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Spy sagas, serial killings and whodunits! The crime rush in Indian literary world

Until even 2012, the best-known Indian detective in English fiction was HRF Keating's Inspector Ghote. But now every publisher has a crime list with corporate biggies and journalists turning authors with spy sagas, serial killings and whodunits. Gargi Gupta reports

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As a well-respected financial expert regularly sought out by the media for his opinions, you'd expect HDFC Bank chief economist Abheek Barua's first book to be about the economy. Instead, City of Death is a crime thriller set in contemporary Kolkata, about a young woman found decapitated in her apartment and a pair of hard bitten Lalbazar cops deputed to solve the crime. Along the way, there're incestuous siblings, the corruption and politics within and without the police department, and a psychopath serial killer.

City of Death is a surprisingly assured debut, easy to read and yet gripping in its evocation of the depths of evil that lie hidden under the surface of the everyday ordinary, only to erupt in horrific, gory crime.

Deranged serial killers being much more in vogue among crime novelists than the old fashioned murder mystery (in crime, like with everything in life, more seems always better), Barua's is not the only recent crime novel in India to feature one. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay's Patang, set in monsoon-drenched Mumbai, has a particularly brutal killer who leaves behind the bodies of his victims in very public places, arranged in grotesque poses. The first body, for instance, is found hung like a kite — the "patang" of the title — from a cell-phone tower! A tad ingenious, perhaps, but Chattopadhyay weaves a tight plot with enough twists and turns to hold and keep readers guessing much of the way.

Chattopadhyay and Barua are just two of the many Indians who have turned, of late, to writing crime thrillers in English. (Of course, there's been much more of crime writing in languages other than English — Bengali and Hindi, primarily.) It's a fairly new phenomenon, gathering momentum in just the last three-fours years.

The makings of a trend

Until even 2012, the best-known Indian detective in English fiction was Inspector Ghote, the creation of British writer HRF Keating. There had been a few like Ashok Banker and Kalpana Swaminathan who wrote in this genre in the Nineties and Noughties, not to forget Vikram Chandra's 900-page Sacred Games (2006).

The present high goes back to around 2011-2012 with books like Anita Nair's acclaimed Cut Like A Wound, Mumbaistan, the first of Piyush Jha's crime bestsellers (he's just out with his fourth Rakshasas which features a serial killer), Madhulika Liddle's The Eighth Guest and Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries, the second installation featuring the Mughal-era detective. (There had been a few in the thriller genre earlier too: Shashi Warrier and Mukul Deva.)

But that's nothing compared to the steady supply now. Every publisher now has a crime list, and some even a separate imprint for crime — Blue Salt launched by Penguin in 2013 and HarperCollins' Harper Black last year.

For two years now there's even been an annual Crime Writers' Festival, bringing visibility to the genre. And all kinds of authors seem to be experimenting with the genre. Like Barua and Chattopadhyay many of them are writing their first novels, or attempting the genre for the first time.

For instance, Vivek Rao, a former corporate banker-turned-start-up-entrepreneur, will make his debut with Shot Down, which will be published by Hachette later this year. It weaves a plot about two estranged brothers and a Pakistani terrorist organisation which is mobilising its sleeper cells across India to launch a series of attacks. There's also Amitabh Pandey, a former railway services officer, who has just had his first book published by Harper Black, Himalayan White, about the criminal-politician connections in Uttar Pradesh. Next year, Pan Macmillan will publish former journalist Aditya Sinha's fiction debut — a whodunit set in a newspaper office, which brings together Bollywood, media houses, the Mumbai police and the underworld. Another journalist, Praveen Swami, too, has turned crime novelist with Gold Flake, published by Juggernaut with stories from his long experience reporting Kashmir. Then there's acclaimed Tamil writer Ambai who's donned a new avatar as a crime fiction writer; Juggernaut is publishing her novella, As the Day Darkens, featuring a sharp-witted and warm-hearted private detective, Sudha Gupta, later this month.

Spoilt for choice

The sheer variety of the output in this genre is staggering. Take A Very Pukka Murder, the debut novel by Arjun Gaind who is better known for his graphic books. The first of a series called the Maharaja Mysteries, Gaind's book is a historical whodunit set in the early 20th century in a fictional princely state where a British resident is found murdered. RV Raman, a consultant with three decades of experience at leading consultancies KPMG and AT Kearney, and now teacher of business strategy at IIMs, writes about white-collar crime. His second novel, Insider, is about insider trading and the nexus between stock markets and companies. And Zac O'Yeah's Hari Majestic novels, in which the colour and quirky drama of life on Indian streets is as much a part of the narrative as the detection of crime.

And lest you think Indian crime writing is an all-male affair, there's former journalist Madhumita Bhattacharyya who has a maverick female detective Reema Ray, who in her latest outing — she's had three thus far since 2012 — investigates shady goings-on in the ashram of a new-age guru.

Also in the list are books recreating real life crime in which category would fall Avirook Sen's Aarushi, the one true bestseller in the crime genre we've had recently; but there are others of its kind coming up such as Puja Changoiwala's Front Page Murders based on serial killer Vijay Palande.

Steady readership

 

Strangely, despite this rush of Indian crime novels, their readership hasn't surged significantly. "Mythological and chick-lit genres have actually produced hits. That hasn't yet happened with crime," says R Sivapriya, executive editor at Juggernaut, which published both Barua and Swami, and is admittedly big on crime.

Agrees Swagat Sengupta, chief executive officer of Oxford Bookstores, "Crime writing by Indian authors is picking up but is still slow when compared to other genres like romance or mythology." Diya Kar Hazra, publisher, Pan Macmillan India adds "that only two Indian authors feature in Nielsen Bookscan's Top 20 writers in the genre — Ashwin Sanghi and Satyajit Ray".

But from the evidence above, it's clear that the lack of a large enough market hasn't stopped a new generation from taking to and experimenting with crime novels, or experimenting with the genre. "There has been no paucity of interesting submissions since we began looking for them," says Sivapriya.

"Crime excites me," chuckles Rao. "All the books I read, the serials and movies I watch are to do with crime. It's what gets my creative juices flowing."

For Raman, who always wanted to write, it was the realisation that India has no one like John Grisham, who writes about institutional crime. "In my case that would be corporate crime since it's a world I know best," says Raman, who has planned four books on various kinds of white-collar crimes.

Barua, on the other hand, was inspired by television crime dramas like The Hinterland, True Detective and The Killing that he confesses to being addicted to. "I think it's high art," he says, adding that they also made him feel that he could do it. Besides, he says, he's "always been a great follower of crime (fiction), and not just in English. Bengali (Barua's mother tongue) has a rich tradition of urban crime writing".

But if the genre is yet to take off in India in readership — globally it remains, perhaps, the biggest category of genre fiction, accounting for 30 percent or more of book sales — what explains publishers' bullishness on the genre?

Kanishka Gupta of literary agency Writer's Side, has a theory: that it's actually because many of the commissioning editors themselves are fans of the crime genre.

Hazra has a different explanation: Crime fiction, in her view, is one of the most exciting, challenging and daunting genres to pull off. "Writers today are much more willing to push the envelope, try something new, and they're a lot less inhibited about being unabashedly commercial. Perhaps there is a more relaxed attitude to 'literariness' now. A writer can take pride in telling a good, well-plotted story for leisure reading."

"The fact that so many of those writing in this genre have day jobs, and don't need to rely on their writing for a living helps," says Rao. "It means they can experiment, take chances." Quality, however, remains an issue, he says. "The demand is there: we have a large community of readers for whom it's so easy to get hold of a foreign title. They now have options to read Indian narratives but until the quality of supply goes up, why should they?"

10 top best-selling crime fiction authors of the past 10 years:

James Patterson
Lee Child
Michael Connelly
Stieg Larrson, Hakan Nasser, Jo Nesbo and the Nordic Noir writers
David Baldacci
Ian Rankin
Ruth Rendell
Patrician Cornwell
John Grisham
Robert Galbraith

Top 10 Indian crime fiction authors

Satyajit Ray's Feluda series (in translation) remains one of only two desi's on the list of top 10-bestselling crime authors in India
Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games was an epic literary treatment of the genre
Anita Nair's Cut Like a Wound (2012) featuring Inspector Gowda. She's back with the second the same detective, Chain of Custody
Kalpana Swaminathan's Lalli series
S Hussain Zaidi - his three books on the D-gang, especially Dongri to Dubai were huge bestsellers
Avirook Sen's Arushi - brought to life this intriguing real-life crime and was on best-seller lists for weeks
Bhaskar Chattopadhyay - Patang is on the Amazon bestseller list
Kishwar Desai - Witness the night and two other novels featuring Simran Singh, a social activist and investigator
Piyush Jha - Mumbaistan (2012), crime and sleeze in Maximum City
Ravi Subramaniam - Bankster (2012), his debut and best-known novel about crime in the financial world

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