How to write a crime masterpiece

Sacred Games is a labour of love, or perhaps hate; a reaction to the scraps that Chandra’s relatives in Bollywood have got into with the Mumbai underworld

Perhaps the greatest crime novels of the 21st century will be written by Indians. “Great” is certainly an accurate description of the 900-page Sacred Games, a masterpiece of early 21st century literature.

Let’s take a closer look at how Vikram Chandra wrote his manifold narrative, so impeccably woven around two antagonists—a slightly corrupt police inspector and a don with a karmic bend—who, with elegant plot symmetry, mirror one another and are inextricably linked in a web of brutality, but also love.

Sacred Games is a labour of love, or perhaps hate; a reaction to the scraps that Chandra’s relatives in Bollywood have got into with the Mumbai underworld. They were targeted by extortionists and even shot at. As a writer, Chandra, an aficionado of crime fiction, takes pleasure in utilizing the genre’s tropes.

Full report here Mint