‘I always wanted to write a book as compelling as Rebecca’
Yomal Senerath-Yapa talks to anaesthetist turned writer Carmel Miranda who won the 2020 Gratiaen Prize for her medico-mystery novel
Carmel Miranda walks into the soaring atrium lobby of the Lanka Hospitals, and even in the melee and behind double masks, I recognize the winner of the Gratiaen Prize for 2020. Now dealing with the aftermath of her Gratiaen success with her face splashed across the papers and online, and congratulatory calls flooding in, Dr Miranda (by profession a consultant anaesthetist) was far from confident she’d be graced with the laurels when she submitted her novel Crossmatch for the country’s most prestigious prize for creative writing in English last year.
The book did not seem to sit easy on the same shelf as the Sri Lankan writing appearing in the past ten to fifteen years dealing with sombre issues like Black July, the Tsunami or LGBTQIA problems, she felt.
She did not, however, think a book woven around a murder mystery would be at a disadvantage. She herself never considered the book a ‘whodunit’ as it addressed deeper issues (like how doctors sometimes see themselves as above the law) and besides, she says, it’s all a matter of “how you classify it.” Oliver Twist, a classic literary novel, has
“crime, violence, mystery, and a boy trying to find his origins.”
In the novel, medical student Lotus de Silva sets out on the trail of a poor boy dead in the hospital ICU, leading her to sleazy slums, Colombo 7 mansions, posh nursing homes and a central mystery to do with herself. Her life in the Medical Faculty provides scintillating content with colourful characters, from senior dons to medical attendants, making the novel a rich, riotously humorous but faithful evocation of the medical community in Sri Lanka and their foibles.
Entertaining and exciting with never a dull moment in the chase, the book is a must read for any Sri Lankan lover of crime writing, offering also an amusing cross section of Colombo from the cream to the base as it were.
A product of St. Bridget’s Convent and the Colombo Medical Faculty, Carmel delights in old fashioned suspense. It was a penchant from early childhood in Colombo where, as the bookworm of a family of four she used to hole up with Enid Blytons, Tin Tin and Asterix.
After becoming a doctor, she served in Anuradhapura and Colombo, then did her postgraduate studies in the UK, following which she worked in West Asia on and off. For the past 18 years Carmel has been a freelance anaesthetist.
While she loves Agatha Christie, the novel that prompted her to create a work of her own was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, set in the ancient briny windwhipped land of Cornwall. Rebecca begins bright and rosy but gradually “a sinister note is introduced into the story and you realize that something’s not quite right. That there’s something going onthere’s more to this than meets the eye.”
Carmel always wanted to write a book as dramatic and compelling as Rebecca.
She likes her mystery novels to be timbered with literature, as with writers like P. D. James or Josephine Tey whose prose was literary and poetic.
Crossmatch is packed with so much material that hardly a paragraph is dull. This is because Carmel pitched her ‘all’ into her first book: episodes from her own undergraduate days, things stored in her mental attic over a lifetime and experiences from over some 50 years. The book, three years in the writing, is saturated with all this so Carmel felt utterly ‘drained’ after writing.
It all began as a series of medical anecdotes. Carmel fictionalized snippets from her professional life and read them to the writing groups she had approached warily, almost sure they would find her writings boring.
However fellow writers at the Wadiya Group and Poetry P’lau were all captivated and asked her to keep coming out with more, encouraging her to go on so that she could, one day, publish them.
The characters in Crossmatch, including amateur sleuth Lotus, were not replicas of real people but more composite figures made from traits Carmel mixed and matched. “Any doctor reading the book will tell you, ‘my God I had a consultant who was just like that- who said those things’…”
She ruled out early the idea to have an anaesthetist as protagonist-sleuth, but occasionally there does appear an anaesthetist in Crossmatch who, unperturbed, does the Sudoku puzzle on a broadsheet newspaper even as there is mayhem all around her in the surgery- even while everyone is chasing a fly which had stolen into the surgical theatre.
This, Carmel was to find early on, is an uncanny trait in all who belong to her breed; even if “everything goes crazy around them” anaesthetists have the knack to “sit calmly and get on with it.”
Meanwhile, she hopes Crossmatch will change the popular notion of crime writing as a commercial or ‘subsidiary’ genre, a first step to have discerning mystery writing ushered into the realm of literature. And while for the moment she refrains from promising more, she says she does have a couple of vague inklings which ‘may or may not’ lead the tortuous way to a new book,