Detectives in India:

It is a country where the term detective is well understood there are few enduring detective novels. Though of late there are a few authors venturing into it. Indian movies had detective stories since early 1950’s. Hindi detective novels have or rather had a long history. Truckloads of detective fiction got written in the neighbourhood of Delhi. The market leader was a guy called Om Prakash Sharma. He had more than 450 Hindi detective novels to his credit.

Meerut was the Mecca of pulp fiction writers, very strangely, as that ancient city is not known for anything else. The city had authors like Ved Prakash Sharma and Surender Mohan Pathak and a street full of cover designer artist. None of that survives anymore

They were rip-offs popular English detective books. Much of it embellished with local sex and mayhem and language. We would read a few pages and roll on the floor laughing at the lurid expression they had.

Later I was to learn that much of this detective story written in Hindi sold in lakhs. Comparative to them books written in english by Indian authors, whatever the genre, barley sold a few thousand, and if they did, they were called best sellers. A classmate of ours who came in from Delhi called them ‘Gopichand Jasoos books’

That one day I would attempt to write a detective story based in Bangalore was like writing, science fiction. There are no detectives in Bangalore. If they are, they must be as hard to fond as seeking a Christian evangelist in Kabul.

It is a bit like the conversation in the movie Casablanca.

Claude Rains: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Humphrey Bogart: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Captain.

Claude Rains: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Humphrey Bogart: I was misinformed

I don’t live in Bangalore. I have visited the place many a time. I would right way seek forgiveness from all those legions of people who will find, assuming they read my book, error and other such goof-ups of location and local customs.

So why did I choose Bangalore, I think I need to ask that to my shrink, it must be to do with something that happened in my childhood.

Fiction allows us to write the implausible and improbable as long as one can keep the reader engaged. Or one can always turn to science research writing.