The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction Volume 1

by Various

Genres: Mystery Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

An elite squad detective from the future travels back in time to hunt down a time escapee.

Across the city of Tokyo, liquids are turning blue, and elsewhere a Tamil actress is kidnapped.

The gruesome murder of an adult industry star spirals into a web of deceit and leads to a bizarre revelation.

A journalist races against time to find the missing link between the deaths of a daily soap actress, a classical vocalist and a famous painter.

And more...

The first-ever anthology of its kind, The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction compiles more than 30 compelling whodunits spread across two volumes. Hybrid, self-reflexive and experimental forms of writing that blur the boundaries between genres, with supernatural mysteries, serial murders and at times absurd crimes jostling for the attention of both amateur and professional detectives in these stories.

Red herrings simmered in blood gravy, served up with family feuds, ancient curses, long-haired lady sleuths and many other typical subcontinental chutneys provide a rare feast for the avid reader of crime fiction!

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 416

Sample

INTRODUCTION

Tarun K. Saint

The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction brings together disparate voices in the genre of detective fiction from India and the subcontinent, with selected translations from regional language writing (Bengali in particular, and Tamil). This anthology seeks to fill a long-standing gap in the archive of popular fiction, which may seem somewhat ironic in the context of the popularity of detective fiction, and series and movies (on Netflix, for instance) in contemporary India.1 Here we showcase some of the best new and original writing in English, while also highlighting the importance of earlier writers who established the standards for the genre in the region.

In a significant recent essay on South Asian crime fiction, Laura Brueck and Francesca Orsini show how the genre unsettles the binaries that often characterize the discourse on World literature (Anglophone/non-Anglophone, domestic/foreign, local/global), as the localization and synthesizing of the form with previous modes of storytelling gave this genre a unique flavour, eventually quite different from either British, European or American precursors.2 After its arrival on Indian and subcontinental shores in the nineteenth century, this mode rapidly established itself with a niche of dedicated followers. From the late nineteenth century onwards, detective fiction with its characteristic clue–puzzle plot (in which the author sets up a puzzle with clues) found a firm footing, later diversifying into subgenres like historical mystery, police procedural, comic/parodic detective fiction, hinterland noir and feminist detective fiction. Indeed, as the elements of the genre were transformed, the subcontinental detective story at its best became a mode of testimonial literature, bearing witness to the ethical and socio-cultural ramifications of the advent of technological development and modernity in our spaces, especially in the context of the vexed afterlife of traumatic histories, marked by silence, amnesia and erasure, and the denial of justice.

While a comprehensive account of the history of the genre in India and the subcontinent awaits completion by specialists, we can certainly identify some landmarks in the adaptation of the genre across the subcontinent from colonial to postcolonial times. Let us take another look at the origins of the genre. According to several literary historians of Anglophone crime writing, precursors like William Godwin (Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794, retitled 1831)3 and Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, 1868)4 initiated an interest in the subject of crime and detection (also stimulated by the popularity of the Newgate novels detailing true crime stories in often lurid prose). However, modern detective (rather than crime) fiction came to the fore in the nineteenth century with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s remarkable tales of ratiocination set in Paris such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), featuring eccentric amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin.5 The figure of the amateur detective became enshrined in popular culture with the appearance of Sherlock Holmes shortly after (modelled in part on Poe’s character Dupin), in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories (the novel ‘A Study in Scarlet’ appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, while the story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was published in the Strand magazine, in 1891, to immediate popular acclaim).6

Between 1911 and 1935, G.K. Chesterton’s stories featuring Catholic priest Father Brown posed a challenge to the ‘scientific’ basis for detection, as spiritual and intuitive methods (at times even entailing a mirroring of the mind of the criminal) proved more efficacious in solving crimes.7 Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot was the best known of the detectives of the Golden Age of the genre in the 1920–40s, marked by the clue–puzzle structure and the notion of problem solving as a tacit game with the reader.8 Indeed, Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction (1929) sought to formalize the ‘fair play’ based (mock) rules for the genre that were broken famously earlier by Christie herself in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), in which Dr Sheppard, the Watson-like narrator is eventually disclosed to be the killer.9

Children’s detective fiction began to appear in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mark Twain satirized the genre and its readership in Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896),10 emphasizing the ‘innocent’ perceptions of the child (Huckleberry Finn) at the expense of the craft of the detective (Tom Sawyer).11 The Golden Age also saw the flourishing of children’s detective fiction in the marketplace, as Edward Stratemeyer formed a syndicate with a team of ghost writers, seeking to boost the fortunes of the genre; the first Hardy Boys novel came out in 1927, while Nancy Drew novels were published regularly from 1930 onwards under the Carolyn Keene pseudonym.12 Christopher Routledge shows how the genre merged with conventions taken from adventure tales and thrillers from the 1940s, exemplified by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five from 1942 onwards in England, later succeeded by the Secret Seven, with the ambiguous situation of the child detective vis-à-vis the adult world often decentering assumptions about children’s inherent naiveté.13 Robert Arthur’s creation, the Three Investigators, with Alfred Hitchcock as patron, gave an extended lease of life to this subgenre with its greater degree of realism from 1964 to 1987.14 Children across the Indian subcontinent (as I recall) eagerly devoured these tales, leading to the possibility of constructing counter-narratives and plots of their own as they grew older and became alert to the many stereotypes in such work.

In the hard-boiled detective fiction of Americans, Dashiell Hammett (Sam Spade), Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe) and Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer), published initially in magazines like Black Mask in the 1920–30s, we can see a greater interest in the subconscious mind and psychopathology, a trend which became more pronounced in the wake of the Great Depression, the two World Wars, and the Cold War.15 The darker side to the city and human nature became the focus in noir-style narratives that unsettled definitions of good and evil, the law and its supposed antithesis, crime, with emphasis on the visceral rather than the cerebral.

After the second World War, the police procedural or police novel came to the fore with the 87th Precinct series of novels by Ed McBain in particular highlighting the importance of police teamwork, including forensic investigation and the laborious assembling of evidence, while acknowledging institutional imperfections and police corruption.16 Subsequently, Patricia Cornwell’s novels brought in a strong element of forensic science – her character Kay Scarpetta works as a pathologist in the laboratory and morgue, and the novels draw on the author’s own experience as a technician in Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner’s office.17 The novels of Kathy Reichs, featuring forensic anthropologist Dr Temperance Brennan (also drawing on the author’s professional experience in the field), took forward the emphasis on forensic detail, while Sara Paretsky’s series of novels featuring V.I. Warshawski reconstructed the hard-boiled tradition from a feminist standpoint.18

Chester Himes (Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones) and Walter Mosley (Easy Rawlins), among others, articulated the Afro-American perspective in their crime and detective novels, underlining the vulnerability of the (often antiheroic) black detective in a racially divided society.19 Meanwhile, the figure of the antihero in crime and detective fiction has mutated from the gentleman thief Raffles of the nineteenth century and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint, through master criminals like Fantômas and Lupin to the more disturbing, even damaged transgressive figures like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay’s serial killer/forensic investigator Dexter Morgan.20 Indeed, over the years the genre has taken on a plethora of new forms, often resulting in the redoing of genre boundaries, especially in Scandinavia and Latin America.21

To invoke a classic reflection from an earlier era, W.H. Auden, in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, famously described the genre of detective fiction (the ‘whodunit’) as an exploration of the dialectic of innocence and guilt. In his account, detective fiction is a mode of escape literature, with magical satisfaction provided by a detective with powers of reasoning akin to a genius, who removes guilt by identifying who is guilty.22 Yet, Auden conceded that there is a quest for absolution and a return to a lost state of innocence underlying the genre, in effect a pastoralizing impulse unifying aesthetics and ethics. This insight can be further extended and modified in the context of Indian and subcontinental detective fiction, which at its most interesting adapts the clue–puzzle plot to the social and cultural contexts in the region, positing ethnographic puzzles while addressing the problem of violence and the question of justice in local contexts, thus redirecting the quest from the realm of the personal or religious to the socio-political and cultural-collective domains.

The reckoning with criminal activity may be set in colonial times, as in early Bengali detective stories, or may be portrayed in a retrospective way as in postcolonial and historical detective fiction. We can often discern, even in tales with a contemporary setting, a longing for prelapsarian or precolonial innocence, an illustration of a subcontinental variation of the pastoralizing impulse with a different metaphysical and historical basis. In the best work in the genre, the decoding of the ethnographic puzzle involves a sifting of layers of culture and society and a critical questioning of hierarchical structures whether of race, class, caste, or gender. For example, as we will see in Ambai’s story ‘Sepal’ in this volume, detective Sudha Gupta’s gaze turns inward to her own personal space, as she unravels with delicacy a mystery pertaining to the situation of those from the LGBTQ community in Mumbai today. Such reinvention of form is often accompanied by a refusal of the closure provided by solving the case as in Golden Age detective fiction. The ambiguities rife in the apparatus of law enforcement inherited from the colonial state come to the fore in the most significant novels and stories, marked by open-endedness and indeterminacy, even an absence of solutions to the mystery at hand.23

In the subcontinent, detective fiction came into the regional languages as a result of translations into languages like Bengali, and later Hindi and Urdu, among others. As Shampa Roy shows, the Bengali bhadralok were forerunners in adopting the form, with goyenda (or detective in Bangla) magazines and novels appearing in the late nineteenth century with the advent of modernity in its colonial avatar (Calcutta was the colonial capital till 1911).24 Anxieties about colonial law, surveillance and policing as well as racist stereotypes about Bengali ‘effeminacy’ fed into the construction of at times derivative narratives conjoining (hyper) masculinity and deductive skill, foregrounding the detective’s immersion in Bengali culture.25 Soon after, we also see the emergence on the scene of parodies of the form, as in the case of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Detective’ (1898), unsparing of both the formulas of detective fiction as well as of the supposedly pristine cultural context of the genre’s origins in colonial Britain.26

Francesca Orsini has mapped the coterminous cultural history of borrowing, adaptation and reinvention in Hindi and Urdu (from English and French as well as Bengali), in which the detective is termed jasus (or spy).27 As Brueck and Orsini remind us, the figure of the ayyar in the dastangoi tradition in Urdu often sent on missions involving investigative work and espionage, resurfaced in the ‘introduced genre’ of early Hindi and Urdu crime fiction as the jasus, albeit with modifications, such as the emphasis on analysing evidence and proof rather than lakshan (bodily marks/signs) to attain the truth.28 Local detective figures did not take long to appear as aspiring authors across the subcontinent sought to emulate western models and templates, also in the wake of the widespread circulation of pulp fiction, for instance at A.H. Wheeler stores at railway stations and the extensive readership that emerged following the publication of the latest story or novel in magazine form or as stand-alone editions. The emergence on the scene of figures like Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi,29 Satyajit Ray’s Feluda,30 and Ibne Safi’s (pen name of Asrar Ahmad Narvi) Inspector (later Colonel) Faridi and Sergeant (later Captain) Imraan31 was a marker of a more complex negotiation with modernity in its colonial, and later, postcolonial guises.32 The best examples of such writing (Satyajit Ray’s work in particular) enabled a critique of both the self and the other, with the genre also becoming a vehicle for social and cultural commentary, especially in Bengali detective fiction. In Ray’s ‘The Locked Chest’, for instance, detective Feluda takes the train from Calcutta via Plassey to village Ghurghutia in the hinterland upon being summoned to help a retired Bengali gentleman, who is an avid reader of works of criminology by Émile Gaboriau, Poe and Conan Doyle. In this short tale, Ray brings in references to the first French detective story, the zamindari system and its style of architecture, as well as English nursery rhymes as Feluda strives to unravel the venal motives underlying the planned theft of a chest’s valuable contents, besides deciphering a numerical code involving a parrot.

Brueck and Orsini show how from the 1970s to the 1990s ‘hard-boiled’ pulp Hindi detective fiction was predominant in North India, also a time of heightened political consciousness leading up to and in the wake of the Emergency (1975–77), with the city becoming identified with violence, both in terms of state-sponsored and communal violence.33 Jasoosi kahaniyan (spy or mystery thrillers) in Urdu and Hindi by writers like Ved Prakash Sharma, Om Prakash Sharma (both from Meerut), Anil Mohan and Surender Mohan Pathak, outpaced other literary forms in terms of sales.34 Along the way, ghost writers thrived, especially in the case of the Colonel Ranjit series of stories, actually written by Maqbul Jalandhari, a journalist with the Milap daily.35 Possibly as a result of over-simplistic, often ghost-written plots, as well as on account of the emergence of alternative forms of entertainment with the advent of cable TV and the mobile phone,36 sales of lugri sahitya (Hindi pulp fiction) have gone into a steep decline in the twenty-first century, although the translation into English of bestselling novels by Pathak and others has sought to reverse the trend.37

In the wake of economic liberalization from 1991 onwards, we see an increasing sense of self-confidence in writers writing detective fiction in English, not only as imitations of the sleuths in Western precursor narratives, but as an attempt to explore the consequences of the rapid changes overtaking traditional society with the advent of techno-science and modern development, and their often destructive underbelly. A notable trend is the emergence on the scene of a number of women authors and women detectives, absent to a large extent prior to this.38 Ambai began writing her Sudha Gupta series of detective stories in Tamil after establishing her credentials as a writer of literary short fiction, and has redefined the genre in significant ways in her delicately wrought stories set in Mumbai and its environs.39

A host of writers in the English language have published crime and detective fiction in the last two decades. Anuradha Kumar (based in Singapore and the USA, with crime novels set primarily in Orissa), Sujata Massey (based in America, her character Perveen Mistry is a Parsi lawyer in the making turned sleuth in colonial Bombay), Nev March (based in New Jersey, her character Jim Agnihotri, an Anglo-Indian sleuth during the time of the Raj), Swati Kaushal (based in Connecticut, her character Niki Marwah is a police superintendent in Simla), Shweta Taneja (based in the US now, sleuth Anantya Tantrist), and Kishwar Desai (based in the UK, Simran Singh is a detective in Punjab) belong to the Indian diaspora.40 Madhulika Liddle (creator of Muzaffar Jang, a maverick amir with deductive skills in Delhi in seventeenth century Mughal India),41 Kalpana Swaminathan (Inspector Lalli in contemporary Mumbai), Meeti Shroff-Shah (Radhika Zaveri, a detective novelist and amateur sleuth in Mumbai), Anita Nair (Borei Gowda, a detective in Bangalore), Sukanya Datta (Lucky Shome, a detective with scientific training in Bengal), Kiran Manral (Mumbai), Harini Nagendra (colonial Bangalore) and Suchitra Bhattacharya (writing in Bengali, Mitin Mashi in Calcutta), have further consolidated the presence of women in the field, whether in India or abroad, heralding the advent of transnational feminist detective fiction with an Indian anchorage.42

Recent times have seen a proliferation of detective fiction in a variegated set of contexts, each with a unique cultural voice and identity. The break out moment for the form in English, albeit as an amalgam of detection and thriller, was the publication of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, in 2006, and the adaptation of the novel as a Netflix series in Hindi (2018).43 Besides the authors mentioned above, although British writers H.R.F. Keating (Inspector Ghote) and Tarquin Hall (Vish Puri) chose Indian settings while writing from afar,44 writers such as Vaseem Khan (based in the UK, his Police Inspector Persis Wadia is a Parsi in post-Independence Bombay, while in another series, detective Ashwin Chopra and Baby Ganesh, his pet elephant, live in contemporary Mumbai), Abir Mukherjee (based in the UK, his detectives Samuel Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee solve mysteries in colonial Calcutta), A.A. Dhand (based in Scotland, Inspector Harry Virdee investigates crime in the UK and India), Ajay Chowdhury (located in Scotland, detective Kamil Rehman is situated in Kolkata and London), Avtar Singh (now based in Germany, his DCP Sajan Dayal, Kapoor, and Smita Dhingra are Delhi cops), Vish Dhamija (based in the UK, his police detective Rita Ferreira, from Goa, works on cases in Mumbai), and Sujan DasGupta (based in the USA, with stories in Bengali, amateur detective Ekenbabu solves mysteries in the USA and occasionally Kolkata) are part of the Indian diaspora in Europe and the USA.45 Arjun Gaind (the Maharaja series during the Raj era), Salil Desai (Inspector Saralkar, in Pune), Ankush Saikia (Arjun Arora, in Delhi and Assam), Bhaskar Chattopadhyay (Janardhan Maity), Jerry Pinto (Inspector Zende and Peter D’Souza), Rajarshi Das Bhowmik (writing in Bengali, Inspector Kanaicharan), Tamilvanan (writing in Tamil, detective Shankarlal) and others in and from India have made effective contributions in this field.46 We have also seen detective fiction and science fiction meet, with futuristic crimes becoming the subject of investigation for detectives (including robot/AI detectives) in times to come as genre hybridization continues to unfold, as the stories in this volume show. Indeed, strong instances of the intersectional potential of the form have begun to appear across the subcontinent, in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan as well, reflected in the selection of stories here by Saad Z. Hossain, Navin Weeraratne, and Kehkashan Khalid.

For this anthology authors and translators of detective (rather than crime) fiction from the subcontinent were invited to contribute offbeat short stories in the detective fiction mode (5–7000 words), with emphasis on originality and distinctiveness of treatment of the chosen storyline and setting. While a setting in the subcontinent was not deemed to be crucial, the stories needed to feature a recognizably Indian/subcontinental dimension, whether in terms of character or aspects of the plot. Translations of classic works were welcome. The idea was not to simply tread the beaten path and recapitulate the well-worn clichés of the Golden Age, but to open the genre to experimental treatment, including modes of meta-fiction in Borgesian style,47 as well as genre mixing. Approaches that encompass both formal innovation and social critique were especially sought. We hoped in the process to set the tone for the further reinvention of the genre of detective fiction in a subcontinental context, with cutting edge work by both upcoming and well-established writers. While not all writers chose to respond, with some expressing their preference for the longer form rather than the short story, many did send stories which extend the scope of the field in distinctive ways. As the luck of the draw (and editorial outreach so far) had it, we were fortunate to get several translations from the strongest regional tradition, Bengali, besides Tamil. We hope to enhance the number of detective stories in other regional languages in future volumes to come.

As we shall see, there is a considerable range in detective fiction emerging from India and the subcontinent in general of which this double volume anthology provides a glimpse. From classic whodunits to police procedurals, from feminist rewriting of the genre to postcolonial reinscriptions of history, as well as genre mixing of science fiction, fantasy and the thriller with detection, the diversity and imaginative versatility coming to the fore in the form is notable. The stories in Volume 1 are subdivided into three sections, classic whodunits with amateur detectives as protagonists, experimental and parodic detective fiction, and hybrid detective or existential or SF or fantasy stories. Volume 2, on the other hand, focuses on police procedurals and historical mysteries.

While early writing in Bengal and elsewhere was inevitably based on European models of detective fiction, the impetus to widen the readership locally has led to a different set of styles and voices emerging, often contesting dominant notions about race, community and class (Vikram Chandra’s ‘Kama’ and Avtar Singh’s ‘Scandal in Punjab’, among others), as well as caste (Shashi Warrier’s ‘A Murder in the Monsoons’) and gender (Giti Chandra’s ‘A Darkling Plain’, among others), even featuring androgynous detective figures (whether amateurs or professionals). The fault lines in our society have come to be interrogated from a distinctive Indian and subcontinental vantage point in the genre. The emergence of an alternative basis for ethics not simply content with the reinforcement of inherited values and codes or judicial precepts can be seen in the most significant detective stories, as modes of fictive testimony.

In the process there is a redefinition of the form, with a redirection of focus from neat solving of puzzles to an exploration of ethnographic complexity and socio-cultural contradictions, particularly in the light of failures to address long standing traumatic memories and silences, as justice continues to go a begging. Indeed, the genre of detective fiction in the region is growing by leaps and bounds, although the critical discourse is perhaps yet to come to terms with this. This double volume should thus be of interest to aficionados, students and general readers who share Auden’s sense of being addicted to the form, as well as provide a fillip to new writing to come, as this series unfolds.

1. For a listing of popular Bollywood detective films, see Anwesha Tripathy, ‘15 Bollywood Detective Movies To Keep You On The Edge Of Your Seat!’, ScrollDroll, 4 October 2021, accessed 3 June 2023. Among the early detective films, CID (dir. Raj Khosla, 1956) is notable, with fine performances by Dev Anand as a CID inspector and Waheeda Rehman as the femme fatale figure who eventually has a change of heart.

2. See Laura Brueck and Francesca Orsini, ‘South Asian Crime Fiction’, in Jespar Gulddal, Stewart King and Alastair Rolls, eds., The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, 2022, 141–59, esp. 141.

3. William Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794, retitled 1831, rpt. London: Penguin, 2005.

4. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, 1868, rpt. London: Penguin, 1994.

5. See John Scaggs’s description of the amateur detective as a ‘reasoning machine’ in Crime Fiction, 2005, rpt. New Delhi: Routledge, 2009, esp. 39, also 33–54, Richard Bradford, Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: OUP, 2015, 1–35, Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2010, esp. 1–42. This British and American centered horizon is broadened in Nels Pearson and Marc Singer, eds., Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, 2009, rpt. Oxon: Routledge, 2016, esp. 31–62, with essays on Vikram Chandra and Amitav Ghosh. An important collection of essays, Janice Allan, Jespar Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper, eds. The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxon: Routledge, 2020 indicates new directions in research, including thinking of crime fiction as a branch of world literature, esp. 1–30. I am indebted to Vaibhav Parel for these references.

6. See https://www.britannica.com/summary/Arthur-Conan-Doyle, accessed 26 April 2023, also Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1661/1661-h/1661-h.htm, accessed 31 March 2023. While the Holmes novels and stories are marred at times by imperial biases and Orientalist stereotypes, for a literary recounting of an episode from Conan Doyle’s life in which he confronted institutional racism while attempting to win a pardon for George Edalji, son of a Parsi vicar in Staffordshire, who became victim of a miscarriage of justice after being accused of mutilating animals, see Julian Barnes, Arthur and George, London: Vintage, 2005. Also Tim Adams, ‘Show me the way to go, Holmes’, The Guardian, 26 June 2005; Chandrayan Gupta, ‘The Most Racist Sherlock Holmes Novel I Have Ever Read’, Medium, 20 March 2021.

7. See Lee Horsley, ‘From Sherlock Holmes to the Present’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 28–42, esp. 30.

8. See Scaggs, esp. 46–49. Also see Anthony Howell/Alex Tickell, ‘Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, file:///C:/Users/Dell/Downloads/agatha_christie_and_the_golden_age_of_detective_fiction_printable.pdf, accessed 20 May 2023.

9. See Susan Rowland, ‘The “Classical” Model of the Golden Age’ in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 119. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69087, accessed 18 February 2023.

10. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad & Tom Sawyer, Detective. 1896, rpt. Ware, Hertsfordshire: Wordsworth, 2009, 125–88.

11. See Christopher Routledge, ‘Crime and Detective Fiction for Young Readers’ in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 321–31, esp. 324.

12. Ibid., 325–28.

13. Ibid., 328–31. Recently, among other critics, English Heritage has recognized the ‘racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit’ in Enid Blyton’s stories for children, citing the figure of Sambo in ‘The Little Black Doll’ in particular. Alison Flood, ‘English Heritage recognises Blyton and Kipling’s racism – but blue plaques to stay’, The Guardian, 17 June 2021.

14. David Barnett, ‘On the trail of the Three Investigators’, The Guardian, 23 September 2010.

15. See Andrew Pepper ‘The “Hardboiled” Genre’ in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 140–51. See Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929, rpt. London: Orion, 2003, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and other Novels, including The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell my Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953), rpt. as omnibus 1993, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case, 1950, London: Penguin Classics, 1950. Also see Fredric Jameson’s magisterial account of Chandler’s work in historical context, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, 2016, rpt. London: Verso, 2022.

16. See Lee Horsley, ‘From Sherlock Holmes to the Present’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 28–42, esp. 35, as well as Peter Messent, ‘The Police Novel’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 175–86.

17. See Sarah Dauncey, ‘Crime, Forensics and Modern Science’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 164–74, esp. 171–72. Also see Patricia Cornwell, Predator, New York: Putnam’s, 2005.

18. See Kathy Reichs, Bones Never Lie, 2014, rpt. London: Penguin, 2022, Sara Paretsky, Fire Sale, New York: Berkley, 2006.

19. See Frankie Bailey, ‘Afro-American Detection and Crime Fiction’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 270. Also see Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem, 1957, rpt. New York: Vintage, 1991, Walter Mosley, Rose Gold, 2014, rpt. New York: Vintage, 2015.

20. Personal communication, Thomas Abraham, also Horsley, ‘From Sherlock Holmes to the Present’, in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 28–42, 40–41. Also see Maurice Leblanc, Ars