Murder they wrote: It's Indian crime fiction's moment in the sun

India Today

11-05-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated May 12, 2025)Between November 3-5 last year, Dehradun played host to the 2nd Crime Literature Festival of India, three days of literary events and panel discussions centred around crime writing. In addition to writers of crime fiction, there were also Bollywood mainstays like the filmmaker Prakash Jha, journalist Sunetra Chowdhury (whose book on Tihar Jail was adapted into the Netflix series Black Warrant), folks involved in the Amazon Prime crime series Mirzapur, etc. The festival was a reminder of how crime fiction is dominating bookshelves across the country. In recent years, Indian crime fiction has seen a notable uptick in both quality and quantity. Even a cursory glance at the 'new releases' section at bookstores will tell you about the genre's rude health in India.advertisementPenguin Random House India, for example, has recently released Faiqa Mansab's The Sufi Storyteller, a work of crime fiction wherein an estranged mother-daughter duo must navigate a series of clues pertaining to Sufi poetry/music in order to solve the grisly murder of a young woman at a library. Picador/Pan Macmillan's recent offerings include Scarlet Sands by Udayan Mukherjee, the second novel featuring Neville Wadia, a private eye character who was once a Mumbai Police hero. Over at HarperCollins, another ex-cop private eye has started his innings—bestselling author Ashwin Sanghi's Razor Sharp is the first among an announced series featuring Prakash 'Kutta' Kadam, ex-cop turned private investigator.'One of the reasons I find crime fiction to be so compelling is that it is such a versatile genre,' says novelist Ankush Saikia. 'It can take you to so many interesting places as a writer. A story that begins with an individual's guilt can expand and incorporate societal institutions, public attitudes, historical events.' Saikia is one of the most successful and acclaimed practitioners of crime fiction in India. His recurring character, Detective Arjun Arora, has been featured in four books so far, most recently Tears of the Dragon (Speaking Tiger). One of these books, More Bodies Will Fall, drew from Saikia's life in the Northeast (Tezpur, Assam and Shillong, Meghalaya) and in Delhi—the murder victim here is a young woman from the Northeast, allegedly killed by her 'mainlander' boyfriend in the national capital.advertisement
'For me, the setting of the novel comes first, and then the individual characters and their psychologies,' says Saikia. 'I left Delhi in 2011 and returned to the Northeast. Before that phase, I was trying to write a cop novel set in Delhi, but progress was slow. Once I changed the main character to a private detective and set it in the Northeast, everything flowed perfectly.'
New Indian crime fiction comes with a variety of settings and backdrops
Because of the way crime fiction has expanded laterally in Indian English publishing, aficionados can find a wide variety of settings. For example, Salil Desai's The Sane Psychopath and The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen (both Westland) are contemporary, noir-adjacent crime stories set in Pune. Rohan Monteiro's Shadows Rising introduces a supernatural element into the whodunit, with gods, demons and demi-gods all featuring in this Mumbai-set kidnapping thriller. The protagonist is a yaksha (a demi-god like entity in Hinduism) banished from the heavens, living out his days in contemporary Mumbai. Shesh's Sixty is the New Assassin sees a retired corporate employee deciding to take murderous revenge in between living the retired life at book clubs and tennis gatherings. There's even crime fiction aimed at children, like Sutapa Basu's Murder in the Jungle, where a Famous Five-like group investigates a spate of tiger deaths at the Nagarhole Wildlife Reserve.Another indicator of the genre's cultural dominance is the number of new writers. These include debut writers as well as practitioners better known for, say, literary fiction, producing novels that are written and marketed as crime fiction. Anita Nair's Hot Stage and Tanuj Solanki's Manjhi's Mayhem are stellar examples of the latter, as is Deepti Kapur's Age of Vice.
'I think anybody who has even the slightest interest in the psychology of a person will be drawn to crime fiction,' says Girish Dutt Shukla. 'Gangster stories are different, where there's organised crime and economic motives but I feel that most lay readers are drawn to the question of 'why would a perfectly ordinary person be driven to murder?'' Shukla's crime novel Cold-Blooded Love was published by Rupa a couple of years ago. A computer scientist by education, Shukla hopes to build a career writing crime fiction.advertisementIt's undeniable that crime fiction is in the middle of a cultural moment in India. What remains to be seen is whether publishers can build upon this momentum and string together an array of writers and books—look at how efficiently Nordic crime fiction (Jo Nesbo, Asa Larsson et al) has been marketed globally. Hopefully, we can pull off something similar and bring Indian crime writers to the attention of readers around the world.Subscribe to India Today Magazine