Last Thursday, Sujata Massey was walking the alleys of Abdul Rehman Street, crisscrossing into Zaveri Bazaar in one of the oldest parts of the city. Her writer’s mind was seeing a story come alive. The mystery author has spent the last 13 years spinning tales of intrigue inspired by her visits to Mumbai. The earliest was in 2010 from she was down from Sussex, and left fascinated by Kala Ghoda’s 1897-built Sassoon Library and the Royal Yacht Club, a 10-minute walk down towards Apollo Bunder. Marine Drive’s John Adamas-designed Victorian Gothic syle structure, Wilson College found a place as Woodburn College in her 2021 title, The Bombay Prince. “The great thing about the city is that most of the old historical structures continue to stand well preserved. Also, because it was one of the few Indian cities that was cosmopolitan in nature, even in the 1800s and early 1900s, you had women work alongside the men. It was a smorgasbord of ethnicities and religions. That’s what makes it such a great place to set a crime novel in,” she says. 

Massey’s best-known work, Widows of Malabar Hill (2019), which won the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel, and Amazon Best Book of 2018, was a legal mystery series and saw her foray into writing novels set in Mumbai for the first time.