Walter Satterthwait: The Gold of Mayani (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
Andrew M'butu's fictional career seems destined to begin and end with the six short stories in this collection, but he is such a well-imagined, engaging young man that he is already assured a prime position in the pantheon of ethnic detectives.

Walter Satterthwait's spare, clean style and obvious respect and affection for his character make him seem familiar and fully realized from the first story.

Much of Andrew's charm comes from the very fact that, despite the exotic African background of the stories, there is nothing freakish or exploitative about his character. He comes across as a very real, sympathetic, workmanlike fellow of decidedly old-fashioned ethics when it comes to honesty, hard work, respect for his world and his place in it.

Though he comes from the Giriama tribe, an ethnic minority in Kenya, he has a strong sense of himself and the importance of his work in an increasingly chaotic universe.

Andrew doesn't know any martial art, doesn't even carry a weapon, practices no arcane religion, relies on his wife and family for moral support. He actually enjoys and takes pride in his work as a lowly police sergeant. He has a healthy respect for authority, a healthy fear of creepy-crawlies and a healthy dislike of pompous airs, incompetence and stupidity.

He goes about his daily rounds on a lowly Moped when he isn't being terrorized by the maniacal driving of his assistant, Constable Kobari, a similarly likeable character.

In a scant half-dozen stories, Andrew seems wonderfully drawn, fully realized and comfortably familiar -- and the reader has a solid sense of the world he lives in, though the African landscape itself is never a major feature of the stories.

Walter Satterthwait, who had authored two paperback originals before Andrew graced his imagination, has gone on to craft two popular mystery series; the Santa Fe mysteries featuring the wisecracking PI Joshua Croft and the critically lauded historicals which began with "Miss Lizzie" already a classic in the genre.

The finely crafted, genre-bending historical series includes "Wilde West" which set critics on their ears with an original mix of sex, violence, humor, historical detail and some of the wittiest dialogue of all time. Only a consummate writer would dare put words in the mouth of Oscar Wilde.

Satterthwait has done it again with "Escapade", a respectful jaunt into the English detective genre with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini and the American Operative Philip Beaumont.

Walter Satterthwait: The Gold of Mayani. The African Stories. Illustrated by Ernest Franklin. Foreword by Sarah Caudwell. Buffalo Medicine Books, ISBN: 0914001078 (May, 1982), 214 p., $2.95.