As an author aficionado of old-school noir — think Hammett, Chandler, Thompson — I’m always on the lookout for the next thing in the genre. While the wave of superb Scandinavian crime has been the buzz in popular fiction for a good while and Korean noir is beginning to bubble to the surface, few have noticed the gritty, blade-on-your-throat fiction emerging from Nigeria.
These novels have that pulse and energy you get from the golden age of crime fiction — simultaneously playing with genre tropes, while subverting them, and bending the craft to suit the peculiarities of modern Nigeria. Reading these books, you get a sense of what Naija crime fiction used to be and what it’s going to become.
Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle
The title of this debut novel comes from the song by music legend Fatai Rolling Dollar, who died in 2013. In the novel set in streets of Lagos, Guy Collins, a British hack, finds the mutilated body of a murdered prostitute and is picked up as a suspect. He falls in with Amaka, the guardian angel of the working girls in the city, but gets caught between corrupt cops and sinister politicians. Electrifying and fast-paced, this book isn’t for the squeamish. The French translation Lagos Lady won the 2016 Prix Marianne award.
White lies tend to have extreme consequences in Naija noir — the body count in this story makes Tarantino seem like a choir boy.
Making Wolf by Tade Thompson
The thrust of the novel, originally marketed as sci-fi, leans so heavily on crime that it joins a host of quality science fiction detective novels like China Miéville’s The City & The City or Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon. In the novel, Weston Kogi is a security guard in London, but he tells people at home he’s a detective with Scotland Yard. White lies tend to have extreme consequences in Naija noir — the body count in this story makes Tarantino seem like a choir boy. Making Wolf picked up the Golden Tentacle for a Debut Novel at the 2015 Kitschies.
Carnivorous City by Toni Kan
If you like literary crime and mindfucks, you’ll appreciate this love letter to Lagos — a city more likely to head-butt than to kiss you. Author Toni Kan is widely known by his moniker “The Mayor of Lagos” in Nigerian literary circles and cut his teeth as a poet, magazine editor and literary novelist before a midcareer foray into crime. The book is about Abel Dike, a small-town teacher with a suitably boring life in the countryside — until he gets called to the city to look for his missing younger brother, Soni, a criminal who’s done some crazy shit. Running parallel to the missing person investigation, there’s also an investigation into the soul of Lagos itself.
I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Lost your life savings to a Nigerian prince who was gonna give you millions? Welcome to the world of the 419ers. Kingsley, our hero, has an engineering degree and no job to show for it. Until the larger-than-life Cash Daddy recruits him to the Yahoo Boys, where Kingsley proves to be a poet among email scammers. In the classic noir sense of the villains-as-heroes, you will fall in love with this expansive cast of characters, even as they siphon bank accounts. This intelligent, ROFL funny novel with big heart won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Africa). Nwaubani, a journalist by profession, had firsthand access to 419ers while researching the novel, giving it that truly authentic feel.
Satans and Shaitans by Obinna Udenwe
Maybe Nietzsche was right and God is dead, but the devil is alive and well in this debut novel. The youngest writer on this list, Udenwe established a reputation in Nigeria for writing short fiction and has never been shy of breaking taboos, especially with his novella “Holy Sex,” which created a lot of discussion in the African literary readership. Faith and vice are a recurring theme for Udenwe, and in his novel, Chief Donald Amechi and world-acclaimed televangelist Chris Chuba, both members of the Sacred Order of the Universal Forces, have a plan for nationwide domination that would put the Illuminati to shame. Suicide bombings, politics, extortion, religion — whatever it takes to get the job done. But being bad is complicated when you have children, so when Chuba’s daughter, Adeline, is murdered, well … If you love conspiracy theories or the occult, this novel will cater to your dark, lurid tastes.
