Abir Mukherjee

That's an exclusive.

Nobody else knows that.

I've read a fair bit of Indian fiction, I think most of which your readers will be familiar with, which tends to be literary fiction.

You know, Salman Rushdie's works or Jhumpa Lahiri or Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth.

But all of these tend towards the literary, tend towards the more modern.

It was nothing that I was reading that was modern.

looking at the period or answering the questions that I wanted to.

It was similar with Indian crime fiction.

So India, especially Bengal, where Calcutta is and where the books are set, has a rich tradition of crime fiction dating back to the 1920s.

A gentleman called Sorodindu Bhandupadhyay wrote a series of books about

about a detective called Byomkesh Bakshi.

He's the sort of Bengali Sherlock Holmes.

But what fascinated me about reading those books was just how little emphasis is placed or how little light is shone on the British.

You know, the British are there, but they're always in the background.

The books seem to be almost totally set within an Indian environment.

And that, you know, really fascinated me.

You know, you have this culture of,

which are overlords in your own country.

But the literature, at least the crime fiction that I was reading of the period, didn't specifically address Bengali or Indian-British relations.

They didn't really have the British as characters.