Indian Crime Fiction

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. 

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

Reading with a Purpose

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading for research. Most of the books are on technical matters, to help me recall terms I used to know but have mostly forgotten. Some of the more commonly used ones came back right away, but others still look a bit funny. This got me thinking about other purposes for reading.

When I began writing fiction I had to unlearn writing like an academic. I had written a novel and short fiction in college, and been published in student literary and humor magazines. I turned to scholarly work in graduate school, and focused on academic work for years. Returning to fiction meant unlearning one style of composing and recovering other ways of thinking on paper.

Of course I read a lot of crime fiction over the years and that certainly prepared me. I thought in terms of clues and characters, and laying things out in a pattern. But I found that I was terse in narrative passages. To overcome this I turned to writers who were almost prolix. I read classic mysteries such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, and A. Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. I also read Anne Perry’s mysteries for the leisurely way she sets a scene or builds up a location and setting.

For capturing character and the sinister feeling of a stranger I can think of no better writer to study than Edgar Allan Poe. He goes so deeply into his characters’ feelings and attitudes that I sometimes wonder if he was slowly driving himself mad. Ruth Rendell achieves much the same effect with her many novels. One of the best in my opinion is Judgment in Stone, which follows the inevitable path to murder of an illiterate housekeeper.

Other writers have taught me other skills. Some writers are strong in dialogue, and others can explain the technical working of anything. The latter is a skill no writer should fail to learn. Once I learned the sequence of steps in making a particular machine work, I could see other processes more clearly even if I wasn’t writing about them. I think of this as understanding the bone structure in a face while you are sculpting or painting a portrait.

Setting a story in a location not well known to all readers requires a judicious use of details, knowing what to include and what to omit. James Lee Burke is well known and admired for his rich depiction of Louisiana, and Dana Stabenow has made Alaska her own as well as a vivid location accessible to readers. Nevada Barr explores the natural world in various parks, and Agatha Christie has set novels in ancient Egypt and then contemporary Middle East. I have learned from all these writers how to make a location come alive and ground the mystery. I use India as the setting for the Anita Ray series, a country I for the first time visited in the 1970s.

All books teach us something but not the same thing. Writers have to read as widely as possible, especially in areas that don’t normally appeal to them, if they want to ensure that their work is as strong as it can be. I try to read against my interests to broaden myself. At present I’m reading about a certain sport. I’m not a sports enthusiast but I want to be sure that my descriptions are accurate and that my character’s behaviors are plausible.

Reading with a purpose, as a writer, is far more than reading good literature to expose ourselves to the best the written word has to offer. Reading with a purpose is a way to absorb the skills and abilities of other writers we do not ourselves possess.

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Anita Ray Mystery series, featuring Indian American photographer Anita Ray, as well as the Melingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. www.susanoleksiw.com