221 B,Gurgaon

Married to Indian journalist Anu Anand and dividing his time between Delhi and London,Hall says,“I wanted to write about modern India and thought that a private investigator would be a good way to describe it. He is a product of post-Partition Delhi but finds the physical and cultural city changing around him.” So Puri,who moved from Punjabi Bagh to Gurgaon where he built a house amid mustard fields 15 years ago,now finds himself living next to malls,call centres and gated communities.

Hall’s own introduction to Delhi sleuths is interesting. “My wife’s cousin was planning to go for an arranged marriage and one of the prospective grooms got a private detective to enquire about her. He asked about her at work: did she have a boyfriend,did she smoke,did she drink,” says Hall,who then began his own case studies of detectives in the Capital. One of them let Hall in on how he had gone undercover in a nudist colony. Another flaunted his homemade bugs and talked about how he bribed employees at telecom companies to provide mobile-phone records. The floating slag provided enough base for Hall to spin a tale around the arranged marriage scenario,a missing domestic help and a motley crew of people called Tubelight,Flush,Handbrake and Facecream.

Puri’s character emerged out of Hall’s meetings with Punjabi men in the Capital and outside. “They operate in an extremely complex culture and to survive and get to the top they have to be extremely streetwise. You don’t meet many people like them nowadays in the West and I find them extremely endearing,” says Hall,who chose to set the case in Delhi,a city he acknowledges as his second home.

The next book,titled The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing,sees

Puri on the trail of a godman who is suspected of committing murder.

“After that,I’m planning to write a collection of short mysteries starring both Puri and his Mummy-ji who is a budding detective and likes to stick her nose into his investigations. I’d like to go back to Puri’s past as well.

In the first book,I’ve mentioned The Case of the Missing Polo Elephant.

It would be great fun to think up the story. How does a polo elephant go missing?”

Well,that is a problem.