Abir Mukherjee

It's wrong.

And...

You know, I would get this completely different narrative a lot of the times when I came home.

And half the time the school was right and half the time my father was right.

And so really it was about looking at this period because I don't think either British history or Indian history textbooks do the period justice.

It does in the sense that I am drawn to history.

I'm a nerd at heart.

So I did read a lot of history when I should have been doing other things, even when I was at university.

But I've been drawn to that strand of crime fiction that tends to feature a good man or woman upholding a system that they don't believe in.

So very drawn to the writings of Philip Kerr, who you may have heard of, who wrote the Bernie Gunter novels.

Oh, extraordinary series.

Oh, wonderful.

Absolutely wonderful.

About a detective in Nazi Germany, a good man working for the Nazi system.

Similarly, I love the books of Martin Cruz Smith, who writes the Arkady Renko series about a detective in, well, it starts off in communist Russia and then it goes to post-communist Russia.

And also, you know, Robert Harris's Fatherland, which features another detective, Xavier March.

working in Nazi Germany.

So that's always fascinated me.

As much as the war literature, it's this idea of a good person upholding a system that is evil.

But what always surprised me was that we have these authors like Harris and Crewsmith and Kerr.