Kwei Quartey

How did you become a writer?

My imagination was captured as a boy of 6-9 years old when I read children’s mysteries and adventures, think Hardy Boys, etc. I always liked stories with a lot of intrigue, motion, and commotion—something with a twist and a surprise ending. It wasn’t only a passing interest I had; it was an intense urge to conjure up a world in my mind’s eye to create a tale that I could share with others. As a boy, I entered and won writing contests, once going on local radio to read my winning story. Once, in high school English class, the teacher called me up to read an assigned composition I’d written called, “What Is The Firmament?” I thought he was about to tell the class that this was an example of the worst essay possible. Instead, to the dead silent and attentive audience of my fellow students, he said, “Now, that’s how to write.” Which provoked a whole new level of embarrassment for me!

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.)

For context, I grew up in Ghana, West Africa, a former British colony. For better or worse, much of my reading and writing experience was shaped by the mark Britain left on Ghana and other countries I the so-called Commonwealth of Nations, an uncomfortable and arguably oxymoronic term.

My father, an academic and journalist at the University of Ghana, wrote nonfiction in his areas of expertise: African Studies, Politics, and Journalism in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. By osmosis, I absorbed his ethic of nose-to-the-grindstone work until the essay/article/chapter/book is complete to perfection. This is both a curse and a blessing because now I drive my editors to distraction by continuing to do what I feel are “light” edits to my submitted manuscript versions, but which they and the typesetters see as “substantial” edits.

My mother, a sociologist, was less of a formal writer than my father and more of a pragmatic one. None of her university students ever knew that she used to assign me, her teenage son, the task of prescreening their term papers into categories of excellent, good, fair, and poor, in order for her to more efficiently grade their papers. Mom, satisfied that my spelling and grammar was sufficiently more advanced than the students’, was also my writing cheerleading squad, encouraging me to write about whatever I wanted.

My primary school English teacher, Miss Mensah, must have seen something in me. She stayed some days after class to help me excel in reading, so that I skipped ahead several levels in reading assignments. I remember eagerly racing home from school on my bike to start on the brand-new storybook in my backpack. I loved the smell of the new pages.

Although British author Enid Blyton is not a well-known name in the United States, she was one of the most prolific children’s writers in the world. As Ghana had been a British colony, it was her novels, rather than those of the likes of The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew that gained prominence with children in West Arica, India, and so on. At the time I read Blyton’s books, they were already rather dated, but they had a timelessness that allowed the stories to stand up to scrutiny. Although Blyton wrote several different series, it was her “Famous Five” and the “Five Find-Outers” that I devoured most because they were mysteries. I couldn’t get enough of them. The sheer genius and simplicity of the solution to what on the surface is the most baffling mystery was revealed to me in Blyton’s “The Mystery of The Invisible Thief.” The aha moment in that story that every mystery fan loves was one of the most impactful ever for me.

After Blyton, I moved on somewhat to more challenging reads with Doyle, Sayers, and Christie, Sherlock Holmes being, hands down, my most important hero. Even now, I can’t resist one or two Sherlockian stories (see The Strange Juju Affair At Gacy Mansion) and a very Holmes-Watsonian scene in the upcoming Last Seen In Lapaz (Feb 7, 2023), the third Emma Djan Investigation.

I dabbled in other authors—Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, etc., but the pure mystery remained my favorite, and that spurred me into writing my own mystery novellas. With a penchant for drawing, I designed my book covers and stapled them to the pages—self-publishing before there was such a thing.

When and where do you write?

Pre-Covid, I could work either at home or at a café, but once Covid came along I restricted myself to home and have never really returned to the public sphere as a setting for writing. When I was a practicing physician (I retired from Medicine in 2018 to write full-time), I wrote early in the morning before clinic opened at 8 AM. Now, I do most creative writing in the afternoon between 1 PM and 6 PM every day.

What are you working on now?

Having completed Last Seen In Lapaz for 2023, I’m working on a new novel that shines a light on homophobia in Ghana, where all my novels are set. With few exceptions, all my stories have a backdrop of a socio-economic ill of some kind. Indentured servitude, religion, mining pollution, sexual abuse, and human trafficking are all examples—not light reading, obviously, but I aim to humanize these topics so that they become real stories rather than dry statistics.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I wrestle with the term and I’m not sure what it means. It’s the word “block” that bothers me. It’s annoyingly passive-aggressive. I feel as though, when I’m writing, I’m driving a car and there are times when it’s not so much a physical block as it is that, either the car won’t start and I need to get out and push it myself, or have someone push it, or walk away from it to return later; or, there are three forks in the road ahead and I must figure out which one to take. A block suggests something impassable, and I just don’t believe anything is really impassable. In the best and most blissful of circumstances, the car is in autonomous mode/cruise control, but if not, why isn’t the vehicle unable to move forward? The answer is always the internal mechanics rather than anything standing in the way.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

That a terrible, horribly, awful bad review is only someone’s opinion, and the worse the review the more likely it is that the reviewer has an agenda or an ax to grind. Distinguish this from an observation or criticism from which the author can learn something. For instance, I took a new look at the word “virgin,” following a comment a reviewer made and I learned a good lesson, for which I’m grateful. And another thing: criticism is a sign that people are engaged. Remember: being ignored is much worse than being disliked.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Adding on to the above in #6, be skeptical of self-appointed experts you don’t know from Adam. A UK literary agent once told me that the two places in the world no one wants to read about are Africa and Afghanistan. A couple of years later, along came mega-bestsellers Khaled Hosseini and Alexander McCall Smith. The defense rests.

Don’t, please don’t ever, ask well-meaning friends or family to critique your work. You may love and respect them dearly, but they cannot possibly give you expert or impartial advice. It will either be too gushing or too harsh. There’s only one answer to your dear mom or siblings asking to read your manuscript. No.

Write about what matters to you, what impassions you. You need to be able to pour your heart and soul onto the page and feel the same pain and joy as your characters, who—whether loved or detested—must be important to you.

Kwei Quartey is a crime fiction writer and physician based in Pasadena, California. Quartey was born in Ghana, West Africa, to a Ghanaian father and black American mother, both of whom were lecturers at the University of Ghana. As a crime fiction writer, he made the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List in 2009. The following year, the National Book Club voted him Best Male Author. His Detective Inspector Darko Dawson and female PI Emma Djan series are set in Ghana. The Missing American, first novel in the Emma Djan series, was a nominee for the 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel and nominee for the 2021 Strand Magazine Critics Awards for Best Novel. It won the 2021 Shamus Award for Best First PI novel. Sleep Well, My Lady, the second in the Emma Djan series was a 2022 nominee for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Last Seen In Lapaz, the third in the Emma Djan series, will be published February 7, 2023.