There's hunt for fresh blood across India, Sweden, even Germany. Crime fiction in English is bigger than ever, and translations of Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali stories are piquing the urban reader's curiosity. Janaki Viswanathan says there's more blood to come
There's hunt for fresh blood across India, Sweden, even Germany. Crime fiction in English is bigger than ever, and translations of Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali stories are piquing the urban reader's curiosity. Janaki Viswanathan says there's more blood to come
Crime authors claim there isn't any room for them in literary fiction. "We're the smokers hanging outside the literary building, so to speak," said Scottish novelist and comic book author Denise Mina at a bookstore event in the city. No matter what the literary classes think, Indian readers dote on their crime authors -- more so now. Why else would we play host to British crime fiction authors (Mina, Mark Billingham and Ian Rankin), invite them to literary festivals, or plan a Swedish crime week? The Indian reader is waking up again to gunshots, blood and mystery.
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Jeyaraj, who has been an illustrator for Tamil magazines and comic books
for over 50 years, illustrates a pulp fiction crime scene exclusively for Sunday MiDDAY.
Most recently, he illustrated the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction
Sivaraman Balakrishnan, deputy manager, marketing, Crossword confirms that the demand for crime fiction has shot up recently. "In 2009, crime fiction accounted for 24 per cent of our fiction sales." Winners include Ian Rankin, David Baldacci, Michael Connolly, James Patterson, Sandra Brown and of course, Agatha Christie who sold a neat 22,000 copies. The market expanded a couple of years ago, with the introduction of the Agatha Christie graphic novels by Euro Books.
Westland recently released Piggies On The Railway a whodunit by Smita Jain. "We sold 5,000 copies in three weeks, and are going for a reprint," says Jain with a smile.
Thomas Abraham, managing director, Hachette India, says thrillers fell from popularity in the 1970s and early 80s. "That's why the household names are fewer in this area than there should be," he says.
Saloni Zaveri-Ahluwalia, public relations officer at the Swedish Embassy says Scandinavian and particularly Swedish crime has become "wildly popular," and has turned into a brand in fact. As is the case with other pop culture trends, this too is a result of US and UK markets driving it first. "Publishers are aware that India is the third largest market for English books, so they've done a great job of promoting the books here."
The Betel-Nut Killers' author Manisha Lakhe believes it was the untimely death of Swedish journalist and author Stieg Larsson (Millennium trilogy), that fuelled the interest. "It's unfortunate but he died under mysterious circumstances, and didn't live to see what a sensation his books have become. That helped the boom," she says.
Debanjan Chakrabarti, head of inter-cultural dialogue, British Council, feels the recent economic recession played its role. People began reading more crime fiction since these books worked as a coping mechanism, an outlet for anger. "They are not pretty, they are hard, nasty and hold up a mirror to society," he says.
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Publishers hunting for gore
With publishers like Westland on the lookout for new talent in crime fiction, the authors say macabre is turning mirthful. "Crime's great fun, especially if you can get away with it!" laughs Lakhe. "All of us have at some point wanted to kill someone. One ride in Mumbai's local trains and you come face to face with violence," she says.
Jain tells you how initially publishers and readers too were looking for the 'great Indian novel'. "Now there's a plethora of daily-life books. MBA-lit, chick-lit, dude-lit, you name it. But everyone loves a good whodunit, especially one in which they can't figure out who the criminal is till the very end," says the Mumbai-based author who also wrote the screenplay for the second edition of popular TV detective series Karamchand.
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Jain took on crime when she realised that India doesn't have a good crime series, a handy tip from her editor.
She is currently working on the sequel to her first novel, Kkrishna's Konfessions, which she calls a chick-lit-crime novel, and will soon continue the Kasthuri Kumar (Piggies On The Railway) detective series.
Crime in translation
Regional crime has remained popular for year, although quietly. "Regional crime fiction never went out of style but we're just waking up to it," says Lakhe. Kaveri Lalchand, co-founder, Blaft Publishing should know. The Chennai-based publishing house was launched with a translation of Tamil pulp fiction. Lalchand found a large void in Tamil translation -- it was either serious novels or ancient texts -- and found a winner in the "racy, fantasy-based fun stories". Telugu-reading audiences would obviously know of Madhubabu, who created the detective series, Shadow. Bengali crime had its own Baker Street thanks to Darogar Doptor, Byomkesh Bakshi and of course, Feluda.
Lakhe grew up on a healthy dose of Enid Blyton's amateur crime-fighting heroes and Marathi pulp. "Shrikant Sinkar wrote a brilliant series based on real cases solved by the Mumbai police," she remembers.
In the last two years, two more translations from Hindi pulp, The 65 Lakh Heist and Daylight Robbery (by Surendar Mohan Pathak) were published by Blaft. Though the print runs of 5,000 copies are far smaller than the 50,000 print runs of the Hindi originals, more books fly off the shelves as word spreads among English readers.
Lalchand calls Pathak the 'best-selling author you've never heard of.' "His stories are incredible, the plots and pace, brilliant. He spends eight months out of the year researching the novels, and just four actually writing them. So all the places he mentions actually exist," she says. Blaft will soon release translations of Ibne Safi's Urdu crime series, Jasoosi Duniya.
Random House India also released Ibn-e-Safi's Imran series this year. Chiki Sarkar, editor in chief, points to translations of regional pulp as the latest trend, rather than an upsurge in the genre itself.
Crime is back on TV too
Crime isn't just making a comeback on bookshelves. It's creeping into televisiion schedules too. Producer Ekta Kapoor's next on television is a detective series, Keshav Pandit, based on Ved Prakash Sharma's Hindi series.
Star World has just launched Castle, about an out-of-inspiration crime novelist who attaches himself to a female cop's team so he can get ideas. Jyotsna Viriyala, GM, Star World and Star Movies, says, "Viewers have always had a huge appetite for crime, especially crime laced with humour, chemistry and possible romance." 
Star World's just-launched crime series Castle is about a crime novelist who
joins a policewoman on her investigations, so he can think up new plots
More blood to come?
The Swedish Embassy had to cancel the Swedish Crime Week scheduled for last month in Mumbai, thanks to the volcanic ash mishap, but Ahluwalia assures us that the plans aren't cancelled for good. "We are planning to bring down several Swedish authors over the next few years," she says. Hachette too have several new crime novels in the offing, including Andy McDermott's Vault of Shiva, Jed Rubenfeld's new book The Death Instinct and John Grisham's Theodore Boone. Blaft is coming up with the third translation of Pathak's Hindi novel, Fortune's Ransom. And it's not just crime fiction that Blaft and other English publishers are getting more interested in. There's a wide variety of genres spanning science fiction, fantasy, slipstream -- all sometimes discussed under the umbrella category 'speculative fiction.' There's even something called 'irrealist fiction'.
Lalchand says, "Kuzhali Manickavel describes some of the stories in her book, Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings as irrealist. We're notu00a0 sure what it means, but we like it."
Know your crime heroes
Hercule Poirot
Creator: Agatha Christie
Let's make it very clear. He isn't French, he's Belgian. Poirot is hardly the handsome, suave detective; he's all about the psychology of the criminal.
Must read: Cards on The Table. One night, two rooms, a dinner party with nine people and a murdered host.
Sherlock Holmes
Creator: Arthur Conan Doyle
He relies on the powers of deduction. And while he may sit for hours deliberating on matters, he also steps out in disguises that bewilder buddy Dr Watson. Must read: Five Orange Pips. Three mysterious deaths in one family are related to the Ku Klux Klan.
James Bond
Creator: Ian Fleming
He loves his gadgets, his clothes, his women and his Martini. Her Majesty's secret agent 007 has the perfectly unrealistic high-flying spy life.
Must read: From Russia With Love. The Soviet plots to kill Bond in the worst possible manner. Of course, they fail. But find out how.
Feluda
Creator: Satyajit Ray
This tall, impressive detective scours the streets of Kolkata fighting crime with his young cousin Topshe and/or writer friend Jatayu for company.
Must read: Tintorettor Jishu -- a chase for a stolen Italian painting takes Feluda all the way to Hong Kong.
Tintin
Creator: Herge
The Belgian boy-man with a gravity-defying shock of blonde hair is a globe-trotting reporter with his fox terrier Snowy for company. And Captain Haddock and Thomson & Thompson.
Must read: Cigars of The Pharaoh. Tintin goes looking for the tomb of Pharaoh Kih-Oskh.
The handbook
How to figure sub-genres of crime fiction
Whodunnit
The puzzle is the focus of the plot. Readers are given clues to work out the mystery.
Read: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Hardboiled
It doesn't empathise or paint rosy pictures. This is sex and violence at its most feral.
Read: The Colarado Kid by Stephen King
Forensic
A closer examination of dead bodies, blood and bones. Usually involves a forensic doctor.
Read: 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs
Conspiracy
Spy novels usually involving America and Russia or more recently, the Middle East, and of course, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Read: Blowback by Mukul Deva
Legal
In and out of a courtroom involving lawyers, judges and cases. It isn't all formal and clean lines, though. It can get dirty too.
Read: Primal Fear by William Diehl
Scandinavian
The crime fiction that comes from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and of course, Sweden.
Read: The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson
Police Procedural
The hero is usually a scruffy cop, and fingerprinting, questioning and FIRs are mainstays.
Read: Ed McBain's 87th Preccint series
Classic crime
Novels which were mostly penned between World Wars I & II, these usually followed a pattern where an outsider, usually a gifted amateur, solved a crime.
Read: Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Literary detectives
The slightly surreal novels which feature real-life characters as fictional ones, Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud to name a couple.
Read: The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
Paranormal
Vampires don't just figure in gooey romances; they face slayers in police squads too.
Read: Anita Blake's Vampire Hunter series
Crime celeb
The grandmom of crime fiction is a hot-seller
Agatha Christie is still one of the most popular authors in the genre. Last year, her books sold 22,000 copies at one Indian bookstore chain alone
Random House India is soon to publish more translations of the Urdu originals of Ibn E Safi's Imran series. Born in 1928 in India, Safi's Jasoosi Duniya and the Imran series became cult classics. Agatha Christie called him 'the only original writer' of detective novels in the subcontinent
Vampires are going to be the next hot trend
Has crime always been a popular genre in England and Scotland?
There is no real tradition of the crime novel in Scotland. For a long time, the English crime novel was dominated by amateur detectives, usually middle-class ladies or upper-class gentlemen who used their intelligence to solve cases that the real police were too stupid to solve. These books were very popular, but I think my own crime novels come from different traditions -- namely, the gothic Scottish novel (Jekyll and Hyde; Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner); and also the hard-boiled urban crime fiction from the USA.
From what you hear from publishers, which part of the world enjoys crime fiction?
My biggest foreign-language market is Germany --u00a0 they love crime novels there! My books also sell very well in Scandinavia. I am popular in Canada and Australia, and the books are translated into 35 languages. The Complaints was a Number 1 bestseller in the UK in its hardcover version. It has not been released in paperback yet, so I don't know whether it will prove to be as popular as my John Rebus novels.
What is it about this genre that excites people?
Crime fiction seems to be more popular than ever.u00a0 Why? I'm not sure. Maybe because the best crime novels tell us something about ourselves. They explore the darker side of the human condition.u00a0 They are also exciting to read, and they show us new cultures and places.
If I want to know about Spain or the USA or Australia, the crime writers of those countries will tell me quite a lot.u00a0 The best crime fiction is every bit as serious in intent as literary fiction. But crime fiction is not so insular or backward-looking -- it deals with contemporary people in contemporary cultures up against contemporary issues and problems.
What do you think is the next book genre that readers, writers and publishers ought to watch out for?
Young readers seem to be very interested in vampires right now, so perhaps the good old-fashioned horror novel is due for some increased interest.
'Yes, crime fiction is a rage in Sweden'
Eva Gedin, publisher, fiction, Norstedts Books, publishers of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy
Has the interest in crime fiction escalated?
I'd say it has stayed very stable. I can only talk from the Swedish perspective, and yes, crime novel sales did escalate six to eight years ago and everyone thought it was peaking. But since then it has stayed on a high level.
Why do you think that is?
It's a bit like the Bjor Borg-phenomenon (in tennis); if you get some very good tennis players/ crime writers, others get inspired and start training hard. After a while, you have a lot of very good tennis players/crime fiction writers.
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How many copies of Larsson's trilogy have you sold so far, worldwide?
More than 26 million copies have been sold across 44 countries.
In a state of nature
A short story exclusively for Sunday Mid Day by Scottish crime writer Denise Mina
Isabella had an unusual stare. He commented on it when they first met. Her eyes, he said, didn't flicker around a room like a nervous fly. They were still, focused on him, oblivious movement in her peripheral vision. She had a perfect stillness about her and he loved it.u00a0 
Men had loved her lithe body and fire red hair before. They had fallen in love with her elegant hands and eyes as green as an Irish hillside but never the stillness. They didn't realise that she had it and she credited him with noticing. What she loved about him was his money and his hypnotic gut. It was beautiful. It hung like a mournful chin over his Gucci belt and when he lay on his side it fell like a gravel landslide onto the bed. It symbolised everything she cherished in him: his prosperity, his taste for excess, the steep ratio of their relative attractiveness. But now he was missing.
It had been five entire days, long enough for a body to melt into the ground in wet heat like this, even a body as lush and full as Jurgen's. He had hired a car and they set off for a small settlement near a large waterfall. They stopped for gas in the middle of the jungle and Isabella went to use the facilities. When she returned to the car, moments later, Jurgen was gone.
The Mikumi police were very interested. A tourist missing on safari was bad for business. Any suggestion of a violent attack could endanger the future of the resort. They questioned every single person in the hotel, giving the staff from the petrol station a particularly hard time. The police chief smiled and told her proudly that one man lost a finger during questioning, as if the digit had simply dropped off and rolled under the table. He smiled when he told her. They would never find him, though, she felt sure. They were keen but incompetent. They didn't know how to question people, only beat them.
There were bad gangster men in the bush, they told her, men from Mozambique who came over the border at night and would kill a tourist for fun. She was very, very lucky she was out of the car, they said, or she would certainly have suffered the same sad fate. The only trace they found of Jurgen were the marks of a scuffle in the deep red soil nearby. It looked as if he had put up a struggle. The ravine nearby was too deep to climb into and was covered over with tall trees so that a helicopter could not search it.
The Tree Hotel staff wanted to know that she would be able to pay the bill if the fat man never came back: it was the most expensive hotel in the entire national park. She could pay, easily. Jurgen had given her four cards of her own, paid off at the end of every month by his estate. If he had lived he might have married her and she would have had everything. He was the kindest man she had ever been with. Isabella had been the trophy of a lot of men: bankers from Frankfurt, futures traders in London, once an art gallery owner in New York. In the late nineties, she had done the Lebanese businessman circuit, working her way through three of them, all of them related, cousins or something, all based in Paris.
She had come from London originally. The first man found her walking along the street, on her way to school in Hammersmith. He stopped his Jaguar and asked the sixteen year old whether she would like to visit Texas. He took her to a dress shop she had never heard of and bought her clothes in colours that made her beautiful. She was tall already and he picked high heels for her, five pairs. They hurt her feet and cut her heels but she never had to walk very far.
She sent her mother and father a postcard from Austin. Don't worry, mum, I am here with a friend. They wouldn't have worried anyway. It was more for his benefit than theirs. He cared for her. Very soon he forgot that he had picked her up in the street and formed her. He fell in love with her, with her quietness. She wasn't like the others, he said, he couldn't figure her out. She smiled but felt nothing for him. His face was starting to irritate her. His earnestness was grating. He looked at her too much, when she was sleeping or watching TV, she would feel itchy little eyes on her and turn to find him staring.
She left him in Miami, in a perfect hotel on the sea-front with a giant purple Bougainvillea slung like a feather boa across the white stucco wall.
Then there was another man. She met him in New York and they travelled to Brazil. She didn't remember leaving him but she knew that she did. She always left them. Two men later, she hardly remembered their names.
She developed a wardrobe of her own, a taste of her own. She kept a flat in Rome and had developed a placeless pan-European accent. She met other women who like to meet the same kinds of men and supposed they were her friends. Friends of a kind. And the men came and went, came and went. She had never worked a day.
Some of the women friends worked. Some were models but mostly they were like her: beautiful enough to take the breath from a man's body but plain on camera. Tall enough to model was too tall in real life, thin enough to model was too thin. The men didn't like that, it made them feel predatory and, although they were, they didn't like to feel that they were. They used the women for pleasure and paid them with cars and houses and cards, until they grew bored or the women lost their looks or charm.
She could only remember her men fondly. Leaving them was never an act of spite or hate. It was always done in a burst of ennui. They were all kind to her in their way. But Jurgen, fat roly- poly baby, was kinder to her than any of them. Jurgen loved her but didn't stare at her, he didn't paw her when she was reading. He let her choose her own clothes. He allowed her the choice in whether she went to parties with him or not.
She stayed on at the Tree Hotel for an extra week, hoping somehow that he would come back but knowing in her heart that he wouldn't. The hotel was built on stilts in the National Park, high in the red trees with green leaves all around them and the red fired earth below. There were only four rooms. Each night's stay cost more than the average person made per year in the region. Or was it the country? She couldn't remember.
Everyone came to the breakfast room. It was open on three sides and the park wardens scattered meat and fruit on the ground in the morning. The approaching whoop and gobble of the mangabey monkeys would wake up anyone still asleep, luring them to the breakfast room for a vision of white-lidded eyes and long snouts peering through the undergrowth below. There were other animals too but she was only interested in the meat eaters and hunters. Jurgen had booked a night safari the night before he disappeared. They were supposed to go on it together.
The residents of the Tree Hotel had changed since he went missing. When he was with her there had been a small woman and her tall husband, both Finnish, an academic couple from Louisiana, a military man from Senegal who talked endlessly about the high price of everything, there with a young woman who never spoke. Since Jurgen, there were new people, a bald man and his wife who was ill and smelled of medicine. A chatty retired woman academic from North Carolina who was so wizened from sun exposure that her face looked like a little walnut. A gay couple from Paris, men, who wanted to be friends with her because she was beautiful and sad and cried every night when she was alone. They could hear her. She would have to leave soon.
She planned to go back to Rome, alone again, but she would move soon. She would sell up and go without seeing her women friends. Perhaps Moscow for a while, there was a lot of money there and it would be easy to get lost. She wanted to be lost. She wanted to move fast enough to out-run memories of Jurgen and Miami and Brazil and all the departures and the mess and the nothing. The nothing upset her more than anything else, that in leaving these men she felt nothing but the urge to be away. But it was her nature. She had to accept it.
She was watching the mangabey over the balcony. The pack of matted grey pelts gathered around the trees, hiding, flashing white lids as they looked around for trouble, whooping to declare their territory, the sharp noise reverberating around the echoing forest. The new residents gasped and whispered to their neighbours while patient staff waited nearby with the hot breakfast and fresh local fruits, bored by the sight and the noise.
Isabella held the railings tight but she wasn't looking at the monkeys. She was looking straight down at the red soil. It came up at her, rushing to meet and swallow her. As she leaned over the railing a red hair fell from her head and floated softly down, absorbed by the land. She wanted to fall, melt into the soil, not to die but to stop existing. It was time to leave.
She informed the staff that she would depart the next day and gave them a forwarding address in Cape Town, in case the police had any news for her. They arranged her travel to Dodoma and she tipped everyone liberally, paying for the room with one of dear Jurgen's cards.
It was the night safari he had booked for her and there were four of them in the back of the Range Rover. A guide called Bobby, a cheerful man with yellow eyes and skin so black it had the blue sheen of a plum, the bald man without his sickly wife, Isabella and the withered American walnut woman, dressed like a man in shorts and a cheap T-shirt. She had recently retired from a teaching post in North Carolina and was fulfilling all her life-long dreams of travel. Her sister had died of a heart attack four years ago and she liked to eat meat but it disagreed with her stomach. It gave her constipation. She proffered information about herself as though she was interesting. Isabella nodded at each new morsel and felt very tired. The woman used the guide's name over and over and over again. In every sentence she repeated his name at least twice.
It was dark and cold, the musty dust whipped up by a dusky breeze caught in their throats and stung their eyes. When the Range Rover stopped, they stood up and Bobby pointed into a clump of trees. They were looking straight at them before they realised what they were: movement, and suddenly the outline of a tiny cub rolling over formed itself in the grainy light. Bobby turned the hand-held spotlight to full beam and a sleepy lioness looked up from the pride to see what the disturbance was.
See, said Bobby, how still they were. Hunters don't look at things the way other animals do. Their gaze is still, focused on the subject, oblivious to movement in their peripheral vision. That is how they identify a victim and stay with them. That is how they hunt. We must be very careful, if threatened, the lions will kill even if they aren't hungry.
But Bobby, why, Bobby? Why do they kill if they're not hungry, Bobby?
Isabella looked straight into the bullet points of light reflected back from the tall grass.
Because it's their nature, she said softly, they kill because they can't do otherwise.
ufffd Denise Mina 2003
Mina has written three novels in the Garnethill trilogy and another three featuring her character Patricia 'Paddy' Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. She has also dabbled in comic book writing, having recently written 13 issues of Hellblazer
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