Mystery of the missing Jasoos

It all began with Holmes of course. Though Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) can claim to have created the first detective in fiction, and Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone" (1868) is regarded as the first modern detective novel, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes thrilled readers like no other. Agatha Christie's Poirot and Jane Marple, and PD James' Adam Dalgliesh followed the trail.Many decades later, these and a handful of other foreign classics — continue to fill the crime fiction racks here. No desi wannabe of The Great Detectives Club has ever managed to get a foot in the door.
It's not for want of trying. In the last couple of years, the genre of Indian crime fiction in English has seen many new titles. From Lalli of Kalpana Swaminathan's "Page 3 Murders", additional sessions judge Harish Shinde in Aditya Sudharshan's "A Nice Quiet Holiday" and ACP Nikhil Juneja in Reeti Gadekar's "Families at Home", to Shashi Warrier's Anna Khan in "Sniper", the Indian jasoos is begging for a break. Ravi Singh, Penguin India editor-in-chief, says, "Compared to the near drought in previous years, there are now more crime and thriller writers, but the number is still small. And very few of them sell good numbers. Kalpana and Mukul Deva have been the notable successes in recent years."
Why doesn't the market feel the thrill of the chase? Is it because the average reader has a hangover from classic whodunits, which makes the Indian spin on murder mysteries set in, say, Ghaziabad or Nagpur profoundly unexciting? Singh says the low sales "may be because those who read and buy books in English here would rather pick up a foreign title than an Indian one. There isn't a respectable enough market to encourage and sustain crime writing."
The marketing is partly guilty, says author Aditya Sudarshan. "Readers approach an Indian crime thriller with scepticism and that is sought to be appeased by marketing the books as pulpy and easy reads. The books need to be projected in a positive way."
Surely the location should not matter if there is substance and style. Crime fiction writer Madhulika Liddle says, "It actually all depends upon the author — whether he or she can make it work. I would think an Indian author, familiar with the setting, would be able to do more justice to a desi crime than a crime set in, say, an exotic foreign locale."
Maybe we should look elsewhere for clues to the missing bestseller Jasoos. Ashok Banker, whose first three novels were crime thrillers and were probably the first of their kind by an Indian novelist in English, says, "As a lifelong reader and admirer of great crime and literary fiction, I found my own work wanting and lacking. Bluntly put, they were disposable pulps. But what's being published today in the name of crime fiction in India is itself a crime! It's as if publishers, editors and authors think that you have to stoop to the lowest common denominator in order to be read and break the bestseller charts."
He finds the new wave of crime fiction "all trash". "There are authors trying to cater to this kind of 'Indian' crime writing — like a new book called "The Betelnut Killers" by Manisha Lakhe. Horrendous, patronizing, class snobbery at its worst. Bad writing, pastiche plots and characters that read like parodies of Ram Gopal Varma film characters don't make these stories 'Indian'; they just make them awful writing. So yes, it's probably better to read a good imported classic than a bad contemporary Indian novel."
So, is there no hope of finding the Great Indian Detective? Singh suggests that a mix of fantastic narrative pace, clean prose, great plot and strong characters should do the trick. "I'm constantly astonished by the number of young writers who say that they write primarily for themselves. No one who seriously believes that is going to produce a gripping or enduring book, and certainly not a good crime novel or a thriller," he says.
We have a good hunch that it will be years before this case is closed.