What’s the point of murder mysteries? As a debut writer of one, it’s probably too late for me to be asking this question. But, like most debut novelists, my nerves are shot and it’s causing me to get philosophical. “What does it all mean?” I ask myself in the dead of night (followed closely by “why are we all here” and “what is life, anyway”, upon which I have to get out of bed to get myself some ice-cream. On the whole, it’s been a wearying – and calorific – process).
No one reads anymore, we’re told, except for self-improvement manuals and celebrity cookbooks. In India, particularly in English, reading has started to become inextricable from educational aspiration and attainment. In other words, too many of us read out of necessity, out of the need to cram information, out of the desire to improve our vocabulary and mainline knowledge. In traditional book markets, romance novels and potboilers have been overwhelmed by SAT textbooks and manuals about how to write the perfect college essay. Reading for maximum utility, not flavour – a protein shake rather than a galouti kabab.
And there’s no type of fiction that is more galouti kebab-esque than the classic whodunit, which takes an ostensibly serious thing (the death of a fellow human) and turns it into what is essentially a glorified crossword puzzle. This is the only genre that can include phrases like “the bodies piled up” (which featured in the blurb in my own murder mystery, A Fatal Distraction) and gory corpses, only to elicit the response, “How fun!” from its otherwise respectable, presumably law-abiding readers. Is there any space on serious Indian bookshelves for this kind of silliness?
More developed book markets seem to be embracing this trend, with the most successful recent example being Richard Osman, whose latest book We Solve Murders features corpses that have been eaten by sharks, flung off cliffs and nailed to trees. And we eat it all up with a spoon – Richard Osman’s books have sold more than 10 million copies globally, which just gives you an idea of the appetite for murder by sharks.
Indian crime fiction also has a long history of irreverence. As a reading nation, Indians have read crime fiction in multiple languages for hundreds of years. Crime fiction in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam et al has a rich and varied tradition, published in formats from little magazines to paperbacks sold to commuters.
Recently, I dipped into the Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction, which to my delight, started off with an old Bengali favourite, The Locked Chest, featuring Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, in which our hero travels to Plassey to stay at the eerie home of a Bengali landowner. It’s full of long shadows, suspicious characters, and, best of all, at the end there’s a code-breaking parrot. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time yet to read the more contemporary tales in the anthology, but the chances of any of them featuring a code-breaking parrot are, I would say, slim to none.
Tarun Saint in his excellent introduction calls the earliest detective stories (paraphrasing WH Auden) “[A] mode of escape literature, with magical satisfaction provided by a detective with powers of reasoning akin to a genius, who removes guilt by identifying who is guilty.” This primitive form, he argues, has now evolved “from neat solving of puzzles to an exploration of ethnographic complexity and socio-cultural contradictions”, and he is warmly approving of such an evolution. This type of progression may be inevitable as our society progresses and our nation develops, but I must admit that I still have what Prof. Saint describes as a “longing for a prelapsarian or precolonial innocence”. Don’t we all?
It must be said that these stories are not for everyone. Surender Mohan Pathak, the doyen of Hindi crime fiction writers, often complained about the sniffiness of the literary establishment, the class snobbery that rendered his novels disreputable, the supposed choice of the indifferently educated, indifferently employed urban male.
And critic Edmund Wilson in a famous 1945 essay titled Who Cares Who Killed Roger Akroyd? argued, grumpily, that “the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.” (If you haven’t read this essay, I highly recommend it – his comments on Ngaio Marsh alone are worth the price of admission. Let’s just say the words “unappetising sawdust” make an appearance.)
But this sniffiness harms our reading culture, prioritises gatekeeping over pleasure. According to some publishers, about 60 to 65 million people in India buy books in English; there’s a statistic that’s been making the rounds for some years now that Indians read for more hours per week than people from any other nation. And even if that number doesn’t distinguish between those reading thrillers and those studying desperately for exams, it does appear that the ground is being laid for an expanding Indian readership in English eager to consume stories of all kinds, eager to read for fun as much as illumination.
As the Hachette book shows, Indian crime writing is exploding in myriad ways, from noir to thrillers, police procedurals and historical crime. We’ve even got subgenres involving science fiction and fantasy. And books, in Horace’s famous formulation, should instruct and delight. We've imbibed the instruction part, now we need to focus on delight. So bring on the murderous sharks, and the code-breaking parrots.
Samyukta Bhowmick’s murder mystery novel A Fatal Distraction was published recently.
