It’s the most popular genre in the world. But why hasn’t the whodunit lured more Indian writers in english?
In the numbers of Agatha Christies that disappear off the shelves of bookshops across the country and the handful of Indian authors writing detective fiction, lies a mystery. You could call it The Case of the Missing Genre. We have cities teeming with crime, newspapers and television channels following murders with lurid drama and readers gorging on detective fiction. But where are the homegrown authors who walk into the bloody mess and walk away with clever, intricate murder plots?

This year, Vikas Swarup took the Jessica Lall murder case and made a Six Suspects out of it. Reeti Gadekar’s Families at Home came out of the obscenely corrupt world that you recognize from newspaper headlines. The plot: the murder of the daughter of a Delhi industrialist, which no one wants resolved. Later this year, you get acquainted with Aditya Sudarshan’s detective Judge Harish Shinde in his debut novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday. What about a detective story told as a graphic novel? Tejas Modak’s Private Eye Anonymous: The Art Gallery Case about a “bumbling” sleuth in the bewildering world of fake paintings.

Neither Swarup, nor Gadekar’s work will make you curl up in bed and spend a night turning pages. Swarup’s rambling novel and his cardboard characters miss the mark by far; the plot becoming the structure on which to string together clichéd tirades against the shining, venal India. Families at Home’s protagonist ACP Nikhil Juneja has potential but is let down by the author. They are not alone.

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