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SHELF LIFE
Of Thrills To Come
Indian authors could be more popular with detective series, says Pradeep Sebastian
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
01 Aug 2009
On the ‘New Arrivals’ shelf of the bookstore I am browsing, there are two thrillers set in India: North From Calcutta and The Case Of The Missing Servant. The first is a Pakistani espionage thriller, the second a detective novel set in Delhi. Curious, I look at the authors: Duane Evans and Tarquin Hall. I am not too surprised, but I am disappointed. It’s not about the books — both feel promising — but more about the writers (once again) not being South Asian. Indian genre fiction, as we all know, is a rare sight on our shelves. And the few that turn up occasionally, except for the odd Sacred Games every now and then, are penned by Westerners. Why, it’s almost a tradition!
And not just in India. Look at The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency — a Britisher writing Botswana thrillers. (Zac O’Yeah, the marvelous Swedish writer who lives in Bangalore, is the only one I know who reversed this pattern by setting a thriller — Tandooriälgen (The Tandoori Moose) in Stockholm with the South Asian immigrant community as the plot’s backdrop). With us, the tradition began, I suppose, in 1964 with H.R.F. Keating and his Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police. Keating wrote the first set of books without ever having visited India. Thanks later to Ismail Merchant we got our first detective movie (otherwise a non existent movie genre in India) when he adapted it for the screen with Naseerudin Shah in The Perfect Murder.
The thing is, for the next five decades, no Indian writer took a cue from Keating to begin another new detective series. (In English, that is — because there was plenty of good pulp fiction in all the other Indian languages as the recently translated into English collection The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction nicely demonstrates).
As readers and writers we were mostly then caught up in serious literature — prize winning fiction — to bother with thrillers and science fiction and mystery. We were well fed on a diet of American pulp. The Indian genre fiction we left to foreigners. I remember sometime in the 1990s being hungry for Indian pulp, and discovering The Ganja Coast. It was by an American called Paul Mann.
The lending library I patronised had a copy. It featured a detective who was half Indian, half British and was set in Goa. It was exotic as a holiday. The author had written more than one thriller featuring Inspector Sansi. I asked friends if they had read him, but no one knew these books. The first one in the series, Season Of The Monsoon was a mystery set in Bollywood. And then, for nearly 10 years or so there wasn’t anything: I looked for more pulp set in India or South Asia but couldn’t turn up anything. Again, no writer — Indian or foreign — seemed interested in plotting a desi thriller. A sole thriller came along with rave international reviews and I was grateful for it, greedily gulping it. Bombay Ice by Leslie Forbes.
Invariably, even my friends who usually checked out all the new Indian fiction, ignored genre stuff unless it had been shortlisted for the Booker. This happened with The Last Kashmiri Rose, another set of highly acclaimed detective series set during the British Raj by Barbara Cleverly that no one I knew seemed to be reading. About three years ago I stumbled on a science fiction thriller set in India that was — and is — a masterpiece: River Of Gods by Ian McDonald. It’s a shame how this book was overlooked by critics and readers in India. If you find a copy of it somewhere, I urge you to read it: it is the easily the most imaginative thriller set in India. McDonald has just published a sequel, Cyberabad Days, also worth grabbing.
It’s a fair conclusion to say that the Indian thriller in the hands of a Western writer is well cared for. In fact, they do a bang up job of it as Tarquin Hall’s The Case Of The Missing Servant shows us entertainingly. The Guardian calls it, ‘An amusing, timely whodunit…’ And The New York Times says: ‘A first novel set in Delhi that offers penetrating insights into the new India.’ It features a portly Punjabi detective named Vish Puri with assistants who go by the names Tubelight, Flush and Facecream. Hall is based in Delhi and the important thing is he doesn’t exoticise the setting and the characters.
The last few years, and especially post Sacred Games and Shantaram, things have been so different, with Indian publishers welcoming submissions for genre fiction. Westerners are still ahead of the game as all these recent thrillers indicate, but hopefully it won’t be too long before we explode with good pulp from our own writers. I don’t think we should let them do all the entertaining and have all the fun.
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