Africa Taught Me Everything I Know About Mystery
On travel, curiosity, and the strange art of hiding the answer in plain sight
There is a particular moment that happens in Africa that I have never been able to explain properly to anyone who has not experienced it themselves. You are sitting somewhere quiet, perhaps on the edge of a lake at dusk, or on the steps of a building in a city you are still finding your way around, and you become suddenly, completely aware of how much you do not know. Not in a distressing way. In a clarifying way. The world tilts slightly and you see, with great precision, how small your understanding is and how large everything else is. For me, the first time that happened, I was twenty-three years old and sitting outside a guesthouse in Kampala, Uganda, with a cup of tea going cold in my hand. I did not know it then, but that moment changed everything about who I would eventually become.
I grew up in Somerset, in the south-west of England. It is beautiful country, slow and green and full of history, the kind of place where the hedgerows are ancient and the paths between villages have been walked by people for so many centuries that they have worn themselves permanently into the landscape. My father was a schoolteacher and my mother ran a small bakery in the village where we lived, and my childhood was largely unremarkable in the best possible sense. We were not wealthy but we were comfortable, and the house was always full of warmth and the smell of bread and, most importantly for the person I was to become, books.
I read everything I could find. I walked the hills with a dog named Barker who was entirely indifferent to the countryside but very committed to my company. I spent a great deal of time in the local library, which was not a large library but was staffed by a woman named Mrs Thorpe who seemed to know exactly which book a person needed before they knew themselves. She handed me my first proper mystery novel when I was eleven years old, pressing it into my hands with an air of quiet certainty, as though she were completing a transaction that had been arranged some time in advance. I remember nothing about the plot except that it made me feel, for the first time, that a story could be a game between a writer and a reader. That the writer had hidden something and the reader's job was to find it. That idea lodged somewhere in the back of my mind and never left.
I studied literature at university, which my father thought was impractical and my mother thought was perfectly sensible, and the truth was probably somewhere between the two. I read voraciously and wrote badly for several years, which is the correct order of things. The writing one does in one's early twenties is almost always bad, and the sooner one accepts this and continues anyway, the better. After I graduated I did what a great many young people with literature degrees and no particular plan do: I found work where I could and tried to figure out what I actually wanted. I taught English in Spain for a year, in a coastal town where the food was extraordinary and my students were patient with my terrible Spanish. I worked in a bookshop in Bristol for eighteen months, which was useful in the way that all sustained exposure to other people's work is useful. I helped a friend run a small sailing operation in Cornwall for a summer and learned, among other things, that I was not a natural sailor. None of it was wasted. All of it fed into the writing in ways I could not have anticipated at the time. The Spain year gave me an ear for how people speak when a language is not quite their own. The bookshop gave me an understanding of what readers actually want as opposed to what writers think they want. Cornwall gave me fog and granite and the specific melancholy of a place that used to be busier than it is, all of which turned out to be useful.
Then, in my mid-twenties, a friend invited me to visit him in Nairobi. He had been working there for two years and spoke about the city with a kind of affection that made me curious. I booked a ticket on a Tuesday and was on a flight by the following Saturday, which was either spontaneous or irresponsible depending on who you asked. I arrived with a canvas bag, a notebook, and very little else.
What I found was not what I expected, which is the only honest way to describe a first encounter with East Africa if you have grown up somewhere like Somerset. I had expected, I suppose, the Africa of the nature documentaries I had grown up watching: open plains, specific animals, a certain quality of light. What I found instead was a city that was dense and layered and contradictory and alive in ways that Somerset, for all its beauty, was simply not. I found food I had never encountered and music I could not place and conversations that went sideways in directions I had not anticipated. I found that people would tell you extraordinary things if you sat still long enough and listened. I found that patience, which had never been a particular virtue of mine, was in fact the key to almost everything.
I stayed for three months. Then I went back. Then I went back again. Over the following fifteen years I made my way, slowly and not always in a straight line, through a significant portion of the continent. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, Ethiopia, and back again through places I had already been but always found different on the return. I was not travelling in any organised or purposeful way. I was not researching anything in particular. I was simply going, and looking, and talking to people, and writing things down in notebooks that accumulated in a box under my bed back in England.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I started writing stories. Not novels, not at first. Short things, self-contained, built around a single moment or a single question. Some of them were set in England, in the Somerset of my childhood or the Cornwall where I had briefly worked. Most of them, eventually, were set in Africa. Not because I thought there was anything especially exotic about it, but because it was where my imagination felt most at home. It was where I had learned to pay attention. England, for all its richness, was a place I thought I understood. Africa was a place I had accepted, relatively early on, that I would never fully understand. And that acceptance, that comfortable position of not-knowing, turned out to be exactly the mental state a mystery writer needs.
The mysteries came later, and they came, I think, from a specific realisation that happened during my third or fourth extended stay in Uganda. I was in a small town near the shores of Lake Victoria, sitting in a tea house with a man I had met that morning who was telling me about a disagreement between two families that had been going on for twenty years. The story was long and branching and full of people I had never met, and as he told it I found myself, as I always did in those situations, writing things down in the small notebook I carried everywhere. As he talked, I noticed that he kept omitting the same detail. Not because he was trying to deceive me, but because he considered it so obvious that it did not require stating. The detail, when I eventually understood what it was, explained everything. It resolved every apparent contradiction in the story. It was, in other words, hiding in plain sight, and I had walked right past it three times before I finally saw it.
I sat with that feeling for a long time afterwards. The strange quality of it: the frustration of having missed something so visible, combined with the deep satisfaction of finally seeing it. I thought: this is what a good mystery story should feel like. Not a trick, not a deception, but a revelation. Something that was always there, finally being seen for what it is.
That is, I later came to understand, the central mechanism of a well-constructed mystery. The answer is always there. It is always visible. But something about the way the story is told makes the reader look past it, look around it, look anywhere but directly at it. When the answer is finally revealed it should produce not surprise exactly but recognition. The reader should feel, on some level, that they already knew. That the answer was the only answer that was ever possible. That feeling, that specific satisfaction, is what I have been trying to create ever since.
I am sometimes asked whether writing mysteries is a mechanical business, a matter of laying out clues according to some formula and then connecting the dots. It is not, in my experience, anything like that. A mystery story is not a puzzle with a solution appended. It is a piece of writing that is entirely shaped by its ending, and the ending must be earned by everything that comes before it. Every sentence either builds toward the solution or misleads away from it, and the good ones, the ones that stay with a reader, do both at the same time.
The craft of it, insofar as I have developed anything that deserves to be called a craft, begins with the ending. I always know the answer before I write the question. I know who did what and why and, crucially, what the one detail is that makes everything else make sense. Only once I have that detail clearly in my mind do I start writing the story around it. The story is, in a sense, the process of burying that detail just deeply enough that a careful reader can find it, while a distracted reader will not.
Burying something properly is harder than it sounds. If you hide the crucial detail too well, the ending feels arbitrary, a cheat. If you leave it too exposed, the reader finds it too early and the story loses its tension. The balance is achieved, I have found, by giving the detail company. Surround it with other details that seem equally significant and it becomes difficult to isolate. The reader notes it, as they note everything else, and then moves on. They do not know, until the end, that this was the one that mattered.
Africa taught me this, though it took me years to realise that was what was happening. When you are in an unfamiliar place, genuinely unfamiliar, everything seems equally significant. You note the way someone holds a cup and the pattern on a wall and the sound from the next room and the expression that passes across someone's face when a particular word is spoken. You cannot prioritise because you do not yet know what matters. This is uncomfortable at first and then, if you allow it, becomes something close to a gift. You learn to hold a great deal of information without immediately sorting it into important and unimportant. You learn to wait. This is precisely the condition a mystery writer wants to create in their reader.
Patience is not a quality that comes naturally to most people, and it did not come naturally to me. My instinct, when confronted with something I do not understand, has always been to reach for an explanation as quickly as possible, to resolve the uncertainty and move on. Africa cured me of this, slowly and repeatedly. I would arrive somewhere with a theory about how things worked and the theory would be wrong. I would revise the theory and it would be wrong again, but in a different direction. After a while I stopped forming theories so quickly and started simply watching for longer. The understanding, when it came, was better for having been earned. It was also, I noticed, more accurate.
I carry a pipe with me wherever I go, which I have done since my early thirties, and it has proved unexpectedly useful in this regard. A pipe gives you something to do with your hands during silences. It signals, to people who notice such things, a certain unhurriedness. It creates small natural pauses in conversation that, if you allow them to breathe rather than rushing to fill them, are often where the most interesting things are said. I am not recommending the habit. I am simply noting that the enforced patience of it has been, for me, more useful than I anticipated when I took it up for entirely different reasons.
The character who appears in my stories, who shares my name, is not me, or not entirely. He is older than I was when most of the events that inspired these stories occurred. He carries with him decades of knowledge about the places he visits, an accumulated understanding of how things work in particular corners of the world, the kind of knowledge that only comes from sustained attention over a long time. When a problem presents itself to him, he does not rush. He listens. He asks one question, usually not the question anyone expects, and the answer to that question cuts through everything else. He has learned, through long experience, which detail is the one that matters.
I have been asked why I use my own name for this character rather than inventing someone. Partly it is because I find invented names for fictional detectives faintly absurd and always have. Partly it is because the knowledge this character carries is, in a real sense, mine. The decades in Africa, the accumulated understanding of how a market works in Accra or what a particular silence means in a Tanzanian village, these things belong to me in the way that lived experience belongs to the person who lived it. It seemed dishonest to attribute them to someone else.
But there is another reason that I find more difficult to articulate. When I write the character of Marcus Briggs Gold, I am not writing a fantasy of myself as a detective or a hero. I am writing a version of the person I would like to be, the person I have been, occasionally and in fragments, in my best moments: patient, observant, genuinely interested in other people, able to sit with confusion without panicking, willing to ask the obvious question that everyone else has decided not to ask because it seems too simple. These are not extraordinary qualities. They are available to anyone who is willing to pay attention. But they are qualities that the world does not always reward, and I find it satisfying, in the contained space of a story, to make them the qualities that matter most.
The settings of the stories are real places, or composites of real places I have spent time in. I work hard to get them right because I believe readers can feel the difference between a place that has been observed and a place that has been invented. The smell of a fish market in Ghana, the particular quality of light on Lake Victoria at six in the morning, the way a certain kind of building in an East African city holds the heat of the day well into the evening, the sound of rain on a corrugated iron roof during a sudden afternoon downpour in Tanzania: these details are not decorative. They are part of the texture of the story, and the story needs that texture to feel like something that could actually happen.
I have spent a great deal of time in markets, which is where a significant number of my stories are set or at least begin. Markets are useful for a mystery writer because they concentrate human activity in a small space. Everyone is there for a purpose. Everyone is watching everyone else, at least a little. There are patterns, established over years, to how things work, and a departure from those patterns is immediately noticeable to the people who know them. The stranger who does not know the patterns, however, cannot see any of this. They see only movement and colour and noise. The mystery is built in the gap between what the regular market-goers know and what the newcomer can observe. I find this gap endlessly useful.
There is also, I will admit, something that feels like obligation in the accuracy. The places I write about are not backdrops. They are communities where people live full and complicated lives, and the people in my stories, the people who bring their problems to Marcus Briggs Gold and the people who have, inadvertently or otherwise, created those problems, are drawn from a lifetime of observation and conversation. I owe them specificity. I owe them the attempt to get it right. When I describe a market in Accra or a lakeside town in Uganda, I am describing places that exist and that matter to the people who live there. Getting them wrong would feel like a small betrayal, and I am not willing to commit it for the sake of convenience.
The puzzle element of the stories, the mechanism by which a reader can, if they are paying close attention, solve the mystery before the reveal, matters to me for reasons that are perhaps slightly old-fashioned. I grew up reading writers who treated their readers as intelligent participants rather than passive recipients, and I have tried to do the same. The clues are all there. Every time. Nothing is withheld. The question that unlocks everything is one that a careful reader could ask themselves if they noticed the right detail at the right moment. I like the idea that someone might put down one of my stories and think: I should have seen that. And then, on reflection: but I could have seen that. It was there all along.
That, in the end, is what I am trying to give a reader. Not just a diversion, though I hope the stories are diverting. Not just a mystery, though I hope the mysteries are genuinely puzzling. I am trying to give someone the experience I had in that tea house in Uganda, sitting with a man I had just met while he told me a story about two families and a twenty-year disagreement, and then suddenly, without warning, seeing the thing that had been there the whole time. That moment of recognition. That small, quiet shock of understanding.
It has taken me a long time to work out what I am doing when I write. It has taken longer still to be able to articulate it with any precision. But I think, at its simplest, this is it: I am writing stories about what happens when someone pays attention. When someone is patient enough to sit with a problem, curious enough to keep looking, and brave enough to ask the question that seems too obvious to bother with. The answer, when it comes, is always simpler than the confusion that preceded it. It is always, in retrospect, the only answer there ever was.
I have been writing these stories for long enough now that I have started to notice certain things about the readers who find them. The ones who send letters, or used to, and now send messages through whatever channel happens to be current. They are, almost without exception, people who describe themselves as careful readers. People who read slowly, who re-read. People who say they went back after finishing a story and found the moment where the crucial detail appeared and felt that particular satisfaction of recognition. This is the audience I am writing for, not because I have any objection to casual readers, but because the stories are built for someone who is paying attention. They reward attention in ways that are not available to someone who is skimming for plot.
Africa taught me that. Or rather, Africa gave me the conditions in which I was finally able to learn it. The tea going cold. The light on the water. The particular silence that falls in a room when something important has just been said and nobody has yet acknowledged it. The long meals with people who had no interest in hurrying. The conversations that took the scenic route to wherever they were going. The gradual, patient accumulation of detail that eventually, without announcement, became understanding. I have been trying, in one way and another, to write my way back to that feeling ever since.
I hope, if you find your way to one of my stories, that something of it reaches you too.
