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Detective fiction, like spy thrillers and crime fiction, is a genre concerned with crime, and has had its origins in the rationalist impulse of modernity. Like all crime fiction, it was used to mediate and contain the anxieties brought about by the experience of modernity. Even as serendipity as a concept might have had its origins in the Indo-Persian literary work of Khusro, Hasht Bahisht (‘The Three Princes of Serendip’) and may have travelled to Europe via translations, the detective genre was imported readymade into India. Urdu literary sensibilities, however, much like their response to modernity, resisted the European version and inflected it with their own tradition of ajaib and gharaib with emphasis on thrillers…

I vividly remember when I was learning Hindi in Varanasi in the early 1980s being fascinated by the bookstall outside the Lalita cinema in Bhelapura. In the evenings as the light poured from the foyer windows crowds would gather around the bookstall outside the cinema.

People would browse through what was new and what was on offer, and after hovering for a while pounce on a publication and snatch it up for a quite low price mostly, and then take it away to devour later. There were all sorts of publications on offer, mostly in Hindi, Bangla, and English but also in many other regional Indian languages. The biggest and glossiest publications were probably the broadsheet newspapers that hung like banners in my memory from the opened shutters of the stall…

The continuing appeal of a detective novel comes from our need to know. We read detective fiction to affirm our ways of knowing as valid, rather than subjecting them to a thorough critique. A typical detective story has a crime usually seen as a symptom of evil-personhood rather than social injustice, and the detective is shown as a master of deductive reasoning. The truth in these novels may be elusive, but always worth knowing. The hero’s goal is to right the wrongs by uncovering facts. And we as readers, vicariously, live the uncovering through the eyes and mind of the detective…

DI Harry Virdee: 6’3. Rugby juggernaut. Religious renegade. Disgraced cop. Hothead.Streets of Darkness, the first novel of the DI Virdee series, introduces us to this sociopathic maverick.In Bradford, routinely compared to Gotham City for its crime and filth, the ethnic divide runs deep. With the statistic tilting towards the ‘outsiders’, the city is a synecdoche to contemporary society, where only the trigger-happy thug lives to see a new day. Bradford has always been a cesspool of ethnic clashes—a tinderbox ready to erupt at the slightest nudge. With far too many incidents in the past for comfort, the palpable hatred is everywhere, seeping into the psyche of the residents and making them suspicious and edgy. Drugs are rampant, syndicates run open empires, survival is a luxury…

Anjana Neira Dev (AND): Every journey begins with an upheaval, a crisis or even a cataclysm that changes our life and the direction it has been taking. Would you share with us the beginning of your journey as a creative writer?

Sophie Hannah (SH): It’s hard for me to pinpoint a precise starting point because writing is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember; writing stories and poems was my hobby as a child and, because my mum was a writer, it always seemed a very natural and normal thing for me to be doing…