Queens without crowns

Well researched, this book is a tribute to the women who have made significant inroads into Mumbai's criminal underbelly.

Mafia Queens of Mumbai 
Stories of Women from
the Ganglands
S.Hussain Zaidi, Jane Borges
Tranquebar Press
Rs 250; Pp 308
ISBN 9789380283777
Paperback

It couldn't get feistier than this you think on reading the title and immediately conjure up images of gorgeous molls lolling on the arms of cigar-puffing villains sporting mismatched shoes. But Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands is nothing like what you'd expect. A cool clinical tribute to the women who made significant inroads into the infamous arena of Mumbai's criminal underbelly, the extensively researched work of journalists S. Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges, besides enlightening one on the ways of lady gangsters, informs, enthrals and very frequently chills the reader down to his bone-marrow.

No stereotypes
There are no stereotypes in the world of crime, it is established at the every onset, and not every woman criminal is pushed into crime by unfortunate circumstances (as generally depicted in movies and literature). Some women are born to crime, some others chase it relentlessly and yet some others have crime thrust on them. And then there are those others who choose to channel their genius towards darker goals for the sheer adrenalin rush it entails. Thus we have the imperturbable Lallan Bhabhi, a cog in the petrol adulteration cartel, Sapna Didi, a rare woman who had the guts to stand up to Dawood Ibrahim, liquor queen Jenabai Daaruwali and the iconic brothel madam, Gangubai Kathiawadi. A rare touch given by the authors is the perennial riches-to-rags possibility hovering over each head and which seems to deter not a single of these women. As Zaidi and Borges lead one down the dark dinghy alleys of Dongri, Bhendi Bazaar, Nagpada, Dharavi and Mumbra, it becomes difficult to forget characters like the dainty bereaved Ashraf who turns into a gun-toting avenger, the charismatic Gangubai who lights up the streets of Kamathipura with a rare dignity or the bootlegging aunties. There is no attempt to romanticise the real-life stories or add unnecessary embroidery for added texture. Consequently, there is an element of starkness, a bleakness of approach that is very brave, yet strangely unsettling for the reader. One wishes the authors had added further dimensions by a deeper exploration of the complexities within each character. Some of the motives and choices made by the protagonists remain fuzzy and perplexing to the very end.

Firebrand unveiled

A sincere portrayal of the bandit queen's life, one that empathises with the subject.

Outlaw: India's Bandit Queen
and Me; Roy Moxham
Rider; Rs.599

Inspired by a newspaper article about a young woman forced into banditry by her circumstances and now languishing in an Indian prison without the benefit of a trial, a London-based archive restorer wrote her “a letter of support”, offering help with her legal fees. A fortnight later, he received a reply in Hindi, dictated by the woman who was illiterate. He had the letter translated and wrote to her again. The thread of communication thus established would grow into an unlikely friendship between two individuals from disparate worlds.

Though Roy Moxham and Phoolan Devi had little in common, their rapport was instant when they met following her release from jail. Disarmed by her warmth, the diffident Englishman would end up as her guest on that particular occasion and on subsequent ones, sportingly adapting himself to her chaotic household of numerous and noisy family members. It was a golden opportunity to observe the former bandit at close quarters.

Full review here Hindu

No game for knights

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, introduced in The Big Sleep, has defined all private detectives in fiction.

Trench-coated masculinity: Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall in the film version of The Big Sleep

“The most durable thing in writing is style and style is the most important investment a writer can make with his time,” said novelist Raymond Chandler and certainly he practised what he preached. His 1939 novel The Big Sleep, the first — though certainly not the last — of his that I have read is so steeped in style that it crackles. Having tried his hand, with varying degrees of lack of success, at the civil service, journalism, stringing tennis racquets, picking fruit and book-keeping, Chandler turned to writing private detective stories for pulp magazines and after six years of maturing produced The Big Sleep. With that he created the archetypal private detective in Philip Marlowe, who along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, has defined all private detectives produced in fiction since. All the cool, laconic, tough men with an often surprising sense of right and wrong; to the extent that even Ian Fleming can be counted among his admirers.

Set in Los Angeles of the 1930s, The Big Sleep depicts a dark and uncertain world, a world of pornographers and gamblers, operating under the protective eye of crooked law officers, a world of blackmail, double-crossing and killing. And of course, blondes. (A famous Chandler quote: “I do a lot of research- particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.”) A corrupt, morally decayed world where love rings hollow and glamour only hides ugliness. Into such a world steps the “painfully” honest, hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe, with his eagle eye and somewhat anachronistic sense of ethics.

Full report here Hindu

HarperCollins secures world Agatha Christie rights

HarperCollins has signed a deal with the estate of Agatha Christie to become the crime author's exclusive worldwide English language publisher.

The deal, signed for a seven figure sum and announced this morning on the 120th anniversary of her birth, secures all global publishing rights, including digital and audio formats, to the publisher for the next 10 years. Previously Penguin and St Martin's Press had been publishing Christie in the US. Collins has published Agatha Christie since The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was first published in 1926.

Brian Murray, president and c.e.o., HarperCollins Worldwide, said: "Agatha Christie Ltd and HarperCollins have worked together to build her into one of world’s bestselling authors. In the last ten years alone, we have doubled her sales across the globe and have catapulted her to a top-ten English language author in India, a market where we believe, she can only continue to grow. This new deal will enable us to take the brand to even greater heights in the decades ahead."

Victoria Barnsley, c.e.o. and publisher, HarperCollins UK and International, said: "Agatha Christie has now become a global brand, embodying a certain quintessentially British style. In this the 120th year since her birth, in a rapidly changing world, we are keen to publish her work in all formats, everywhere in the globe, to consolidate her position as the world’s most popular author."

Full report here Bookseller

The world of underworld

Aabid Surti's “Sufi – the Invisible Man of the Underworld” gives an insightful account of Mumbai's underworld

The success of the recently released Once Upon A Time in Mumbai is still fresh in our minds. What made it impressive was the story behind the making of the smugglers of Bombay of the 1970s — now called underworld dons. The era of the '70s saw the height of gold smuggling, and names like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Yusuf Patel and Vardabhai emerged as famous gangsters.

Aabid Surti's Sufi – The Invisible Man of the Underworld, just published by Diamond Pocket Books, compassionately tells the story of the making of Mumbai's organised crime world.

“Sufi…” is actually a biography that the 78-year-old author prefers to call a ‘jugalbandi' with Iqbal Rupani (alias Sufi) — a dreaded name in the Bombay underworld but a devout Muslim. Both grew up in the dark alleys of Dongri — the centre of smuggling activities in the '70s — and saw “how people like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Yusuf Patel and other dons progressed step-by-step and how poor Muslims turned to crime, apart from the nexus between politicians and criminals,” says the author. The 410-page book covers the period between 1935 and 1965 and “all the characters and their names are true”, he asserts. ”I am aware of that life as I have grown up in that ghetto where I have seen Karim Lala as the supreme don, Haji Mastan moving up the ladder and Dawood Ibrahim playing gulli-danda with other kids,” says Surti who, like the above mentioned names came from an extremely poor family who could barely manage two meals a day.

Full review here Hindu

Medley of murders

This is the second book in the DI Stacey Collins series, the first being Fallen Angel. It’s a gritty psychological crime thriller set in London against the backdrop of vast crime-ridden housing estates, drug wars and dysfunctional families. Collins herself is a single mother of a teenage daughter as a result of a youthful fling with a boy who’s grown up to be a gang lord, and who is still very much around and determined to be a dad.

Scent of a Killer; Kevin Lewis
Penguin UK, Rs 299, pp. 464  

The book opens with her being investigated by her superiors who want to know how close she is to this man, who has been giving her minor tips about the underworld. Collins’s domestic problems are compounded by the hunt for a serial killer who seems to want to do good: at first the murderer only targets former or current paedophiles. However, nothing is as it seems, and Collins is drawn deeper into the net of deceit that the killer weaves around her.

Kevin Lewis knows his craft: the book never flags, and you’ll have no trouble sticking with it till the very last page. He doesn’t waste energy on literary flourishes, but this also means that his prose is sometimes rather flat.

Full report here Deccan Chronicle 

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

What Indians can’t write–and why

There are three kinds of fiction that Indian writers can’t write: good crime thrillers, good romance (adult kind, in which sex is not “lofty breasts” and “stars in the sky”) and fiction for young adults. So that leaves us readers with literary fiction, pulp fiction and of course, the ubiquitous campus novel. By the way, a really cool crime title which Hachette India is publishing is by Lounge columnist, the more Bangalorean-and-less-Swedish writer Zac O’Yeah. His book ‘Scandanavistan’ is a spy thriller set in a futuristic Europe colonized by India!

When  I last visited my favourite bookstore Landmark (finally, Landmark opens this side of town, in Lower Parel), Martin Amis, Susan Sontag and Vikram Seth sat alongside each other in the literary fiction shelves. The new releases section had a dizzying variety of books. There was no separate section for cime, but in popular fiction, there was Swedish fiction, Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre. The only Indian authors here was Kalpish Ratna—they never got to me although their crime stories are soaked in very local Bombay flavours.

There was no category for young adults. In the children’s books section, there was the phenomenally successful ‘Twilight’ series and the usual sci-fi and fantasy titles. What do teenagers and young adults who don’t like sci-fi or fantasy or love stories revolving handsome vampires, read?

Full report here Mint

Sniffing out crime

Zac O' Yeah on two freshly translated thrillers from either side of the border — one by the king of Hindi crime fiction and the other by the king of Urdu detective stories.

If there are literary seasons, then I guess the current is one of the hottest in a long time. A thriller from the king of Hindi crime fiction, Surender Mohan Pathak, and a mystery from the king of Urdu detective stories, Ibn-e Safi, both freshly translated, arrived on my desk in one parcel tied together with a piece of string, almost like two handcuffed goondas.


Daylight Robbery
Surender Mohan Pathak, Translated by Sudarshan Purohit
Blaft, 2010,
pp 236, Rs 195

Daylight Robbery, with its attractive pulp cover by legendary Shelle Studio, is the second title by Pathak to be translated into crisp, hardboiled English by Sudarshan Purohit. Already last year I’d been bowled over by The 65 Lakh Heist and I am glad to hear that the series will continue with at least one more translation, the shortly forthcoming Fortune’s Ransom.

These three belong in the ‘Vimal Series’. The story goes that Pathak had written 40 novels about a crime-solving journalist called Sunil, a good guy, but needed a different hero to fit more sordid plot ideas. So he created Vimal, who was framed by his wife and her lover, put in jail on charges of embezzlement, and escaped to become a wanted criminal. The book flopped.

Full report here Deccan Herald

To each his own

The British Council's Lit Sutra initiative saw crime novelist Mark Billingham and fantasy fiction writer China Mieville work up a delightful, laughter-filled conversation.

A crime writer who's also a stand-up comic; a fantasy fiction writer who's also a left-wing political activist. Put them together in a room and what do you get.

A rapid-fire, roller-coaster conversation on everything from avant-garde fiction to rakshasas and assorted monsters, the induction ceremony to Agatha Christie's Detection Club to falling anvils in Tom & Jerry cartoons.Best-selling crime novelist Mark Billingham and fantasy fiction writer China (his parents were hippies and named him after a popular Cockney slang term!) Mieville from the U.K. were recently in Chennai as part of British Council's Lit Sutra initiative.

Lively, opinionated and articulate, the two quite literally talked up a storm, first during an interview at the British Council and then again at the public event at Landmark.

Full report here Hindu

Tell tales

From comedian to crime writer, Mark Billingham’s life has been an absorbing journey

For British crime author Mark Billingham, a story can come from anywhere— from a newspaper report, to life around him and of course, “his own twisted imagination”. “Being an ardent crime reader, I keep in mind what my reader would like to pore over. So the plot takes shape, without any pretermined plans,” says Billingham. He was in the city’s British Library as part of Lit Sutra: UK-India Literary Conversations, where he spoke on The Detective and the Criminal Mind.

Born and brought up in Birmingham, Billingham’s life has followed an interesting curve, from a sought after stand-up comedian to an actor and now a highly successful crime writer. His debut novel was called Sleepyhead, which introduced the London-based police procedural series, featuring Inspector Tom Thorne and his team of inner-city cops.

Since then, there have been half a dozen Thorne novels, the latest being Death Message, which deals with the dark side of text messaging. “The idea is to create characters who engross, engage and create suspense. A twist in the tale is paramount and one of the most interesting aspects of a crime novel,” he adds. At present, Billingham is at work on a series of thrillers for children.

Full report here Indian Express

They did it

Very few crime novels have been written in English in India, but it is a relief to know that the genre has been thriving in other languages. Coincidentally, two publishers, Blaft and Random House India, have brought out two very different books — one by well known Urdu writer Ibn-e Safi, and the other by famous Hindi author Surender Mohan Pathak.

Translations are usually very tough — and it is remarkable how well Pathak’s novel Daylight Robbery reads in English. The pace is racy, the tone is just right. Pathak himself has said in a recent interview that he does not believe in long passages of description and, therefore, the book is a page-turner with tightly written action. The book succeeds because it quickly taps into our psyche, peopled as it is with characters we are familiar with from Indian cinema. Even the book cover luridly acknowledges it, with bare-bosomed babes, racing trucks and masked men. This is unadulterated literary kitsch heaven and one reads Pathak with a relaxed sense of fun. There is no struggle with graceful or elegant prose out here — rather, the testosterone directly injected into the writing throws us back to an era when we read James Hadley Chase in which, as they say, men were men and women were, well, women.

Full report here Indian Express

Women more drawn to tales of rape, murder

Women are more likely than men to pick up books with tales of rape, murder and serial killers, a new study has found.

Many people might assume that men, being the more aggressive sex, would be most likely to find such gory topics interesting.

However, it’s the fairer sex that finds such books appealing and what makes these books appealing to women are relevant in terms of preventing or surviving a crime

For example, by understanding why an individual decides to kill, a woman can learn the warning signs to watch for in a jealous lover or stranger. By learning escape tips women learn survival strategies they can use if actually kidnapped or held captive.

Full report here Times of India

REVIEW: Witness the Night

REVIEW

Witness the Night
Kishwar Desai
HarperCollins
Rs. 250
Pp 256
ISBN: 9788172239220
Paperback

Blurb
Durga. A fourteen-year-old girl, found all alone in a sprawling farm house tucked away in a corner of Punjab. Silent, terrified, and the sole suspect in the mass murder of thirteen members of her family. Simran. Whisky-swigging, chain-smoking unmarried social worker from Delhi. She is Durga’s only hope, for Simran is the only one who believes that Durga may be more a victim than a suspect. As Simran tries to explore every corner of Jullundar and its people, from the enigmatic tutor Harpreet and his disfigured wife to the pictureperfect high-society Arminder and her superintendent husband Ramnath, she delves deeper and deeper into a cruel world where even the ties of family are meaningless. It isn’t long before she realizes that nothing is quite as it seems.

Reviews
Behind the Sweetness and light Telegraph 
I cannot get over the shock and surprise I got while reading the novel. I have known Kishwar over many long years. She is always giggling, laughing and congenitally cheerful. I did not suspect that behind the façade of light-heartedness was concealed a morbid mind deeply concerned with the sordid realities of our lives. Highly readable.

Dreams die very young Financial Express
The passion reflects in the writing, and the tale was so clear that she finished writing it in a just a month. And, no, Desai did not provide the plot to the girl in Haryana, who in September last year was accused to killing seven members of her family, a narrative eerily similar to hers. “I almost passed out on reading that,” she says, shaking her head.

A Time to Kill Indian Express
Anger is essential to the book: Witness the Night begins with the protagonist Durga’s diary entries, describing the aftermath of the murders. Durga is writing an account for Simran Singh, a Delhi-based chain-smoking, whiskey drinking social worker who believes in her innocence and must unravel the events before the murders to get to the truth.