Richard Crompton: 'Kenyans tell me, this is the story of our city' The Honey Guide, Richard Crompton's first novel, was languishing, half-finished, in a drawer a few years ago. Crompton, who was born in Manchester and is 39 years old, had "forgotten about it," he tells me, until he entered The Telegraph's ghost story competition in late 2010, which he won for Friends, a short story inspired by Facebook. When a literary agent got in touch to ask if he had anything else, he dug out the draft of The Honey Guide, a manuscript he'd written about tribalism and politics in Nairobi. The book was published in February this year. The novel wraps Nairobi's 2007 election and the subsequent violence around a gripping crime plot. At its core is our guide to the divided city that is Kenya's capital- Maasai police detective and struggling father Mollel, who is determined to unearth the truthbehind the country's corrupt elite. As a tribesman who has lost contact with his family after moving to the city, Mollel is an unlikely hero. "I really didn't want to write a novel about a white saviour flying into Nairobi and putting everything right," Crompton explains. He has lived in the city since 2006, alongside the tribes whose political differences sparked violence which left more than 1,000 dead. "Nairobi is an incredibly diverse city," Crompton says. The individual tribes sit sometimes comfortably and sometimes rather uncomfortably against each other, and sometimes stereotypes linger. These stereotypes are built into the novel, usually in quick-fire dialogue, to show the boiling melting pot of Nairobi. It was an ambitious subject for a debut novel, especially for a writer who, like his hero, was a newcomer to the city. But The Honey Guide has become hit: the president of the Kenyan PEN Khainga O'Okwemba called it, "the story of contemporary Kenya." It's flattering praise. "Kenyan writers have told me, "before I read this book I felt cross that a Mzungu (Swahili for white man) had written it, and when I read it I felt guilty that a Kenyan had not." There is, Crompton says, "a huge pool of untapped talent" in Kenya, but "a lack of awareness that people can express themselves in literature," unlike in Nigeria or Ghana, where writers are regularly winning prizes. Thankfully, Crompton says, the publisher Storymoja and its connection with Hay Festival Nairobi "is lighting a fire behind that ambition," as Crompton puts it, to help make it a "nation of readers and writers." The author will be holding workshops and talks at the festival. In the meantime, however, Crompton is making a return to ghost stories. Having finished a draft of The Honey Guide's sequel, Hell's Gate, which is due for publication in Febuary 2014, he is compiling a ghost story anthology. "I'm trying to pull together 20 ideas, and if the publishers don't want them, I'll put them out on Kindle," he says and continues: "It's a genre that's looked down on, as is crime fiction, but you can't argue with the great British public."