I want to create a market for thrillers: Ravi Subramanian

After writing a series of banking thrillers, author Ravi Subramanian has set his sights on exploring other spaces within the thriller genre. His ninth novel, In The Name of God, is a fast-paced, gripping tale of a temple and its vast riches, a heist, murders and a multi-linear narrative all coming together towards an explosive end. Here, the author speaks about his latest book, his thoughts on his writing and wanting to create a space for thrillers in the country. Excerpts...

The characters in your last book, The Bestseller She Wrote, were bankers and all your earlier books have been banking thrillers. Why the complete departure in your latest, In The Name Of God? 

I firmly believe — and you will see more of it in the coming days — that a good author should experiment. I’m an author not because I’m a banker. If I write banking thrillers, then I’m actually writing from my experiences or putting my knowledge on paper and creating fiction around it. The real challenge is to write something which is away from my comfort zone, where I have as much advantage or disadvantage as any other writer and then come up with a good book. 

What’s really been heartening for me, is that as of today, out of the first 35 reviews on Amazon, 29 are five stars and six are four stars. A big credit for that goes to the story, the plot. I have always held that the day I feel my plot is becoming repetitive, I will move away from it. It’s not that I will never write a banking story again, but I have to be convinced that it’s a different story/plot from what I have ever written earlier. And two, Padmanabhaswamy temple really interested me. I was reading about the temple, the wealth and the case history. Typically stories about temples and vaults become about mythology, but this is set in contemporary times.

How did the story evolve? 

I started reading about this temple two-and-a-half years back. I realised there is a temple here that’s richer than the Vatican and we have three lathi wielding guys protecting it. Are we expecting fear of God to prevent a crime there or are we expecting fear of law to prevent it? It got me thinking and I thought I will write about a heist. Then I started doing research. If I had written a heist story in a temple, it would have offended a lot of people. So I decided to change the plot. That’s when the angle of a Supreme Court nominated committee going there and some people getting killed came in. Then when I read about the Tamil Nadu anti-smuggling racket, which is also a true story, I started researching about that. Even the Wafi mall robbery, which makes an appearance in the first few chapters, is a true story. So, this was more difficult than my earlier books to write because there, I knew the subject as well as the back of my hand. Here, everything had to be read, validated and then included.

It’s been ten years to your first book, If God was a Banker. How do you evaluate your growth as a writer? 

I think in my first book, there was an innocence. From a story perspective, there was zero pressure. And I just wrote what I wanted to. But the writing style has stuck, that shifting between time zones and having a multi-linear approach, having multiple stories linking towards the end has been a style that’s stuck to me right from the beginning. What has changed, one, is the confidence. Writing is a craft. When I wrote my first book, I was zero words down. Now, I’m 8,00,000 words down. So my writing now is far superior to what it was. Two, is that I have learnt to take my time and not hurry up. When I wrote my first book, I really hurried it up because I was eager to bring my book out. Now, that compulsion is not there. My last book came out in 2015, this book is after two years. Prior to that, for five years, I had a book a year. The best part about the journey of 10 years has been that every book of mine is better than the previous book. With every book, I have come out a lot more intellectually awarded. When I write a book, the research leaves me a lot more enriched. So, that in itself, is worth the journey for me.

What’s next? 

I’m working on another thriller that should come out this year end or early next year. It’s work in progress. I personally think that not many people read thrillers in this country. Thrillers are a smaller market as compared to romance and mythology. I want to create a market for thrillers. I want to write local, simple thrillers that a guy at the railway station can pick up and read. I’m talking to a couple of publishers. Today, thrillers in India are either mythological thrillers or murder thrillers. Where are the sub-genres of thrillers, for instance medical or legal thrillers? I will fill that gap soon.