Piece for Apple Books on debuts of some of my favourite crime writers
Author Recommends
Ajay Chowdhury
I’d never planned to write crime fiction but as I started to write my Kamil Rahman and Anjoli Chatterjee novels I realised how much I‘ve been influenced by the great detectives of yore, so have picked the first time my favourite detectives appeared in print. I’m full of awe at how their (now dead) authors created self-contained universes and developed their characters over many years, so we get to live their lives. I look forward to doing the same for Kamil and Anjoli.
- Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep. Having grown up on genteel British crime, this was unlike anything I’d read before. I loved the fact that when Philip Marlowe, the quintessential hardboiled American private eye, wasn’t using his fists he was playing chess and reading poetry!
- Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair At Styles. Hercule Poirot lived a full life from his first appearance in this book till his death 55 years later in Curtain. Still the only fictional detective to get an obit in The New York Times.
- Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study In Scarlet. What can one say about the granddaddy of them all? Sherlock Holmes has been template for so many other detectives – the brilliant, flawed man – but no one has ever done it better.
- Colin Dexter: Last Bus To Woodstock. When Morse first appeared, he was a very different character from his later books where Dexter deliberately made him much more like John Thaw who played him on screen. Art imitating art?
- P.D. James: Cover Her Face. Adam Dalgleish was one of the first detectives who truly understood the horror of the murders he was solving. They were not merely puzzles on a page but caused real grief in those left behind and Phyllis James explored that pain with delicacy and finesse.
- H.R.F. Keating: The Perfect Murder. One of the first Indian detectives, Inspector Ganesh Ghote, never became a caricature and Keating depicted Bombay brilliantly, even though he had never visited (and this was pre Google Earth!).
- Philip Kerr: March Violets. Bernie Gunther is probably my favourite of them all. A good man in evil times (Nazi Germany) he has to navigate a world going to hell while retaining his integrity.
- Ed McBain: And All Through The House. Steve Carella and his merry band of 87th Precinct cops starred in the first police procedurals that I read. McBain evoked New York City so brilliantly that when I finally visited, it instantly seemed familiar.
- Satyajit Ray: Danger In Darjeeling. Ray’s Feluda books were the first time I read an Indian detective actually brought to life by an Indian author. It still saddens me how few other truly Indian detective stories there are.
- Rex Stout: Fer De Lance. Possibly the most eccentric detective of them all. Agoraphobic, orchid growing, haute-cuisine loving Nero Wolfe, made me salivate with the delicious descriptions of food and wonder at his ingenious deductions, all made while sitting in a comfortable armchair.