The missing plot

Neither Swarup, nor Gadekar8217;s work will make you curl up in bed and spend a night turning pages. Swarup8217;s rambling novel and his cardboard characters miss the mark by far; the plot becoming the structure on which to string together clicheacute;d tirades against the shining, venal India. Families at Home8217;s protagonist ACP Nikhil Juneja has potential but is let down by the author. They are not alone.

Writers as various as Shashi Deshpande, Kalpana Swaminathan and Ashok Banker have tried their hand at the genre. Deshpande calls her novels 8220;an embarrassment8221;. Banker, who debuted in the early Nineties with three detective novels The Iron Bra, Murder and Champagne and Ten Dead Admen8212;perhaps the first Indian experiment in the genre8212;has written five more, which he says 8220;should remain unpublished8221;.

So, why don8217;t we have a writer who has cracked the formula? Swaminathan, the only creator of a detective series so far, the Lalli novels, points out that fiction in English is only about 20 years old. 8220;When the publishing industry started out, it had to create an audience as well as an identity for Indian fiction. And it had to steer clear of what had been done before, which includes this genre,8221; she says. 8220;Give it time.8221;

But, she says, Indian writers will have problems with the classic detective story template. 8220;Why? Space. You just don8217;t have the space for a murder mystery,8221; she says. 8220;For the classic plot to work, characters need the physical space to have and hide secrets. There is too much traffic in our lives. Neighbours keep dropping by, nosy kids peer into homes8212;unlike in the West, where people have lonelier lives. Look at the classic formula. A murder in an isolated countryhouse. That doesn8217;t work here.8221; Deshpande couldn8217;t agree more. 8220;When I was writing my novels, I just couldn8217;t get Agatha Christie out of my head. It didn8217;t work. The nature of our reality is such that we need a different form. And it will take someone brilliant to figure that out,8221; she says.

Look back at the history of the detective novel and you8217;ll see how reality fashions fiction. The birth of this genre in the West coincided with the growth of criminal detection as a respectable activity in England and France. The Sucirc;reteacute;, the French investigation department, was set up in 1812. In 1829, the Metropolitan Police was founded in London. That same year saw the publication of one of the bestsellers of the time, Memoirs of Vidocq, an account of the experiences of Eugene Francois Vidocq, an ex-criminal who rose to head the Sucirc;reteacute;. A decade later, a man called Edgar Allan Poe invented the first detective novel in English with The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1841. Poe8217;s eccentric detective Auguste Dupin8212; strikingly similar to that other maverick on 22, Baker Street8212;was modeled on Vidocq.

In India, the police inspire fear rather than faith, justice is thwarted rather than delivered. If Poirot had to solve a murder in India, he would come up against the usual Indian suspects of corruption, chaos and general indifference to law8212;cops get bribed, the murder scene gets trampled on. Would the little grey cells win?

8220;In most detective fiction, the detective is sort of obsessed with truth Poirot, for instance. That obsession is hard to imagine in a policeman or a detective here,8221; says Mangalore-based Shashi Warrier, whose detective novel Sniper, will be released by Penguin this month. There are other problems too. 8220;Unless you have contacts, it8217;s impossible to get near court records or to talk in any meaningful way to policemen, who head most murder investigations. Also, forensic work is minimal,8221; he says.

Death is at the heart of the detective story but it is, originally, a comforting genre; a morality play where Good bests Evil, order is restored by an act of reason. In the absence of that anchor, the plot collapses. Writing in the Indian Review of Books, Deshpande makes a pertinent point. 8220;Our faith in the police is minimal8230; Besides this, clues are destroyed, bodies rot, written records are rarely kept or available, police procedure is8212;well, the less said about it, the better8212;medical examiners succumb easily to pressure and change medical records and autopsy reports. And therefore the dead, the murdered in this country are fated to cry for justice in vain. How then do you write a story in the classical style?8221;

Banker, however, would not let writers get away with that. 8220;Most foreign crime fiction actually thrives on the corruption. ..I think the only reason we haven8217;t had a successful crime series in India is because we haven8217;t had a writer who nailed the style and subject just so..8221;

The shifty moral universe of Indian crime, he says, could be the groove along which our version of the genre grows. 8220;The reason we read crime fiction in India is not because we want the genius detective to make everything all right8230;but because we know the world is cruel, the system is crueler.8221; Is it any wonder that the corrupt policeman figures as a crime-buster in two recent crime novels8212;Families at Home and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra?

So which is the dark world that the Indian whodunit writer should trawl? As Banker points out, cinema8212;think Ram Gopal Varma8217;s oeuvre or Manorama Six Feet Under8212;has already shown us how. 8220;We have terrific stories waiting to be told. Not about mean streets and detectives with hearts of gold, but about seedy back alleys, small town streets and back of beyond villages. Ram Gopal Varma has already shown us the way to some extent8211;but the urban way. Bustling, brawling, bawdy, full of life and lust and love and longing8211;that8217;s how it should be written,8221; he says.

In our cities and police stations, drawing rooms and minds, we have all the material that P.D.James recommended in the modern detective story, 8220;moral ambiguity, greater realism and8230;issues which go beyond the process of ratiocination8221;. All we need is more writers eager to explore those worlds. Bring on the gore. The readers are waiting.