Though there is a huge Indian audience, there is also a sizeable expat readership interested in books of this kind, says Khanna. In fact, he is looking at the US and Canada. “We are still a young company and are having fights with the distributors about where the book should be available. We already have copies in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi, but there have been some problems with the books reaching Mumbai. I will be leaving for New York, California and Toronto soon. I hope the Indian readers out there like the book. There is a huge Sri Lankan population in Toronto, maybe they will also love Tamil pulp fiction.”

Blaft has plans to translate Urdu and Bengali crime fiction. “Well, we would like to get in touch with some writers of Urdu and Bengali spy novels. I would love to get the rights to the works of the prolific Urdu writer Ibn-e-Safi,” says Khanna. “He was famous 40-50 years ago. He would write about India and all the villains were goras. The Bengali spy novels that we are looking at are from Bangladesh.”
But as they search for new languages to translate, there was one case the publishing house had to solve. On page 325 of the anthology, along with the story A Murder and a Few Mysteries by Brajanand V.K., there is a paragraph about the author. And its last line reads, “The editor of this volume encourages the author to come forward and contact the publisher.”

On June 6, Brajanand V.K. contacted Blaft. “We were so excited. He is all of 18 years old and has been writing for the last three years. His father corrected us, saying his name is actually Prajanand. The boy lives in Coimbatore and it was his father who used to post his stories to publishing houses! We hope to meet him soon. We are holding a party for all the authors who could not make it to the launch in Chennai.”
Blaft has thus solved the case of the unknown author. And as it plans to have translations of writings in south Asian languages, comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, non-fiction, textbooks, how-to manuals, encyclopaedias, and kitchen appliances, all one can say to high-brow, English-literature lovers out there is “Mind it!”