Papua New Guinea, or simply PNG, sandwiched between Indonesia and Australia. A confection of over 800 languages and dialects. The capital, Port Moresby (Pom City) is generally regarded as a tough town, a hardship posting for diplomats and foreign correspondents, a potentially dangerous place for business executives.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with the underbelly of Port Moresby and PNG then perhaps take a look at Stephen Dupont’s photo-journalism book Raskols: The Gangs of Papua New Guinea (2012), a series of incredible black-and-white portraits of PNG’s gangsters, brigands, thieves, and carjackers posing with their arsenal of homemade guns and knives. The book’s introduction says it all:
“Papua New Guinea’s capital, Port Moresby, is regularly ranked among the world’s five worst cities to live in by The Economist magazine. In 2004, when the photographs in Raskols were taken, the same survey ranked Port Moresby the worst city in the world. This fenced-up, razor-wired, lawless metropolis is infamous for its criminal gangs known as raskols (the indigenous Tok Pisin word for criminals). Throughout Port Moresby, dense urban settlements and a general lack of law and order have led to intertribal warfare and a seemingly endless stream of kidnappings, gang rape, carjackings, and vicious murders. That’s all in addition to soaring HIV rates and massive unemployment.”
In novel form Wiri Yakipoko’s The Dark Side of Port Moresby (2002) follows cousins Jules and Suglare, young men with very different lives. One a talented musician destined for study at the conservatory of music in London, and the other is a “raskol” (rascal), living in the Port Moresby underworld. Yet both are caught up in the corruption that has long enveloped PNG.
Contemporary issues in PNG and Port Moresby run through Keith Dahlberg’s The Samana Incident (2010). Keith Dahlberg, an American missionary doctor, worked as a temporary supply doctor in the East Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Lieutenant Jason Kerro is an honest cop in a corrupt system, trying to stop a gang of gunrunners and meth dealers from taking control of tribes in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. When his captain forbids him to investigate an armed attack on the town of Samana, he suspects the captain is among those taking payoff s from the smugglers.
In Keith Dahlberg’s South Sea Gold (2013) Tom Akani, reporter for the Port Moresby Journal, has his eyes opened to corruption when mining interests strongly oppose his feature stories about conditions at the Owego gold mine. Anonymous agents hire a gang to threaten his life, his family, and the newspaper. And so Police Inspector Jason Kerro returns sensing a connection between attacks on the newspaper and the disappearance of vast amounts of government money intended for PNG’s hospitals and schools. His investigation reveals a plot against the national government itself.
Something a bit different is San Franciscan tuned Amsterdammer Jennifer S Alderson Rituals of the Dead. Flicking back and forth between the 1960s and 2017 and between Amsterdam and PNG, museum curator Zelda Richardson is setting up a forthcoming exhibition in 2017 in Holland of Bis Poles (carvings that have been made on Papua New Guinea for generations by the Asmat people). In a packing case from PNG she discovers a notebook that goes back to the early 1960s, back to the last days of Dutch colonial rule. It belongs to a foreign collector, then exploring Dutch New Guinea, who disappeared. Then Janna, the museum’s photographer, is murdered. Could the two cases be linked across half a century and two continents divided by nearly 9,000 miles. Rituals of the Dead (2018) is the second book in the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series. Other books in the series finds Zelda on the trail of Nazi looted art from World War Two, trying to solve an art heist in Amsterdam by Croatian gangsters, and tracking down a lost Vermeer.
Let’s jump back a bit to remember a book, now mostly forgotten, that was once on everyone’s TBR list – Charlotte Jay’s (a pseudonym of Geraldine Halls) 1952 Edgar award winning Beat Not The Bones. And not just any Edgar award, but the inaugural Edgar award for best novel! Chandler’s The Long Goodbye won the second Edgar ever awarded if you want a measure for Beat Not the Bones). A woman arrives in New Guinea from Australia, determined to find out what really happened to her husband, the Chief Anthropologist in the colonial administration alleged to have committed suicide. It’s long been considered an Australian crime classic largely for its descriptions of New Guinea in the immediate post war period as well as being an ’early, a-typical example of an anti-colonial novel (and even likened to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness).
Halls/Jay (1919-1996) was a prolific Brisbane-based mystery writer in the post-war era. American reviewers compared her to Eric Ambler, Josephine Tey and Graham Greene. Several of her novels were adapted for TV and she won awards in the UK and US too. from 1949 to 1950 she was a court stenographer in Port Moresby, hence her really great descriptions of the country at the time. Other novels by Halls/Jay take place in Swinging 60s London, Thailand and Australia. It’s a real shame she’s not better remembered and republished these days.
Bang up to date Christina Larmer was born in PNG and now writes both cozy crime and stand-alone adult novels and now lives in Australia. In her novel An Island Lost (2012) we journey from Manhattan to Papua New Guinea as a woman moves from a crowded NY café to exploring a remote island hideaway in PNG to look for her vanished father – did he elope with the maid, fall foul to a tragic accident? Or was he murdered (and if so, why?). Along the way there’s tribal chiefs, eccentric expatriates and an elusive witchdoctor.
Contemporary Port Moresby appears in Philip Fitzpatrick’s Inspector Metau (2013). It’s a series Including The Case of the Missing Professor, The Case of the Good Politician, The Case of the Angry Councillor, The Case of the Great Pumpkin Heist. The books all provide a marvellous array of insights into PNG and Port Moresby life. This is helped by Fitzpatrick having been a Kiap (Patrol Officer) in Papua New Guinea between 1967 and 1973. And, in the 1990s, he worked as an independent consultant in PNG carrying out over heritage surveys across the country.
And finally, Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile, first published in 1970, a novel set in Papua in the 1940s. Hoiri Sevese knows he must avenge himself on the sorcerers who have caused his wife to be eaten by a crocodile. He must also come to terms with colonial rule, with himself and with the crocodile. A very different kind of novel but enlightening on the rather opaque society and government of PNG.
