Mind games in a karmic thriller: Zac O’Yeah

Usually, the thrills and frills of crime fiction are in its plot—some nasty crooks, crafty cops and twisted con games strung together plausibly, and there, you have a decent crime thriller. A few crime fiction writers take a step further to add literary merit to their tales. Zac O’Yeah could well be the exception. This author of 11 books in Swedish—crime fiction to cultural essays—made his English debut in 2010 with Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, a gritty and equally witty tale set in a futuristic Scandinavia colonised by India.

We caught up with Zac as his second novel in English, Mr Majestic! The Tout of Bengaluru, is just out in stores this week. He tells us about how he layers his tales with word play and also learnt to incorporate the cultural aspects of India, including karma—“an Indian fictional detective can’t just shoot anybody just like that—or he or she might be reborn as a cockroach in his/her next life.”
How did you get the idea of Mr Majestic? Did you get too many scam mails from Nigeria saying that you’ve won pots of money?

That was just the beginning, really. At some point, I started collecting spam emails that struck me as particularly creative. You know how they are, they spin a story full of facts, real company names, people, actual accidents such as plane crashes, even web links to news reports, and I thought that some of them were rather entertaining. So the next step was to imagine what somebody who pulled off these scams might be like and I set my story up to be about a young guy in Bengaluru who has been dragged into the world of cyber scamming, and then he has to rescue one of his own victims… when he realises that something really bad may have happened, thanks to his scamming.

This is your second crime novel in English. The first one, Once upon a time in Scandinavistan, was hilarious and horrific at the same time. Is Mr Majestic like that too? Tell us a bit about the book.
Yes, I suppose I like both comedy and horror equally. So in my detective novels, there’s a bit of both… I often feel that our real lives are either horror comedies or comic horror stories. OK, so the protagonist is a young Indian chap, Hari Majestic, who has made his living as a tout and small-time scam operator, mainly tricking tourists into going to expensive souvenir shops and suchlike; basically the kind of person I’ve encountered millions of times while travelling around India.

Then he is dragged into a case of a vanished tourist, due to a cyber scam, manages to kill her boyfriend by mistake, and he has to track her down... or die. His name is Majestic because as a child he was left behind in a cinema hall called Majestic which has recently been torn down. I think they’re going to build a shopping mall there, so I wanted to celebrate the old movie theatres of Bengaluru by naming the hero after one of them. Hari Majestic was subsequently adopted by a lady who used to work cleaning the theatre. So he has a soft spot for orphans, stray dogs, and cinema.

What homework did you do?
I do a lot of it. This book must have taken me some four years to write, to get a feel for the parts of Bengaluru where the story takes place, reading up in newspapers and magazines (like my favourite, crime & detective magazine), reading about the type of modern crimes that take place today. As the novel is set on the fringes of the underworld and in the present, I wanted it to feel up to date.

Did you block out the story in advance? And did the characters ever run away from you?
To write a successful suspense novel, one does need a map for the story, a rough sketch for how the whole thing will play out or otherwise the reader might feel that the plot is just drifting around and going nowhere. So as a writer, one must know a bit more than the reader. But then again, the plot isn’t made of iron but rather bendable, and adjustable, and so when for example the hero (or anti-hero if you wish to call him that) Hari Majestic gets a better idea than my original idea, then I try to go along. Although he is not a real person, but a completely fictional character, sometimes his logic overrules the story logic, and then if one is a sensible novelist one admits defeat and lets the character take the story in a different direction. There’s, for example, one chapter where Hari decides that he’s had enough of my book and wants to leave the plot, and so he boards the Rani Chennamma Express to Dharwad to go and hide, but then on the way something crucial happens to him and luckily he returns to the story.

What was most difficult about writing it?
Everything is difficult about writing good books! For me, perhaps the hardest part was actually to write a character who is so different from myself: he’s south Indian, of course, but he’s also a young dude, he belongs to one of the lower classes, he has a petty criminal record. I spent probably a whole year just mulling over the character of Hari Majestic, and his friends too, until I started to feel that I actually understand what they’d do in any given situation. Although I don’t feel that it is particularly important that fictional characters are entirely real, because then much of all the sci-fi would be impossible since authors rarely get to go to Mars and Venus and other planets to research. One still likes them to appear believable. Or just enough so that readers are willing to go along with the mind-game. All fiction is a game of imagination where the writer and reader play on opposite sides, me on this side of my desk, the reader wherever he or she prefers to sit and read.

How is Indian crime fiction, or books written for an English-speaking audience, different from Swedish crime fiction?
There are cultural aspects that make India different, a certain complexity in society, the family system in India is tighter, stronger… detectives have to think more of their personal honour than a typical Western private eye who lives outside the system as a loner; an Indian detective is connected to his or her clan and the larger social concerns of family life. A Swedish cop, as depicted in crime novels, is usually estranged from his family, divorced, and has a troubled relationship to his children. Then there is non-violence, a strong tradition, and a belief in karma: an Indian fictional detective can’t just shoot anybody just like that, or he or she might be reborn as a cockroach in his/her next life.

You write with a lot of humour and interesting word play unlike most writers of this genre. Is the craft here as important as the plot?
Thanks, this must be the first time anybody has asked me this question. I definitely feel that I want to write books that have intricate linguistic structures hidden underneath the surface of the plot, the action and the thrills, and so one of the things I amuse myself with is to bend language to fit my way of thinking, like small word games, cryptic hidden messages, in-jokes and so on. I feel that books that are rich in meaning have a longer shelf life, my dream for my books is that when people buy them—find them in the shop and decide to adopt them and take them home, is that they really adopt them to keep them, not just for a single read but maybe to reread again a few years later to find new meaning in something that one bypasses on a first read. You know what I mean, reading as a love affair?

Have you been influenced by other writers?
I’ve been influenced by lots of writers although I don’t think I really write like any one of all those who have influenced me. What influences me is when a writer is dedicated to producing good writing, independent of genre. But I think Graham Greene and RK Narayan have been important influences because of their emphasis on the humanity of their fictional characters. I’m also influenced by my wife, Anjum Hasan, because she keeps her writing standards so high, so I would never dare to write anything sloppy.

Among contemporaries, whose books would you recommend?
Important crime novels from recent years are Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (which I think lots of people have but haven’t got around to reading because it’s so massive but it is well worth the read) and Anita Nair’s Cut Like Wound, this latter is also set in modern Bengaluru. And I hope with time to read more detective novels set in Indian cities.