Really cold cases

When we read a contemporary thriller, we make sure the back door is bolted and the balcony grill is locked. We jump at shadows. We leave the bathroom light on. But reading about a murder that took place in another century is less scary. When the character walking down a dark alley wears buttoned-up boots and swings her full skirts out of the path of a passing carriage, we are more detached. To truly chill our blood, she would have to be shadowed by Bill Sykes.

About a month ago I was in a mood for a retro thrill, something other than my well-thumbed Complete Sherlock Holmes. From the lending library I pulled out Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men, which was basically the conundrum of a murder inside a locked room. Then a Perry Mason from Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote a string of them, with alliterative characters from Anxious Aunts to Terrified Typists. It was full of old-fashioned foot chases, week-long stake-outs, sniping dialogue, and the beginnings of technology. Della Street’s “trained fingers whirled the dial with swift precision”. On a rotary telephone. Isn’t that sweet?

Then I went way back, before the trench coats and fedoras. The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits, which I happened on last month, has some big names and some modest writers who have much to be modest about.

Full report here Business Standard

Mystery of the missing Jasoos

It all began with Holmes of course. Though Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) can claim to have created the first detective in fiction, and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is regarded as the first modern detective novel, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes thrilled readers like no other. Agatha Christie's Poirot and Jane Marple, and PD James' Adam Dalgliesh followed the trail. Many decades later, these and a handful of other foreign classics — continue to fill the crime fiction racks here. No desi wannabe of The Great Detectives Club has ever managed to get a foot in the door.

It's not for want of trying. In the last couple of years, the genre of Indian crime fiction in English has seen many new titles. From Lalli of Kalpana Swaminathan's Page 3 Murders, additional sessions judge Harish Shinde in Aditya Sudharshan's A Nice Quiet Holiday and ACP Nikhil Juneja in Reeti Gadekar's Families at Home, to Shashi Warrier's Anna Khan in Sniper, the Indian jasoos is begging for a break. Ravi Singh, Penguin India editor-in-chief, says, "Compared to the near drought in previous years, there are now more crime and thriller writers, but the number is still small. And very few of them sell good numbers. Kalpana and Mukul Deva have been the notable successes in recent years."

Full report here Times of India

Schlock Holmes, ha, ha!

Is there an end to postmodern blurring of boundaries of author, narrator, detective, villain?

After retirement, Sherlock Holmes at age 89, moves from London to Sussex, and rooms in a house run by the wife of a Malayali pastor, The Reverend K.T. Panicker of the Church of England. Rev. Kumbhampoika Thomas Panicker is a high-church Anglican vicar who has lost his faith, and is riddled with doubts. He looks to this old lodger for clarity. This at least is how Michael Chabon imagines the great detective in his slender pastiche, The Final Solution. A mysterious mute boy turns up with a remarkable parrot that utters numbers in German, and the detective once again picks up his magnifying glass and the game is afoot, with Rev. Panicker as his Watson.

Many avatars
Concluding the case, the old man ponders over the meaning of detection: ‘ The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings – the discovery of the sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.' The recent movie Sherlock Holmes showed us (once again) that what endears us to Conan Doyle's creation is how Holmes can morph into whomever we want him to be, and wherever we want him to be. Tibet in Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes . Watching a cricket match in Bombay in Vithal Rajan's Holmes of the Raj , as he crosses paths with Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramanujan, Annie Besant, and Jinnah.

Full report here Hindu