Playwright Victoria Kneubuhl departs from her usual theatre track to write a mystery novel. - Photo: Courtesy of University of Hawai'i Press

Romancing the past

Murder Casts a Shadow
By Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Review by Liza Simon / Ka Wai Ola

Noted playwright Victoria Kneubuhl claims ancestry from both Sāmoa and Hawai'i and spent time growing up in both groups of Pacific islands. An unusual life? Well, yes. And it's no surprise that her budding literary imagination was galvanized at an early age by Robert Louis Stevenson, who also made his home in both Sāmoa and Hawai'i, letting the natural beauty and ancient culture of both places shine through many of his fiction masterpieces.

At an early age, Kneubuhl visited the well-preserved 19th century Stevenson residence outside the Sāmoan capital of Apia. It impressed her – not so much for its vintage charm, but because she felt it was very much alive with mana. This may have been one of the seminal experiences that shaped Kneubuhl's impressive gift for resurrecting long-gone epochs along with their dearly departed denizens.

The combination of Kneubuhl's passion for the past and her bonds to Polynesian tradition ground her art in a poignant tug between the echoes of old souls and voices that call for future transformation. Translation: When you go to a Kneubuhl play, prepare for some serious chicken-skin moments.

In a change of pace, however, she's written something just for fun. Her new novel, Murder Casts a Shadow, unfolds in between the World Wars, in a bygone Honolulu bounded by theatres and museums and plenty of mixed-plate Hawai'i special effects. The plot doubles as a classic whodunit game, which you can play alongside her characters as they try to figure out who is real and who is real trouble. It is escapist lore, yet the fact that the plot moves so deftly through a quest and a revelation of a secret is a credit to Kneubuhl's pure joy in the art of using the writer's imagination to accomplish what nothing can – the creation of a living window on the past, much more vital than a one-dimensional timepiece.