Raagam Taanam Pallavi is a recent addition to Kalpana Swaminathan’s books of detective fiction which includes other works such as Cryptic Death and Other Stories (1997), Pa (2003), The Page 3 Murders (2006), Greenlight (2017) and Murder in Seven Acts (2018). As the cover page suggests, the present novel is ‘A Lalli Mystery’; the lead character of this novel is Lalli, a sexagenarian detective who has been a recurring figure in seven of Kalpana Swaminathan’s previous works since 1997…
Andrea Camilleri’s 28th and final murder mystery in the Inspector Montalbano series, Riccardino is a befitting ending to this extremely popular crime series with over 65 million copies sold across the world. Adapted for Italian TV and screened on BBC 4, the series has been translated into 32 languages. Camilleri started writing the series in 1994 when he was about 70 years old and wrote the final book in 2004, deposited it with his publisher on the condition that it be published only after his death. Surprised to find himself alive at 91 in November 2016, he revisited the story and found it ‘good and unfortunately still relevant’…
Quiet in Her Bones is a thriller by Nalini Singh, set in Auckland, New Zealand, depicting an immaculate and unapologetic insider’s view to the culture and class of New Zealand’s rich and powerful through the incident of a disappearance of a woman from an exclusive cul-de-sac. Using this incident, Nalini Singh carves out an entire world that a missing person can leave behind or open up after their disappearance. The story begins with a turn of events when Nina Rai, wife to a very powerful Ishaan Rai and mother to Aarav Rai, re-appears many years after she went missing, in her decomposed and skeletal self. Although long gone, Nina was never presumed to be dead, most of all, by her husband and son…
It has been a rather grotesque and gory affair—my tryst with Scandinavian or Nordic noir literary fiction—crime novels to be precise. And a long and protracted one, often bordering on an obsessive involvement with the genre many may term bloody, obsequious, and fundamentally predicated on titillation and an appeal to baser human instincts. I often tend to agree. With narratives featuring psycho-pathological serial murderers and twisted child abusers plying their trade against the intensely bleak and forlorn Scandinavian landscape, the plotlines might be enough to put one off the genre for all times to come. But one tends to endure and come to terms with the darkness of the backdrop and of the characters themselves and view it as integral to the overarching appeal of the Nordic noir genre…
All sorts of people write mystery stories in which a crime has to be solved. Most are solved by policemen, but many are solved by gifted amateurs. For example, there are medical murders. There are drug related murders. There’s murder in the financial world. There are many other types of murders involving rage, jealousy, conspiracy and what have you. Usually, policemen and professional detectives solve them. Sometimes old ladies solve them. So why not economists, too? After all, they have been around for about 300 years and have multiplied like rabbits in the last 50 and at last count there were around 100,000 of them, male and female. But only two, writing under one name, have taken the reputational risk of writing murder mysteries. Economists can be very dull and unforgiving in that respect…
In his excellent biography, Robert Gerwarth recounts how Reinhard Heydrich secured the job of creating the fearsome security apparatus, the SD, which eventually developed and implemented the Final Solution.‘…he began to develop an insatiable appetite for crime fiction and spy novels, many of them serialized in newspapers. Detective novels from Britain and the United States—from Sherlock Holmes to Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton—were a huge success in Germany and they captured the imagination of the young Heydrich. Throughout the war and the 1920s, he maintained his keen interest in the genre and put his expertise to good use when he first met Himmler in 1931…
In the 1970s, Uma, Chandra and myself had almost identical collections of detective fiction. Common to all three of us were those by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. We each had crammed bookshelves with our treasures and were extremely possessive about our editions.What is it about this genre of writing that inspires this loyalty to read and reread these books with pleasure every time? Today so many authors have joined my bookshelf and Kindle—PD James, Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling), Caroline Graham—but classic crime fiction for me is dominated by the magic of Christie and Marsh…
2020
The Grumpy Man makes for a delightful reading experience. Illustrated by Suvidha Mistry, the scenes are set so beautifully that children are sure to have a blast reading this short story by Cheryl Rao.As the title suggests, the story is about a grumpy man and the kids in the neighbourhood who are wary of him. Their curiosity is aroused and they want to know about this grumpy man who is not moved even by their good deeds. Their childhood pranks are always met with disapproval. On holidays, they would leave sweets for him at his doorstep but even that gesture does not endear him to them…
Yamini and the 7:00 pm Ghosts is a story by CG Salamander that revolves around 12-year-old Yamini and her friends discovering the mystery of ghosts in their neighbourhood. The story begins with Yamini hearing the rumours about ghosts in her neighbourhood that come around 7 in the evening. Everyone in the neighbourhood is scared of these ghosts, including Yamini’s friends. But Yamini doesn’t believe in the rumours. Therefore, she tries to solve the mystery…
Once cheerful and sunny, the village of Himmatnagar has changed in the past month since the mysterious deaths of three of its nativesRam Nayak, Chintamani, and Reddy. The natives of the village seem to have stopped smiling and are always tense; the police seem to have no leads to the cause of the deaths. Welcome to the village of ‘Himmatnagar: Land of the Brave’, formerly known as ‘Phattupur: Village of Cowards’.Adithi Rao in The Bhootbusters of Himmatnagar brings the village canvas alive—the trees, the ponds, the local school, the expansive farmlands, and the village cemetery. Illustrated by Sayan Mukherjee…
2021
The Sackclothman has been developed for Different Tales: Stories from Marginal Cultures and Regional Languages, an initiative of the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad. To be honest, I judged this book by its cover–in fact, I was totally intrigued by it. The illustrations by Rakhi Peswani are commendable. The story evokes the familiar imagery from Rabindranath Tagore’s famous story ‘Kabuliwala’. There is a young girl, an ‘outsider’, a social outcast; and the familiar attachment between the two of them. It even has the same gut-wrenching scene of the outsider being taken away from society after establishing a tender bond with the little girl…
2020
The Waiting may seem like a simple book, but it is pretty complex with multiple stories surrounding the main character, Anit, and his friends–Bimal, Chandan, and Deeksha, also known as the ABCD gang in the book.Dipavali Sen talks about bullying/ragging and connects it with mythology, magic, historical research, scientific experiment, contemporary attitudes, and mystical practices.The Waiting is an adventure book. It starts with Anit’s story of shifting to a new house, a new school, and how he is bullied there as a new boy. Even though he is irritated and frustrated, he does not tell his parents about the ordeals of the ragging he faced. Being an the only child, he understands all the hardships his parents had gone through to buy a house for themselves…
2020
Hawa Mithai by the renowned Hindi poet is a collection of essays on the elements, water, light, air, as also on sound, the earth, sky, fire, the seasons. E.g., water is derived from clouds, rains and rivers and light are derived from the Sun, Moon and the stars. Humans, birds, animals and even plants and trees, all depend on the elements. We derive abundance of pleasure from them but when we make them angry, they bring misery to us by causing floods, earthquakes, thunderstorms, etc.The author has described these elements in colourful details. There are three essays on potatoes, cycle and green chillies to add spice to the volume. The illustrations are attractive, Kulkarni has done a very good job…
2020
The ‘children’s books’ I grew up with were essentially preachy adult stuff parading as stories for children. It is a delight, therefore, to see these six books which try and see the world through the eyes of a child.Sher ki Neend (The Lion’s Sleep) written and illustrated by Manica K Musil presents a lion who is not a fierce hunter out to kill and frighten children. Rather, it is a lion that desperately needs a snooze but cannot sleep because birds and monkeys and insects don’t let him. Finally a bird leads him up a hill and he falls asleep: a lovely metaphor for a child’s desire to guide grownups. While the tale alone is sure to engage any six-seven year old, the fabulous illustrations, created with a variety of fabrics, threads, rope and wool, would compel even older people to turn its pages…
Chaman Lal Ke Pyjame is an interesting collection of six stories written by Anil Singh for children aged 8 and above. All the stories are set in Umariya, a district in Madhya Pradesh. The language is colloquial bringing back memories of a Madhya Pradesh I grew up in. The Hindi spoken in small towns of many Hindi-speaking States is something one does not generally hear in Metropolitan cities. It is very quaint and only people living in those parts may be familiar with some of the words that I came across in these stories…
Babies In My Heart is a simply-written story about the concept of family, and the types of families found in today’s world. The story begins by introducing the reader to a standard nuclear family with biological father, mother and their biological children—the archetypical Hum do hamare do; and then goes on to introduce families with twins, triplets and quadruplets. Then come same-sex families with two mothers or two fathers. Here, the concept of adoption is brought up by differentiating between tummy mummy and heart family. Then the concept of a single parent (actually a single woman) family is introduced…
2021
Gulab, the daughter of a manual scavenger—is mocked at by her class mates as ‘stinky Gulab’, not because she is filthy but because of her father’s profession which involves cleansing of clogged gutters.So, on science day in school Gulab takes the first bold step of showcasing a machine to clean up the drains without involving any human. She names it Gulab which will remove the dirt and spread fragrance.The story revolves around the inherent class divide existing in our society. Both Gulab and the bullies are the victims of this societal discrepancy, one as perpetrator and the other as victim…
2020
The story revolves around two princesses created by the fairy queen Sheera to deal with her boredom. One of the princesses is sent to the kingdom of darkness and is to be protected from the sun while the other is sent to the prosperous kingdom of the light and is to be protected from the night. Sheera keeps adding up complexities to their lives as the plot progresses until they both finally meet each other and help each other’s kingdoms.The story has three female characters as protagonists and all three of them are appreciated for their beauty first and other characteristics later. The adjectives used for the females are only focusing upon their physical attributes which follows the standard beauty norms…
Fantasy is a tricky genre. It plays right at the heart of why many of us read: to escape, to find refuge. After the success of Harry Potter, publishers around the world flooded readers with YA fantasies, so much so that the genre became saturated with numerous worlds, each with their elaborate rules and patchwork characters. And while Tanaz Bhathena’s duology, Wrath of Ambar is based on one of the oldest tropes in storytelling, a hero, her destiny and the quest she embarks upon, the result is a refreshingly absurd world which attempts to hold up a mirror to the one we inhabit and create every day…
There used to be a time, long ago in most of our childhoods possibly, when we would have real, vivid and intense dreams, dreams within dreams, where we would experience physically acts of falling from a height, slipping, running and even as we awoke, our hearts would continue to race. Sangu Mandanna’s ninth adventure fantasy novel is a quick paced, vividly descriptive work of art and imagination.Kiki Kallira is the protagonist, recounting her life in the first person. She loves sketching and draws up characters from the Indian folklore of Mysore. Even as these characters come alive, threaten to destroy the real world, there is a parallel narrative of great courage and bravery displayed by Kiki—alluding to an aspect of herself that remains mostly hidden…