Right away, let me say that I believe The Whitewashed Tombs, the latest in the Emma Djan series of detective novels, is one of his best so far.

The character of Emma, although developed already in three other books, comes alive in these pages and comes into her own. She is smart, intuitive, and sensitive, but also relentless to the point of recklessness in her pursuit of a lead. One feels a pride of accomplishment riding above her natural sense of justice, and that makes her human.

The plot was well crafted, set against but not relying on the backdrop of a real and topical problem in Ghana and other countries in Africa. And this is where Kwei Quartey both succeeds and fails in my view.

I had been prepared not to like the book because of the media hype created around it. It was promoted by Quartey himself and his publishers as a piece of “literary activism.” Already this epithet diminishes the book in my eyes.

A work of fiction, a work of art, is not didactic. It is not a schoolmaster’s cane or whip with which we hapless readers are to be instructed in “right thinking”. I object to writers who wish to teach us something. If it is good and well written, we will learn without being leaned on heavily by the author.

The Whitewashed Tombs does not do this, and I was happily surprised and pleased by that. It is first and foremost a fiction: a good story expertly told. The fact that it causes us to think about the real-life issues around it is exactly what art is meant to do. As a professor of mine, Dr. Pelen used to say: “The Odyssey is not a book on how to build a boat.”

In real life, the proposed “Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values” law is an abomination against any kind of human decency. I am aware of it because of Kwei Quartey’s book, but I wish his promotional team had not linked them together.

Trust the reader to draw these conclusions.