Vikas Swarup, the author of Q&A, the novel that became the critically acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire, has turned to writing crime fiction.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times calls his second novel, Six Suspects, "a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in" and adds “the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.”
In a starred review Booklist said “If Agatha Christie wrote a mystery about modern India, it might be something like this.”
Seven years ago, Vicky Rai, the playboy son of a government official murdered a waitress at a trendy restaurant in New Delhi simply because she refused to serve him a drink. Now Rai is dead, killed at a party to celebrate his acquittal. Six of the guests are discovered with guns in their possession – a corrupt bureaucrat, an American tourist, a stone-age tribesman, a Bollywood sex symbol, a mobile phone thief, and an ambitious politician – each as likely as the next to have pulled the trigger.
When asked, in an interview on the publisher’s website, about the comparisons to Christie he answers “I prefer to characterize it as a social thriller. It does begin with a murder and there is an investigation of sorts, but for me the murder is more interesting from a sociological rather than a forensic point of view.”
Swarup says his inspiration for its structure came from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and for its content, from real-life crimes in India including the Black Buck case and the Jessica Lall murder case.
For a little more armchair travel time in India, you might want to try three other recent releases.
In H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote’s First Case, a prequel to the popular series, newly promoted Ghote investigates a suicide case and becomes increasingly suspicious that the victim's husband is not telling the truth. The New York Times has called the detective “one of the great characters of the contemporary mystery novel.”
Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant introduces mustachioed Vish Puri, a respectable family man who styles himself as India's forefront private investigator. He mostly runs background checks for prospective brides and grooms until a lawyer who has brought cases against corrupt government officials retains Puri to find a maid, Mary, who has gone missing from his household – and whom he is suspected of killing. The Kirkus review raves “What Cara Black does for Paris, Hall achieves for India in this lively and quick-paced series debut.”
If noir fiction is more to your liking, try Delhi Noir, a collection of 14 stories, praised by Publishers Weekly for being “briskly paced, beautifully written and populated by vivid, original characters.”
