Is Indian crime fiction coming of age?

In Connaught Place, the heart of New Delhi, a literary festival took place at a prominent bookshop-cafe this weekend, called the Noir Literary Festival; it was actually the third annual Crime Writing Literary Festival, with a name change. There was no explanation for the change and perhaps it has to do with it being genre fiction. Though crime writing may have captured international glory (think Japan, Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain, the US, etc) in India it remains a mofussil cousin of literary fiction. Unlike other commercial fiction in India — old boys’ campus nostalgia, sterile romance, comainducing thrillers and fluffy chick-lit — crime writing in English has still not broken out, and is yet to crack India’s 11-per-cent-growth-per-annum books market. It’s a mystery.

I picked up my crime-fiction reading from my mother, who was a big fan of Agatha Christie and spent her afternoons in Bihar reading magazines like Manohar Kahaniyan (roughly translated, Engaging Tales) and Satya Katha (True Story), which were devoted to serialised pulpy crime stories, with lurid illustrations such as murdered housewives in petticoat-and-blouse. Such magazines are the descendants of the original serial thriller, Charles Dickens. The great chronicler of London was around when the Metropolitan Police set up a unit devoted solely to solving crimes that became known after the location of the unit — Scotland Yard. Dickens knew the Chief Inspector and other detectives and serialised their sensational cases in a magazine he launched, which helped in no small measure give Scotland Yard its enduring reputation.

When I was a crime reporter in Delhi for India’s biggest newspaper three decades ago, a trusted source was the Crime Branch chief and one afternoon I paid him a visit to find a reporter I did not recognise. He was not from any of the the other broadsheets or the three thin afternoon tabloids, or even from the English fortnightly or weekly newsmagazines. He turned out to be a writer from a pulp magazine, perhaps even Satya Katha though I’m not sure, and I was surprised not just to find someone who actually worked for one of those pulp magazines, it was also surprising that he didn’t ask the police officer for one of the high-profile cases that we in the broadsheets were chasing — he only wanted to flesh out the details of stories hidden away on the city pages, meriting only a paragraph or two: crimes of passion of ordinary people.

Anyone following the news in India knows that while political news is a big deal, it is domestic crime that has been a huge deal — the Aarushi murder case of 2008, where a 14-year-old girl in suburban Delhi was found in her bedroom with her throat slit, or Sheena Bora’s case in 2015, where a beautiful young woman was allegedly murdered by her famous parents and her corpse exhumed three years later.

Also, Indian languages feature successful crime serials or novels be it in Bengali, Tamil or Malayalam. Currently, 76-year-old Hindi writer Surender Mohan Pathak is enjoying the limelight: after having started his career in the 70s translating Ian Fleming’s and James Hadley Chase’s novels into Hindi, he began writing his own stuff — and has 300 potboilers to his name.

So it’s a surprise then that no crime novel has truly cracked the lucrative commercial market, and I tried to solve this mystery when I was invited to the Noir LitFest on the basis of my crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head having debuted last weekend. Crime writers had come from Australia, Norway and Italy, as well as from around India. The venerable Pathak was in attendance as well as one of my favourite Indian crime writers, Shashi Warrier, among others.

It isn’t that any of the Indian writers had gotten anything seriously wrong. They had differing approaches — some focused on the how-it-was-done rather than whodunit, though perhaps focusing too much on the puzzle risks having a story look and sound contrived (after all, you might have to work backwards and force your characters into situations they may naturally avoid). A friend felt his novel’s sales were tepid because he focused too much on the main character — a late 40s Bengali alcoholic woman cop — to the detriment of the mystery (I disagreed). Possibly today’s crime writers in India are watching too much Netflix; maybe they are too middle-class to travel to dark places. The other thing of course is that everyone tries to emulate Agatha Christie’s crime-solvers or Sherlock Holmes, but a cliché remains a cliché unless it is well-executed. Genre writing is necessarily guided by tropes so in the end it comes down to, unsurprisingly, strong story-telling.

At the end of the weekend LitFest I felt optimistic. If not this year then surely very soon, crime fiction in India will break out. There are more authors and publishers, so more readers are bound to follow. Pretty soon we’ll count among ourselves a Gillian Flynn, Henning Mankell, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Keigo Higashino, Arnaldur Indridasson, or even a Stieg Larsson.

I am optimistic. If not this year then surely very soon, crime fiction in India will break out. There are more authors, there are more publishers, and so more readers are bound to follow.