The people and culture of India have loomed large in crime
fiction almost from the beginning. Consider Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, or Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. And yet, up until 1980
there were only a handful of mysteries set in India proper, and most concerned
foreigners getting into trouble in a foreign land. Among the few that had any
focus on India and Indians were the series titles featuring Inspector Ghote. H.R.F.
Keating introduced the much loved and intrepid Inspector Ghote in 1964 in The Perfect Murder, and followed this
with 23 more entries. The Ghote series is very much in the Agatha Christie
tradition.
For mystery readers who love to read about India, there
weren’t many other options than the endearing Inspector Ghote. This was part of
the motivation that pushed me to write about Anita Ray, an Indian American
photographer who lives in her aunt’s tourist hotel in South India. Anita made
her debut in the short story “A Murder Made in India,” in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine (2003). Since then she has
appeared in 12 more short stories and three novels. The third novel is For the Love of Parvati, available in
May 2014.
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India may be thousands of miles away, on the other side of
the globe, with more people and worse weather, but many of the problems are the
same. In For the Love of Parvati
Anita travels with her aunt to visit relatives, but it’s clear at once that the
old and revered family is well on its way to disaster, and a woman who has fled
a war zone in another country is terrified of something she won’t or can’t
explain. She entered the country illegally, and she has nothing to go back to.
An equally important and violent character in the story is
the monsoon. It’s hard to explain the drenching unrelenting rain that comes twice
a year. Rivers flood, bridges and roads are washed out, and trees are often
uprooted. Anita is not surprised when she finds signs that a leopard has been
stalking the area, driven out of the nature preserve farther up in the hills.
She is surprised, however, when she realizes that a man is stalking the house,
and her worry is only intensified when it turns out that the household servant
has not gone on pilgrimage but is instead missing.
Similar in tone is the Vish Puri series by Tarquin Hall. The
Most Private Investigator Vish Puri is introduced in The Case of the Missing Servant (2009). Three more mysteries
followed. Also in this category is the series following treasure hunting professor
Jaya Jones, who appeared first in Artifact
(2012) by Gigi Pandian. Manjiri Prabhu published at least one book
featuring Sonia Samarth, a private detective who solves crimes using astrology,
in Cosmic Clues.
Barbara Cleverly introduced Detective Joe Sandilands in The Last Kashmiri Rose (2001). The
series is set in 1920s and 1930s colonial India, and depicts life among the
British and other Europeans of the time. Darker and more varied in setting and
characters is the collection from Akashic Books, Mumbai Noir, edited by Atlaf Tyrewala (2012), offering stories by
14 writers from India. These writers take us into corners of Mumbai no outsider
was ever expected to see. You can’t get farther from the Taj Mahal than the
dark corners of Mumbai.
India is no longer the most unusual place on earth, the
hardest to reach and hardest to understand. But all these books have a few
things in common—the traditional ways of dealing with authority and elders, the
delicious food, the challenges of getting anything done in India, the extremes
of wealth and poverty, the pervasive corruption, and the exotic beauty of the
country. All are set in North India, an area that has long been much more
accessible to foreigners.
The Anita Ray stories are set in South India, in the state
of Kerala, once the location of an old kingdom, Travancore. The ruling family
is still active in civic life and much admired by the local population. Kerala
is also one of the last areas to relinquish the matrilineal system, and many
who live on the fringes of the modern world still adhere to the older ways.
For links to the Anita Ray books, go to www.susanoleksiw.com
