A mystery set in the capital of Mali

White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume, hard-boiled, noir mystery, is interesting on several levels: It is set in Mali, about which I suspect few American reader know much; I certainly don't. Its narrator is Souleymane Camara, called Solo, a half-African/half-French ex-cop

private detective. In France, he was regarded as black; in Mali, he's regarded as white. Solo is the quixotic figure: a (mostly) just man seeking justice in a corrupt world.

The book begins stereotypically with a beautiful dame, a French lawyer, showing up in Solo's office with a problem she wants him to solve. Her younger sister has been arrested as a drug mule. Solo needs to get her out of prison. No problem—or no big problem. Solo knows who to bribe and the sister is released.

Then the sister's mutilated body is pulled out of the river, and shortly after two exceptionally brutal thugs chop off the hand of Solo's elderly gardinier, which is what "Bamako residents call someone who tends the grounds and garden." They do it to warn off Solo, the old man dies, and, needless to say, Solo is not warned off. By the book's end, Solo has found himself involved in an international drug trafficking ring, a gay Ukrainian crook who's not what he seems, an upcountry gold mine, a shore-side standoff between the military and himself, and more.

White Leopard, translated gracefully from the French by Sophie Weiner, is Guillaume's first book to be published in English. He is apparently writing from the inside. A former police officer, he worked on anti-gang, narcotics, and financial crimes. He also served on a number of international cooperation missions, including one as a police adviser in Mali, particularly for issues related to drug trafficking. He has six thrillers published in France (French readers: take note).

I said above I know nothing about Mali, but now I know something: "Mali was once the French Sudan, and even though it has been an independent nation for a half century, vestiges of French rule still remain." A painless way to assimilate geopolitical information. And while Mali may be a third world country, technology thrives: "It took me a good ten minutes to find Ronny's magnetic GPS tracker underneath the engine block [of my Land Cruiser]. I pulled it off and examined the casing. It had a cable with a male USB  port. I hooked it up to my computer and quickly figured out how to download the correct application. Fifteen minutes later, the GPS's location showed up on Google Earth. Satisfied, I charged the battery before going to bed."

While White Leopard contains some grisly violence, I never felt the bloodshed was gratuitous or overdone. Solo operates in a violent and corrupt milieu. Readers who would enjoy a safe visit to that world as they watch Solo untangle the mystery surrounding the sister's death will enjoy White Leopard.

Here I am, the interviewer as interviewee

Nancy Christie, fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, is a full-time professional writer, whose passion is for fiction. In addition to her two e-books, Annabelle and Alice in Wonderland, her short stories can be found in literary publications such as Hypertext, Full of Crow, Fiction365, Red Fez, Wanderings, The Chaffin Journal and Xtreme. In addition, she maintains an interesting blog: "One one One: Insights into the Writer's Life" where she interviews writers in unusual depth. Recently, she interviewed me.

Because Christie herself is a writer, she asks interesting questions about a writer's background, writing experience, writing process and more. The interviews are long, so long she posts them in two parts. But because they are so long and because interviewees are free to respond at length they are unusually insightful. I found the experience of answering her questions both challenging and stimulating.

For example, she asks, "What does the act of writing bring into your life? Why do you want to write?" I was tempted to give the answer Victoria Page gives to a similar question in the movie The Red Shoes: "Why do you want to live?" But that begs the question.

More good questions that made me think: "What stimulates your creativity or serves as a writing inspiration? . . . What part of the writing process do you enjoy the most? The least? . . . What is the message of your book? What do you want readers to come away with after they read your book? . . . Who has inspired you — either at a personal level or as a writer?"

These are not easy questions, and I'm glad I didn't have to answer them off the top of my head but had a chance to think about them and write answers. That might mean the interview lost a certain spontaneity, but surely gained some depth. All in all, I found it a thought-provoking experience.

In "Birds of America" the language soars

Now that I've read (and written about) Stanley Fish on sentences, I've been thinking about my sentences and have become sensitive to other writers' sentences. Fish talks about the

importance of first sentences, and I've just finished reading a short story collection that is a model of how to write a first sentence that pulls the reader into the story.

—In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.

—It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines.

—I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.

—When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one.

—Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one.

Five first sentences from the first five stories in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. All different, all engaging. Indeed, I imagine that one of the challenges of writing so well at the sentence level is that readers will pay more attention to the writing than to the story. It may be a problem for Moore because more than once I was stopped by an absolutely lovely sentence, a perfect metaphor and briefly pulled out of the story.

But for Moore, I'll let it pass. It's a little like complaining that the meal was so delicious I couldn't eat.

While there are certain repeating themes in these dozen stories—people who are lost, couples who find it hard to live together, families in crisis—there is also lightness and humor. A woman who mourns the death of her cat goes through the five stages of grief: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage. And while I responded more to some stories than others, that I think is the nature of a story collection and another reader will find a story that did not engage me to be the best in the book.

I tell aspiring writers to read the best stuff they can get their hands on. One cannot do better than study Birds of America for its range, for its language, for its structures.

What's inside the blackman's coffin?

Faithful readers of this blog—both of you—know that I respond positively to mysteries that are (a) plausible, (b) have interesting characters, and (c) are set in recognizable locales. Blackman's Coffin by Mark de Castrique meets all three criterion.

You'll have to take my word for it that the mystery is plausible because to discuss the plot in any detail would be to give too much away.

The main character, however, is both original and sympathetic. Sam Blackburn, a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army's Criminal Investigation Detachment, has his leg blown off in Iraq and is recovering in a North Carolina V.A. Hospital. Tikima Robertson, a former Marine, visits him in Chapter 1 and offers to help him find a place to live in Asheville and a job with her employer Armitage Security Services. Surprisingly (to Sam) she never returns.

When Sam is out of the hospital, he tries to connect with Tikima at Armitage. She was murdered the morning she'd visited Sam. It's now three weeks later, the police have no suspects, and it's becoming a cold case. After a memorial service for Tikima, Sam receives a phone call from an agitated Nakayla Robertson, Tikima's younger sister. Someone has broken into Tikima's apartment during the service but appeared to take nothing. On the other hand, the burglar may not have recognized the significance of something Tikima had left on a table.

Before Blackman's Coffin ends, the reader has learned something about Thomas "Look Homeward Angel" Wolfe and the brother who stayed behind in Asheville, the Biltmore estate (with the biggest private home in the United States), and North Carolina geology. Because de Castrique grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina he knows the landscape and perhaps because this is his fifth mystery he knows how to sketch a character and evoke a scene.

Blackman's Coffin is interesting for the exchange between Sam, the white, one-legged, former Army detective, and Nakayla, the black insurance investigator. de Castrique also manages to write convincingly what seems to be a 60-year-old journal, an early, unpublished work by Thomas Wolfe. The journal says more than appears on the surface and while Sam may have an artificial leg, the IED in Iraq did not destroy his sharp-wittedness.

Who do you trust to critique your writing?

It seems to be two problems with the comments you receive about your writing: One is to not take it seriously, to, for example, attribute maliciousness or ignorance to person giving the critique. The other problem is to accept the comments wholeheartedly, to assume the reader knows better than you.

The Writer's Circle has an excellent piece on taking feedback on your writing and when to trust it. It is short, to the point, and available at:

http://writerscircle.com/how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=100115&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too&origin=twc_twcfan_social_fb_link_how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too_100115