Goodbye to all this

After four and half years of this column I have decided to cry off now. Enough said, at least by me.

To round it all off I have been asked to write, as a farewell to this column, about the five or six best English language authors I had ever read. Nasty, but it has served to focus my mind. It has, however, been a bit of tussle.

I could have written about Gandhiji, Sardar Patel, Nehru, Golwalkar, Keynes and Karl Marx. But although all these people wrote, and wrote well, none of them was a writer.

Indeed, I ruled out all producers of non-fiction as being ‘me-too’ pretenders because you see, it doesn’t matter how well you write. It’s what you write. And on that score, the non-fiction types don’t count with the creative fiction types, even the worst of them.

In fact, even within the fiction group, there are bad writers who have produced good books and good writers who have produced bad books. Good and bad, that is, as defined by me.

Even so, some mildly objective criterion was still needed. So I decided, first, to stick only to those writers who have written more than six books of a series or, if not an actual series, novels so similar that they are virtually one.

The second criterion, crucially, was those authors every one of whose books I had bought, even when the number ran to 15 or 16. It has been money well spent, not least because books are still very cheap in India.

Art, in any of its forms, like batting, ought not be an exercise in self-indulgence. I hope you agree.

So I excluded all ‘serious’ novelists because they write for themselves, without much thought for the reader. That doesn’t make the cut for me. Some writers like Amitav Ghosh and Robert Graves were knocked out on my version of the Duckworth-Lewis rule.

Thrills from thrillers

So onward to the Chosen Few. Truth to tell, a proper listing would run to at least a dozen writers, starting with Enid Blyton’s Noddy series, not to mention her others. Georgette Heyer, P G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, and the guy who wrote all those Sudden novels, Oliver Strange, are also there, great entertainers all. There are many more, of course.

The short list, however, comprises four Brits and two Americans. They are, in no particular order, John le Carré, Daniel Silva, Dick Francis, Michael Dobbs, Colin Dexter and a writer whose name none of you would have heard: John Verdon. All of them have written thrillers, which are absolutely the hardest to sustain.

Le Carré wrote those grim spy thrillers where the hero is a decent chap who believes in fairness off the Left variety. Daniel Silva’s style is just like Le Carré’s but he has written about an Israeli super hero spy, a reclusive assassin, who is also an art restorer and the Pope’s pal. He, too, has this thing for justice and fairness.

The late Dick Francis wrote light crime thrillers in that wonderfully understated way that only the English can carry off. His first 20 or so books were about horse racing in England before he started on other crimes.

Colin Dexter, as you should know, wrote the Inspector Morse series. His novels had all the elegance of a good crossword puzzle. He was an expert on them.

John Verdon has so far written six murder mysteries in the New York area with a brooding ex-policeman as his hero. They are stories in the psycho genre, superbly told. There’s a lot of introspection about ‘the human condition’.

The odd man out is Michael Dobb who used to write political thrillers about England. He wrote the House of Cards trilogy. The Americans produced the TV series based on that trilogy but they just couldn’t match the sophistication of either the novels or the BBC series that was based on them.

So there you have it, my list. It is complete on the criteria I have used, and consistent with it. There can be other criteria which can be devised by others including the young thug who forced me to write this article.

Until then, read Shakespeare. It will improve your mind.

The short list, comprises four Brits and two Americans. They are, in no particular order, John le Carré, Daniel Silva, Dick Francis, Michael Dobbs, Colin Dexter and a writer whose name none of you would have heard: John Verdon