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The book traces the journey of Jia, an immigrant of Pashtun origin living in a place that is not named. The story unravels following a family’s life story partly in England and partly in Pakistan. The predicament that is being faced by the protagonist leads her to journey on the path of reluctant self-discovery. A father murdered, a feudal lord dead, Jia Khan trained as a Barrister is compelled to face what was to be done as she belongs to a clan which has connections with a crime syndicate, a family business…

The portrayal of children who resent getting stifled within the regimen of home and school is a recurring feature of children’s fiction in Bangla, although they are by and large unable to break free of it. In the sub-genre of domestic fantasy within it, the child tries to find an outlet from the regimen of home and school for a while, but the most radical implications of her/his breaking out of the system get contained within the predominantly middle-class worldview of the narratives. Detective stories deviate from this sub-genre umbrella inasmuch that the child gets caught or initiates an adventure in which s/he is able to realize her/his fantasy of solving a mystery.

In 2016, the publishers Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph announced a crime-writing competition and the winner was Abir Mukherjee, a young chartered accountant based in London, whose five-thousand-word entry has ultimately resulted in the debut novel A Rising Man. The historical whodunit spans a few days in April 1919, beginning in a diary-like form on the 9th of April to be exact. Set in Raj-era Calcutta of the 1920s decade, it features English cop Captain Sam Wyndham, and his Indian sidekick, Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee or Surrender-not, as his British superiors were wont to call him…

In the history of Bengali detective fiction—arguably one of the more often accessed sub-genres of popular literature in India itself—one could find the example of a gradual dwindling from something quite serious into something that is read mostly by children and young adults. When one speaks about such post-modern Bengali fictional detectives and adventurers like Satyajit Ray’s ‘Feluda (Prodosh Mitra)’, Samaresh Basu’s ‘Goyenda Gogol’, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Kakababu (Raja Roy Choudhury)’, Sayed Mustafa Siraj’s ‘Colonel Niladri Sarkar’, Suchitra Bhattacharyya’s ‘Mitin Mashi’, Shasthipada Chattopadhyay’s ‘Pandav Goyenda’ and ‘Goyenda Tatar’, Samaresh Majumdar’s ‘Arjun’, or Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Goyenda Baradacharan’, it reveals a list which consists of writings meant for the young adults…

Half–a–corona. Long before ‘corona’ created mayhem across the world, Keralites were used to this phrase… ‘half-a-corona’. This phrase conjured images of a dashing sleuth—with a lighted half-a-corona cigar…the image of Detective Marksin created by ace novelist Kottayam Pushpanath. From the late sixties until his death in 2018, Pushpanath was the last word in popular detective fiction in Malayalam.Detective novels in Malayalam or Apasarpaka Kathakal as they are known are heavily indebted to Sherlock Holmes. The early creations were influenced by Holmes’s novels. Kunthalatha—the first novel in Malayalam (Appu Nedungadi—1887), though had elements of Apasarpaka in it, however, is not considered as a pure detective novel. The first attempts in this realm of writing were by OM Cheriyan and Appan Thamburan. OM Cherian’s Mister Kailey started as a series in a magazine in October 1899…

In 1911, when the British colonial government announced its decision to move the imperial capital of British India to Delhi, many received the news as a restoration of the city’s place in its natural, political location. After all, the name of ‘Dilli’ had been synonymous with the rise and fall of successive dynasties in the subcontinent. The city seemed to exert a divine will of its own; punishing menacingly, as it did with Muhammad bin Tughlaq, those who did not submit to its ordained status. In its more recent history, the city came to manifest the imperial or modernist grandeur of the likes of Shah Jahan, Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens and even, Jawaharlal Nehru. It is for these reasons that the conglomerate of settlements that goes by the name of Delhi, often seems to invoke a narrative of extraordinary greatness especially in its past…