When I was growing up in Ghana, books of all kind were abundant at home. My parents were university lecturers who had large collections of fiction and non-fiction. I was a bookworm. I spent long Saturday hours browsing the university bookshop and expanding my own book collection. Life on the campus was culturally diverse and in many ways idyllic.
My African-American mother and Ghanaian father both did their own writing. It was primarily academic. My own love was fiction. And it was a true love. I devoured novels, sometimes two in a day if they were an easy read. I wanted to be a writer long before my ambition turned to my current profession of medicine. When I was about eight years old, I wrote three short novels that I bound with staples and illustrated cardboard covers. The first of these novels was modeled on Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Another was about a troupe of five children who made it their business to solve pesky local crimes. Then came the adventures of Eddie Rheingold, a wisecracking private detective, disliked equally by the police and criminals he was constantly outwitting. My childhood attraction to detective stories and thrillers persists to this day. I loved reading Conan Doyle, but I read others including Henry James, Joyce Cary, Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, John le Carré, James Thurber, and Chinua Achebe.
As I matured, my writing had to be put on hold during medical school and residency, but once those years were over I renewed my interest and started writing again. Culminating my lifelong interest in detective stories, my first full-length novel, Wife of the Gods, draws on both my medical training and my memories of Ghanaian folklore. It tells the story of a rural murder investigation that ultimately turns into a clash of cultures.
Although novels are what I like to write most, I have also written two feature length screenplays, one of which placed as a finalist at the 2002 Moondance Film Festival in Boulder, Colarado. I currently live in Pasadena, California where I write early in the morning before going to work at the clinic. And yes, I am already working on my next novel.
