS and readers? Have you followed the story of the discovery of King Richard's remains? Do you believe that Tey was right, and that Richard has got his due at last?

Here's more about Kate's new book, False Tongues: 
The Reverend Callie Anson should have learned her lesson by now: revisiting the past is seldom a good idea. But she succumbs to peer pressure and attends a reunion at her theological college in Cambridge, where she is forced to confront painful memories – and the presence of her clueless ex, Adam.

Meanwhile, in London, police officers Neville Stewart and Mark Lombardi are involved with the latest stabbing of a teenager. Was the victim – gifted, popular schoolboy Sebastian Frost – all he seemed to be, or was there something in his life that led inevitably to his death? The police find themselves plunged into the queasy world of cyber-bullying, where nothing may be as it seems.

While they're apart, Callie and Mark's relationship is on hold, and his Italian family continues to be an issue. Will Mark realise, before it's too late, that while his family will always be important to him, he is entitled to something for himself?


Kate Charles, a past Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association and the Barbara Pym Society, is American by birth but has lived in England for almost thirty years. She is co-organizer of the annual St. Hilda’s Crime and Mystery Conference and a member of the prestigious Detection Club. Her books, including the Callie Anson series and the ‘Book of Psalms’ series, are set against the background of the Church of England.

ELEMENTARY--ONE MORE HOLMES?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Few will deny that the new BBC production of SHERLOCK, written by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson in a contemporary London, is terrific.  The acting is superb, the plots labyrinthine, the dialogue sparkling and razor sharp. I'm a huge fan of the series, as I am of creators Gatiss and Moffat (Moffat also helms the current version of BBC's DOCTOR WHO.)

But now we upstart Americans have thrown another  Sherlock Holmes into the mix. When CBS announced plans to produce ELEMENTARY, a weekly series which not only moves Holmes to contemporary New York, but portrays Watson as a woman, there were cries of outrage from die-hard Holmes fans (and whispers of potential lawsuits from the producers of SHERLOCK.) But Conan Doyle's Holmes stories are in the public domain, and Holmes and Watson have been portrayed in many different incarnations over the years, both on film and in books.  (Laurie R. King, after all, had the temerity to marry Holmes to her wonderful Mary Russell.)

English actor Jonny Lee Miller plays Holmes as a recovering drug addict, sent to New York for his rehabilitation, and Lucy Liu is Joan Watson, the former surgeon hired by Holmes's father to be his "sober companion."

My verdict, four episodes into the season? It works, and it's huge fun. The plots are not Moffat's and Gatiss's dizzying puzzles, but they are more than clever enough for the hour format. Miller gives us his own version of Holmes's obsessive/compulsive brilliance, and he brings an unexpected vulnerability to the character. Miller, a fine actor, lost the role of James Bond to Daniel Craig, and that of Rick Grimes in THE WALKING DEAD to Andrew Lincoln. I think in ELEMENTARY, he got the plum.

Lucy Liu's Watson, serious and profoundly lonely, brings her own strengths to the partnership. And I think it will be the development of the friendship (NOT romance!) and respect between the partners that will keep this series top notch.

So, REDS and readers? Have you watched? Is it thumbs up or thumbs down for another Holmes?

(And the winner of Michelle Gagnon's DON'T TURN AROUND is Gayle! Gayle, you can email me at deb at deborahcrombie dot com and give me your mailing address. I'll pass it along to Michelle.)

DO YOU CUMBERBATCH?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Having confessed, if a bit belatedly, that I've never seen an episode of Mad Men, can you guess why I put a red circle around Sunday, May 6th, on my calendar? 

Yes, it's the return of SHERLOCK, on PBS Mystery, the first episode of the second three-part adaption of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Only in this newest version, created by Dr. Who collaborators Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat, Sherlock and Watson, and the villains who challenge them, exist in modern times. (Gloriously modern London, to be exact.) John Watson, MD, has returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan as an army doctor, and Sherlock--well, if you haven't seen the first series, I'd highly recommend you get your hands on the DVDs and watch immediately before diving into Season 2.

Sherlock is played by an actor with the unlikely name of Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict Cumberbatch???? Really??? In the old movie days, surely his name would have been changed to something sexier and more audience friendly... But then, once you've seen him, you can't imagine him being called anything else.  It would be like Humphrey Bogart not being Humphrey Bogart.

Not that I'm comparing the two. Bogart was brilliant.  But Cumberbatch is...Cumberbatch. I can't think of a comparison.  He's arresting, brilliant, geeky, and incredibly sexy in a weird way.

(I've just seen him play 1970s MI6 spy Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and he steals the movie, even from Gary Oldman.)

In the new SHERLOCK, Martin Freeman is wonderful as Watson. My only regret is that both actors were so busy (Cumberbatch making Tinker Tailor and War Horse, as well as voicing Smaug the Dragon in The Hobbit, and Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins in same) that there was a long gap between Season 1 and Season 2 of SHERLOCK.

So, REDS, do you Cumberbatch? And do you have a favorite Sherlock, from Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett to Robert Downey, Jr. in the new film versions?

RHYS BOWEN: I didn't think I was going to like this new interpretation of Sherlock when I saw it on TV last year, but I found it fascinating. Of course watching Cumberbatch and Freeman was a plus but also Holmes using modern technology--which of course he would have embraced had he lived today.
And if my name was Benedict Cumberbatch I would definitely have changed it--think of signing autographs. His hand would fall off!

I always hated Rathbone and wasn't too keen on Robert Downey Jr. Jeremy Brett got the character right in many ways, but he was way too old. So was Watson. They are essentially young men in the stories. We tend to forget that because of the way Holmes has been portrayed on screen.

DEBS: Rhys, I so agree.  Holmes was always a man ahead of his time, so it's such fun to see Holmes AND Watson using modern technology.  I love it when we see what Holmes is thinking as a text:-) And yes, they are the perfect age.  I recently reread some of the first Holmes stories and they are young men.  In the new series, Moriarty is young, too, which makes it all the more interesting.

HALLIE EPHRON: I love the new Sherlock, too - it's clever in the way that Holmes is meant to be clever. And cheeky. Can't wait to start watching the new episodes.

I did like Jeremy Brett as Sherlock, but he got a bit too twitchy and mannered and skeletal toward the end. The BBC so often nails it with mystery sleuths. Can't beat David Suchet as Hercule Poirot or Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
 
LUCY BURDETTE: Sorry to say I'm utterly out of the loop on this one! My husband and I just last night finished the final episode of Season 2 of DOWNTON ABBEY so you can see I'm not on the cutting edge. Sigh. On your recommendations, will have to put this in the queue...

JAN BROGAN - I used to watch the PBS version long ago when Sherlock was uncomfortably nervous and shaky and there were repeated references to his use of... what was it cocaine? Or opium? Watson was really the one I rooted for. Was that Rathbone's Sherlock? Whoever it was, he sort of turned me off on Sherlock Holmes and I'm afraid I really haven't given him a chance since.

But I've seen War Horse and now I'm trying to figure who Cumberbatch played. Off to google....

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I am so delighted with the new Sherlock! It's completely fascinating and revealing about the quality of the stories that the current  writers could make Watson a veteran of the CURRENT war in Afghanistan. I love that Holmes is a character we know so well that we can believe he'd text. I mean--they might have decided to do a new Sherlock who hated technology, and insisted on relying on the old ways, right? But they  went the riskier way, and I say hurray.

And I will confess to adoring Basil Rathbone. And adoring Robert Downey, Jr. (I'm sorry, I know, it's--not hip of me.) Jeremy Brett--somehow that didn't work for me. I watched them anyway, of course. Shall we talk about Jennifer Garner as Miss Marple? Okay, later... 

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Cut my teeth on the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies and they will forever be the gold standard (in my mind anyway.) There was one movie..Terror By Night?..that was set during WWII and I didn't like that so not sure I'd like the new series. Haven't seen. And remembering Jeremy Brett as Freddie Aynsford Hill in My Fair Lady ("it's the new small talk...you do it so awfully well!") I could never see him as Holmes without expecting him to belt out On the Street Where You Live.

DEBS: Hank, is it not cool to like the Robert Downey version? I didn't know that... Because I do, although I liked the first movie better than the second. And I love Jude Law as Watson.

I did like Jeremy Brett, although I agree he got a bit twitchy and weird towards the end of the series.

But no one, as far as I'm concerned, has topped Cumberbatch and Freeman for perfect casting and cleverness.  And no one has come near Gatiss and Moffat on the writing.

For those of you who aren't yet Cumberbatch converts, you have a treat in store.

How about you, readers? Do you like--or love--the new Holmes?