Apologies if you’re tired of hearing about Scottish authors of detective fiction but here is what I think is another good one! As the heading says, Abir Mukherjee was a practising accountant before he started writing his books about India in the early 1920s when Britain still ruled and India was part of the Empire. So far, he has produced six books, all featuring the same principal characters and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. The characters are quite unusual and a little quirky and the principal two are Captain Sam Wyndham and his assistant, Sergeant Bannerjee, who, for reasons which are not explained very well but, probably, self-explanatory, known as ‘Surrender-Not’.
After some twenty years as an accountant, Abir began writing his first novel, ‘A Rising Man’ to alleviate the boredom of what he referred to as a spectacularly dull career in finance’. The subject matter is a little unusual in terms of it taking place so long ago and in India and it makes me wonder where authors’ ideas for subject matter come from. Is it spur of the moment, perhaps coming across a reference somewhere or is is a time and a place they have been interested in for some time, perhaps, as may be the case here, due to some family connection (although I accept that I am jumping to conclusions here). Whatever the reason or reasons, I have certainly found the characters, the period and the location very interesting and quite compelling in that I have managed to find my way through the six books in the series without any difficulty and I have been getting hold of them on publication more recently!
The stories and plots are not hugely different from what we tend to find elsewhere in the genre, a bit formulaic and telling tales and setting mysteries around the usual material of murder, corruption, kidnapping. In this case, though, the plots are spiced up with tales of the Raj, the aftermath of the first world war, the conflict between the British rulers and the indigent population and a lot of interesting characters, not least the two principals, Sam and Surrender. In addition, not surprisingly, there is a substantial political component to the stories and the difficult relationships, not just between the British and the local people but also between the different castes within that local population. The whole experience had quite an educational impact on me.
As far as Sam is concerned, he is, to all accounts, a fine, upstanding (and quite young) veteran of the British army in the War who has joined the police in Calcutta. In almost every way, the perfect hero. However, we soon find out that he has a severe opium addiction as a result of the trauma he suffered during the war and an interesting aside of the books covers the ways and places in which he manages to source the drug. In the more recent stories, we begin to see his efforts to wean himself off the opium in order to save his career and that is also an interesting sub plot. However, while Sam Wyndham is the main character, Surrender-not steals the show for me and I am sure that was the author’s intention. Introduced pretty much as Sam’s ‘faithful assistant’, we discover quickly that he is Cambridge educated and that there is much more to him than meets the eye. Just as the relationships between the British police and the Indian population are difficult, so Surrender-not’s relationships with his fellow Indians are a constant issue and, in addition to that, both he and Sam have constant difficulties in their relationships with their superiors in the Calcutta police force. These books and the author and his characters have very quickly become favourites of mine and, as with so many of the authors I like and write about, I now find myself waiting for the next one to be released. As well as the stories, I have found the history of the time and place very interesting and the description of Calcutta and other parts of India in the early 1920s also very entertaining. They come with my very enthusiastic recommendation and, if you read them, I would be surprised if you don’t enjoy them. Definitely a good addition to the detective and crime fiction libraries as far as I’m concerned but, as ever, let me know what you think and, on this occasion, definitely read them in order!