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This page updated: 01-Aug-2007 10:40 PM

 

The Mankiller of Poojegai and other stories

Stories ranging from 19th century Italy to modern Africa.

Crippen & Landru, August 2007

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THE GOLD OF MAYANI

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Foreword by Sarah Caudwell

The usual address is Poste Restante though seldom for long in the same city or continent. Noting the latest change in overworked address-books, friends of Walter Satterthwait somehow tend to think of him as a man not merely on the move but on the run, keeping, only by constant vigilance and amazing agility, one step ahead of pursuit. By whom or what -- disappointed creditors? chagrined lovers? or merely hostile weather conditions? -- we are never entirely sure; but we imagine him always as departing suddenly from places, in the early hours of the morning, without luggage save for his faithful word-processor.

His work as a writer shows also a certain fugacity, a certain evasiveness in the face of such questions as "Who are you? Where do you live? What exactly do you do?" He arrived on the crime scene in the guise of a tough, wise-cracking private-eye writer, subtler and funnier than most of Chandler's progeny, but recognizably one of them. It was easy to assume at that stage that he bore a close resemblance to his hero, Joshua Croft, a young man of a literary turn living in Santa Fe. We have seen since then, however, that this is merely one of several disguises which he may adopt to foil his pursuers and enable the real Satterthwait to make a quick getaway. In MISS LIZZIE he was found writing as an elderly woman, recalling a period of lonely adolescence on the coast of New England; in WILDE WEST he successfully alternated the roles of sophisticated English aesthete and tough but naive American policeman.

Sometime in the 1980's he took flight (or possibly, after all, merely a flight) for East Africa, which is the background for the stories in this collection. They are all set in an unnamed township beside the Indian Ocean, some hundreds of miles from Nairobi, and told, though not in the first person, from the point of view of a Kenyan police sergeant. It is notable that Sergeant M'butu, though a native of Kenya, is in some sense an outsider, working in an alien environment - - not a Kikuyu, like most of his colleagues in the police force, but a member of the minority Giriama tribe.

In construction these stories follow the classic pattern: the mysterious death, here often, though not always, of a visiting European or American; the investigation, in which Sergeant M'butu, assisted by the film-struck Constable Kobari, questions a variety of suspects; the surprise denouement in which the truth is revealed. But these are more than deftly plotted whodunits, though indeed they are that. They are the framework within which the author expresses his sense of Africa -- its harshness and its warmth, its poverty and its magic, its bewildering mixture of tribes and races, the comedy and sadness of its relationship with "western" civilization, as it moves from the colonial past to the tourist paradise present.

Those who purchase a volume of short stories sometimes do so with a certain misgiving, fearing that they may have misspent their money on a mere rag-bag of leftovers, of ideas and characters too flimsy and insubstantial to be worked up into a full-length novel, connected only by the author's desire to raise an extra cent or two on work turned out hastily over the years to meet unexpected bills. In the present case such fears are without foundation. With an underlying unity of theme, as well as of setting and character, these stories illuminate and enhance one another in a way which makes the collection as a whole something far more satisfying that the sum of its parts.

They also represent, it seems to me, some of Satterthwait's best writing. Characteristically, he is at his most poised and confident when he takes on the persona of an African policeman and the address is Poste Restante, Nairobi.

Sarah Caudwell

How to get a copy of THE GOLD OF MAYANI

THE GOLD OF MAYANI can be ordered from Buffalo Medicine Books
Box 1762
Gallop, NM 87305
Call 1-505-722-2904 for more details.