The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892) - the author Conan Doyle’s own favourite Sherlock Holmes’ story - featured as its murder weapon an extremely deadly Bengali swamp-adder trained to kill. Until not so long ago, the detective stories of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie were virtually the only ones on the bookshop shelves, despite the fact that India itself can be such an exciting component in mysterious tales, something Western writers noticed as far back as the Victorian era. A natural new cause for thrills and chills.īut all these years we’ve been reading foreign thrillers with gusto and I think we have become brainwashed by their format and style. Teaching writing, I’m never quite sure what students make of all my scenarios for heightening tension and mechanisms to create suspense, but one point I try to reinforce time and again is that any Indian setting, no matter how mundane or rural, especially if other than the usual suspects (Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata), will be of great novelty value for any fan of mystery and suspense fiction. Looking at the future of Indian literature? Drawing on the whiteboard, looking at the students - who had come from all over the country - in the eye, it occurred to me that what I had there before me might well be the new face (as well as phase) of bestseller fiction.
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