This interview with Abir Mukherjee not only covers the writing of his best-selling and award-winning novel Hunted, but his return to his award-winning Wyndham and Banerjee series, his research, background to the new book, authors of colour and other bits of information that I managed to persuade him to talk about.
Ayo: Can I just start by saying congratulations.
Abir: Why thank you. Can I say thank you for everything. It cost a lot of money to bribe you, and it was money well spent.
Ayo: That is so funny. Okay, let’s be a bit serious. 2025 has been an interesting year.
Abir: It has been an interesting year from a political point of view. It has been a great year if you close your mind to all the world.
Ayo: I'm talking more about you and your books.
Abir: Ah well explain?
Ayo: Well British Book Award, Theakston's need I say more?
Abir: I know well. It has been mental.
Ayo: Did you actually expect to win the Theakston's
Abir: I didn't expect to win either to be quite honest with you. As you know I didn't expect to win the Theakston's as I turned up in my shorts.
Ayo: Well yes, I heard about that.
Abir: I was going to get changed but then I saw everyone looking so fancy I thought don't I understand someone obviously knows that they have won but they had not told me and so I didn't bother to change. So I stayed in my shorts and then I felt like a complete idiot.
Ayo: You are never a complete idiot. Oh dear.
Abir: Partially then.
Ayo: When I think back to when you first started writing I thought bloody hell this is good. I was just so happy.
Abir: Well, you didn't give me the prize that year did you. Nine years I had to wait.
Ayo: Can I just say this is my first year of judging the main prize.
Abir: Okay then, I forgive you then. That's all right. Why is this your first year. Someone needs to answer for this. You should have been a judge years ago.
Ayo: I have no idea. I have to say that I was quite pleased that they asked me.
Abir: Quite right
Ayo: You do know that I generally tend to be low key
Abir: As one of the wise great heads of crime fiction not just nationally but internationally. Everyone where I turn up you are Guest of Honour
Ayo: Now you are making me blush if you could see me doing so. I am not everywhere. Anyway, this is not about me it is about you. As much as this is about the new book, It would be very remiss if we don't start off by talking about Hunted. What a year it has been with Hunted.
Abir: Yes, please do as I can’t remember the new book.
Ayo: (Laughing) You can’t remember the new book?
Abir: (Laughing) – No, I wrote it a year ago. Actually, yes, I can but I wrote it a year ago - I’m writing another one. This is the problem.
Ayo: Let’s talk about Hunted. What made you decide to write Hunted which is your first contemporary novel and standalone.
Abir: Well, there were a couple of things I had written five Wyndham and Banerjee novels and that had taken the best part of a decade. Seven or eight years I had been writing, and I had these two voices in Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee in my head. Three voices actually those two and my wife’s and I wanted a change. I wanted firstly to write something different. I was getting a bit stale and secondly, I wanted to see if I could write something that was different because historical crime fiction is great, but it is a certain style of novel. Let’s call it middle brow. That’s something somebody once called it. I am not sure that I like that term.
Ayo: No, I think that I have to disagree with whoever said that it’s middle brow.
Abir: It is a certain book, a certain pace, a certain amount of research goes into it, a certain amount of history comes in. Whereas I had never written a thriller and I wanted to write a thriller. It just turns out that I wasn’t particularly good at it to start with because it took three years. The first two attempts were awful. The first one was terrible. I’m surprised none of my editors jumped off a bridge it was so bad.
Ayo: So how did you feel about moving not solely to the 21st Century but to North America when you wrote Hunted?
Abir: As you know I write about things that make me unhappy and angry and the thing is when I started writing this what we see now and is probably worse now is the rise of extremism, the rise of populism, the rise of intolerance. All of these things and I thought well the last book I had written Shadows of Men dealt with some of those issues, but it was allegorical and I thought that it was getting really quite bad and that I should tackle it head on. And so, it made sense to look at them. If we are talking about the rise of the Right, talking about the rise populism then America seems to be the fulcrum of that. It is happening everywhere but that is what we see the most of.
Ayo: You think it has become more prominent?
Abir: Err, yes. Well, it certainly matters more. Let’s say if it happened in Hungary which it is happening in Hungary it doesn’t really affect most of the outside world. When it happens in America, as they say when America sneezes, we all catch a cold.
Ayo: Was the transition difficult and if so, what was the most difficult part of it?
Abir: It was bloody terrible! It was really difficult as I didn’t know how to write a thriller, so I wrote 15,000 words of this book and it was written in the style of how I wanted to write it and then I got a book deal off the back of those 15,000 words. For the first time I had a big publisher in America, and I got a bit scared, and I thought I don’t know what I am doing. I need to write a thriller; I need to write a different sort of book and so I wrote the next 80,000 words in a very different style which in hindsight was a terrible mistake because they all read it and went 'this is not what we paid for'. And they were right and the stated that if they wanted a book in this style they would have commissioned a book in this style. Why don’t you write the book you want to write.
The first time was very plot heavy and so I went back and rewrote it in the style I would write my other books but that wasn’t right either because that was historical fiction. The first time too much happened and the second time nothing happened. And so, it was about getting that balance. What I did was that I went away and read a lot of thrillers by people I liked.
Ayo: For example?
Abir: Steve Cavanagh who I think is brilliant. Reading a Steve Cavanagh book is like being hit in the face with a frying pan every couple of chapters.
Ayo: I am fairly certain I saw somebody mention that recently.
Abir: It was probably me. I have been saying that for the last couple of years. I learnt how to be braver and essentially to dial all the action up to eleven. The issue I had was marrying that action with the character development and arcs and the quiet messages. That was a very tough part and then I have never written from three points of view before, and they were all vastly different points of view. Whereas Sam and Suren both of them are the voices in my head, they are my personality, I can get them. These were different characters from me. A white American guy 20-year-old, an American woman of a certain age and origin and a Bangladeshi Muslim man and while I could relate to bits of their character, these were quite different to the sorts of things that I had written before. Just getting the voice of each character took a long time in each draft. By draft three we had the story, the action and the plot sorted but in terms of getting the characters right it took another three to four drafts. It took an exceptionally long time.
Ayo: How many drafts do you normally do of your books?
Abir: It varies. I think by the end of the second draft we will have the structure, then there will be three smaller and smaller drafts including a copy edit. But you know if you say it takes me nine to twelve months to write a first draft, probably three to four months to do the second draft and then the subsequent drafts get shorter and shorter. This one took much longer. I mean the first three drafts took about in total over two years, getting close to two and a half years. All in that book took a long time.
Ayo: Were you panicking at any stage about this?
Abir: I wasn’t panicking precisely because failure is my natural state (laughing). I know how to deal with things going wrong. I have no idea how to deal with things going right. I don’t trust myself when things go right. I feel I jink it. So, when things were going wrong, I was really happy because I knew – hear we go again this is my natural state. Also, I never really knew how bad it was until I looked back. This is the wonderful thing about editors they never really tell you just how bad you are until you have fixed it yourself. I didn’t panic; I got lucky in that respect.
Ayo: How soon after you finished writing Hunted did you start writing The Burning Ground.
Abir: Hunted had been going on for so long I had to start it anyway as I was getting tired. I must have handed in the fourth draft and while I was waiting for the fourth draft of Hunted to be pulled apart, I started researching and I started writing the new book. To be fair the gem of that comes much earlier. It probably goes back to 2018 when I was in Calcutta doing a walking tour and we were taken to the house of India’s first female photographer. That was interesting to me and the reason that she made such a name for herself was because in those days a lot of men if they were Muslim or even Hindu men did not like their women being photographed or seen by other men so she had this natural constituency and she could go into everyone’s houses and everyone loves a photo. So, she did pretty well.
Ayo: She found her niche.
Abir: Yes, and I thought that’s an interesting story I have got to build that into a book. That was many years ago – 2017/18. I was actually in India with Val McDermid and Graeme McCrae Burnett at that point. We were on this walking tour together and that’s when that happened and then there is another part of this story when I was researching that I came across another story which I can’t tell you about because it is in this book but if I tell you, it’s a spoiler.
Ayo: No spoilers please.
Abir: I started the research by the fourth draft of Hunted and started writing probably by the time the fifth draft was in.
Ayo: Describe the new book in five words?
Abir: Oh gosh that’s tough. I can’t describe anything in five words. I can’t even describe my breakfast in five words. Um --- Rich people in Calcutta with secrets.
Ayo: How important is history to you in relation to the Wyndham and Banerjee books?
Abir: I love history, I have always been a bit of a history nerd – I’ve been many sorts of nerds. My son seems to be an even bigger history nerd than I am. He has a little friend that lives across the road but when he switches on Horrible Histories she goes home. I think that it must be genetic. History is important because if we don’t know our history and, in this country, we certainly do not know our history, we are doomed to make the same mistakes. It sounds like a cliché, but it is not. We can only make decisions from an informed position and if we are not informed, we do stupid things again and again.
Ayo: Do you think that your connection with India has changed since you wrote your first Wyndham and Banerjee book?
Abir: Has it changed, I suppose it has matured a bit more. I understand India more. I get treated slightly differently as well.
Ayo: How?
Abir: The books are read there and that’s all really nice.
Ayo: Really, that’s very nice. Does it help when you get to India.
Abir: I don’t know if it helps. But if you go to Calcutta, and Calcutta is a weird place where writing and the arts are essentially fetishised everywhere. You tell people you are a writer they will do anything for you it is amazing. It is really cool in that respect. You go to the airport in Calcutta, you land, you go into the terminal, you look up and you will see writing all over the ceiling and that is Rabindranath Tagore the first non-white winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature who came from Calcutta. That’s his handwriting from the Bengali edition of the book Gitanjali (Song Offerings) which won. The whole city is literature, poetry, and art creativity, so it helps there.
Ayo: I know that you have mentioned the first female photographer (who was Homai Vyarawalla) but what else inspired the story because you talk about the dead being laid to rest in the burning ghats of Calcutta. What are the burning ghats of Calcutta. I have during my research got some vague idea but let’s talk about it from the point of view that some people may not know anything about it.
Abir: Hindu’s believe in reincarnation and reincarnation is effected by the burning of the shell which is the corporeal body to free the soul and this tends to happen around auspicious places if possible and the most auspicious and holy place the Ganges and the part of the Ganges that goes through Calcutta is called the Hooghly but is essentially still the Ganges and there is this point in Calcutta, in fact there are several the main one is Manikarnika Ghat where these bodies are cremated and it is called the burning ground or the burning ghats right near the river. The cremation can only be done, I mean the priests can conduct the prayers but the burning, the carrying and the preparation of the bodies can only be done by a subset of an untouchable cast called the ‘Doms.’ It is a really bizarre situation. Outside of the burning grounds these guys are nobody but inside they are literarily kings to the extent that in Varanasi, which is not in Calcutta they say that the head of that community is a millionaire just because of the money that they get for this monopoly on essentially carting the dead around. So, I heard that story and thought that’s pretty cool I have got to put that in as well.
Ayo: Did you go to India to do research about this and if you did, did you go to Varanasi?
Abir: No, I did my research in the sense that my father passed away on holiday some time ago and he was from Calcutta, and he spent half his life there and half his life here. He and my mother were on holiday, and he fell ill and passed away, and, in that sense, it was nice as he went in the place where he was from and we gave him proper funeral rites, we scattered his ashes on the river. If it were here, it would have been in a crematorium, and he would be sitting in a jug above my mantel piece. So, in that sense we went through the whole thing. These days it is almost industrialised there are so many people, and they have incinerators as opposed to funeral pyres but there are certain things that remain. I have had this discussion with Craig Robertson. There is a part of the body that apparently doesn’t burn at the same temperature as the other parts of the body. He says that this isn’t true, but I have seen it, and I don’t know if it is true, but it is the navel, the inside of the umbilical cord which stays inside you. So, once they give you the ashes, they also present you with the navel which you then pack in earth or mud and return to the Ganges separately. I did not put it in this book, but I did put it in the second book. So, I have been fascinated by this whole procedure of reincarnation. Have you ever been somewhere, where you have gone into a building or a place and it’s not just déjà vu but you have this really strong sense that you have been there before.
Ayo: Oh God, yes.
Abir: That happened to me once in India. I went to this house, and I have never been there before in my life, but I seemed to know the layout, and I had this really strong feeling that I had been there.
Ayo: That is rather spooky you do realise that!
Abir: Yes, it is really spooky.
Ayo: Let’s talk about Indian cinema.
Abir: Okay we can do that, or I can tell you about the time my dad saw a ghost! But we can talk about Indian cinema if you want.
Ayo: As much as I would like to hear about you dad and ghosts, I think we should talk about Indian cinema. Indian cinema is a big part of this book as well. How did you go about doing your research. What I want to know is did you end up sitting down watching loads of Indian films and was some of it nostalgic.
Abir: God no. I did not for this because the period for this is still the silent movie period and there were very few films. The Indian film industry did exist, and it existed in Calcutta at that point in time. I watched YouTube clips but not much has survived from that because that was the very early days of Indian cinema. But Indian cinema is funny because we think of it all as Bollywood.
Ayo: But don’t you think that this is partly because what we grew up seeing?
Abir: You did – or people did. But Calcutta has its own, very different heritage of cinema. So, we have Satyajit Ray who was given an Oscar for his lifetime work The Apu Trilogy. He was the first Indian to receive it. We have a very different culture of film making which is skewed towards the artistic. They are generally four hours long, you come out with a headache without any clue what happened, but you are very happy it is an art film, and you feel intellectually good. Again, it goes back to this idea that Calcutta and Bengali’s thinking of themselves as intellectuals. Our film industry is different; it has its roots in intellectual fiction rather than commercial fiction.
Ayo: When were you doing all your research was there anything that you found that you realised that if you put this in the book nobody would be believe you?
Abir: Well in this book I did not find anything to that extent other that then crucial premise of the book. The whole twist is around something that is real, but I can’t really speak about that, but it will go in the author’s note at the back. And that was really the trigger for the whole book. Finding out this fact and that is where the book comes from and that is what the whole book hinges on. I didn’t believe it, and I wouldn’t have believed it if it wasn’t true. I can’t say anything more than that.
Ayo: What do you think readers would make of the relationship between Wyndham and Banerjee now?
Abir: Well, you know what it’s changing isn’t it. It is very different from what it was five /six books ago. Five/six books ago Suren was in awe of this detective who had just come from Britain, ex-Scotland Yard. Now they have spent a couple of years apart. We should point out this book is set in 1926, the last book was set in 1923 at the end of which Suren left India Ostensibly for six months, but because it took me so long to write a hunted he has been away for three years. They are ageing in real time.
Because of that Sam has been alone for three years. He is pretty grumpy about it. So, the relationship is quite difficult. At least to start with it is quite abrasive. I don't think either of them really forgives the other. Sam because Sam is Sam and Suren because he is a bit sort of traumatised by the whole experience of having to leave India because of the way he was framed at the end of the last book.
Ayo: What generally therefore are your thoughts on the portrayal of friendships and relationships in novels particularly yours.
Abir: I think they are very important. And why do I have that relationship? It is because these relationships are across cultures, across races and actually existed. We tend to draw history in broad brushes, them and us. Whereas so much of the time the really interesting details are in the individual relationships and we see that they don't meet their stereotypes and there is another of those in the books. It is the story of Jatindra and Nellie Sengupta. Jatindra was this Bengali guy whose father sent him off to Cambridge at the age of 17 to study law and he fell in love with this woman whom I think was called Ellie. Anyway, she changed it to Nellie. This white girl called Nellie and Jatindra fell in love, and he wrote to his parents saying I've met this girl we are falling in love and I'm going to marry her, and she told her parents who were white and they were fine with it. His dad wrote a letter to her parents saying this is terrible' the cultures are too different, and Jatindra was ordered to get on a boat back to India. So, he cancelled everything got on the boat but got as far as the Suez as he realised, he had made a mistake. He sailed all the way back, got Nellie went back, got married on the boat and she arrived in Bengal dressed in a Sari. Fast forward the story. Jatindra is a freedom fighter and becomes the Mayor of Calcutta. Jatindra is then arrested and dies. Nellie then becomes a member of the Indian National Congress party as she also becomes the first non-Indian female head of the party. She becomes a bigger name in the freedom struggle than he does. So, this white woman whose in-laws didn't want her coming across is revered as this hero of the independence movement. She had stamps produced in her honour.
Ayo: Okay we are going to skip back a bit. Let's talk about when I think back to 2016 when you were one of the debut authors for the new blood panel at Harrogate. So much has changed hasn't it.
Abir: My hair didn't have specks of grey, and I didn't have a beard.
Ayo: No, you didn't. You were fresh faced. How has this change affected you?
Abir: It has changed my life. I mean I was an accountant for 20 years
and then all of a sudden, I have all this good luck. I had this book published and it Starts
getting all this great praise and it gets onto this panel just to be the best
debuts which was a huge surprise because I had never written anything and that
turbocharged everything. The week before that Vaseem and I were published in
the same year, and we did an event together. We have been doing events together
for 8 to 9 years now.
Ayo: You are such a great double act.
Abir: It's ridiculous. I love him (laughing). We talked to an audience of four people. One of which was his wife, the other his publicist and also my publicist and just someone random who accidentally walked in off the street and then the next week I'm at Harrogate talking to 700 people or whatever it is. So, it did, it changed and that was the beginning and now (touch wood) I'm writing full time. I'm doing the job I love. I would use the phrase George Orwell uses in 1984 – 'It's like swimming against the tide your whole life and then suddenly turning around and going with it'. It just feels right.
Ayo: Well – is there anything you would change since you started writing?
Abir: (Laughing) – I would sell more books, and I would like Chris Whittaker’s sales.
Ayo: You were saying when you started you did this literarily on a whim when you entered the competition.
Abir: I would have done it earlier if I had known. I would have done it ten years earlier. In hindsight I would have said to myself be brave and do it earlier.
Ayo: Are we going to see another standalone novel from you?
Abir: I am just finishing the first draft. I would be writing it now if I were not talking to you. I have got to hand it in on Tuesday (12th August 2025)
Ayo: Really? Oh my God.
Abir: Yeah, first draft. I'm loving it. It is the best thing I have written. (Laughing)
Ayo: Can you give us a bit of a hint.
Abir: I can tell you all about it as I'm writing it now. So, think, a George Clooney type American Hollywood star. Slightly over the hill, marries India's Bollywood sweetheart. She is the biggest actress in India, and they move to Mumbai, and they are staying in billionaire's row in one of these massive private houses and she is murdered. He is the prime suspect. And what do you do when suddenly 1.4 billion people suddenly hate you?
Ayo: Go and hibernate?
Abir: Well, you have to hide. So that's what this book is about.
Ayo: One of the things that I have realised is that there has been an increase in books specifically referring to authors of colour. Why do you think that this is the case, and I am sure that you will agree with me that not only is it long overdue but that we could still do more?
Abir: Yeah – Why is it happening? It's market forces. I think it's market forces. If you go back ten years ago, Vaseem and I came around at a time when there were very few non white, or certainly not British Asian writes writing crime fiction. I can't remember any. There were very few British Asians writing anything other than literary fiction. There was a feeling I think that books written by British Asians just wouldn't sell. Things like Londonstani which is Gautam Malkani's book. It is a great book, over hyped and when it did not sell to the degree that publishers wanted it seemed to put a damper on the market. Vaseem and I were quite lucky that we came along in the same year, and we were both commercially successful, to the extent that we are viable as writers. It showed that these sorts of books – that there was and is an appetite for them. Something that was wider. Times were changing, tastes were changing and because we did that and we were lucky to be there then next year there were more people and more people. It's still incredibly difficult. I mean if you are going into supermarkets and if you are lucky, you will find one book that is by a non-white writer on the shelves. It is changing though.
Ayo: I did a paper for Martin Edwards at the Gladstone Library last year in June 2024 and my paper was called from Black Mask to the Modern Day; The Evolution of the Black Crime Writer, but when I was doing the research for it I got so angry because on the one hand we have the US who are much better than we are and then there is the UK and the major gap just made me think that we could be much better than this.
Abir: We should be better than this but on top of that there is the gap between us and the rest of the world as well. Anger is a funny thing, we should be angry, but it is how we channel this anger. Too often in the past we have channelled that anger by saying to the industry -'You should be doing this, you should be doing that and that you should be doing the next thing. The problem with that is that you can't guilt people. What we have got here is an industry that works in a market economy. So, the only way you change things is by showing them there is a profitable route and make it win, win. It happens every time. Even in the last couple of weeks there has been a retrenchment in terms of publishers and booksellers selling non-white books and publishing non-white books. And we had the same thing with a literary agency a few months ago and I think the problem there is, is that you can’t guilt people into doing it you have to make it work economically and that’s a different approach.
Ayo: One does hear so much about people complaining and saying that there are not enough authors of colour.
Abir: You have to buy the books.
Ayo: Yes – One you have to buy the books and two, it is a business and sometimes people forget that it is a business.
Abir: Maybe because I come from a financial background, I always look at it in these terms. But that’s the only way you can make this sustainable. It has to be market driven. You cannot force a model on to the public via a subsidy which so many of these did. You have to change minds, you have to change tastes, you have to change attitudes and that is a very long process unfortunately. Or maybe there will be a moment like we had with Scandi fiction. Knowing my luck, it will be Vaseem who does that. You know what (laughing) more power to him. As long as somebody does it.
Ayo: Is there anything that makes you fearful?
Abir: Yes, the whole world right now makes me fearful. Intolerance makes me fearful, the state of the country and the world. The lack of seriousness in our politicians. The lack of willingness to do things for the greater good as opposed to a small subset. Fear, hatred, anger – all of these things worry the shit out of me. But at the end of the day the only way you deal with any of these things is by dialogue, by talking, by making people laugh. You can’t hate someone who makes you laugh.
Ayo: How do you counterbalance your writing? I know that you have got the podcast.
Abir – Whiskey! Whiskey is a good counterbalance to most things and falling in rivers. I think family life really, that’s the counterbalance. It doesn’t matter what happens, you can win an award like the Theakston’s or the British Book Award, but you still get told to put the bins out, shouted at for putting the wrong things in the washing machine. It doesn’t matter who you are; or it certainly doesn’t work in our house.
Ayo: What are the few things that you like about the crime writing community?
Abir: Oh gosh – It’s brilliant. I mean look at it. It is so friendly, so collegiate. It is a wonderful world both in terms of writers and readers. Everybody looks out for everyone else. Since the day I started in this industry people like Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Lee Child have gone out of their way to help and that’s mental. Which industry can you go into and the best people in it will go out of their way to help a novice. It doesn’t happen. People think of themselves as too important generally but not in this industry. Everybody is so down to earth. (laughing) which upsets me as I’m not allowed to be a diva at any point.
Ayo: Who wants to be a diva within the crime writing community?
Abir: It would be amazing it would be. I would be a fantastic diva (laughing). I just won’t be given the chance.
Ayo: Last two questions. What books have you read recently that you would recommend.
Abir: You like putting me on the spot. – Oh, The Good Liar by Denise Mina which is phenomenal. Again, nobody gets under the skin of people and understands human nature like she does. I’m going to give you a non-crime book. – The Shortest History of Migration by Ian Golding. I thought I need to know about this as it is going on right now and it is eye-opening.
Ayo: Any last words?
Abir: Thank you so much for this interview,
thank you so much to all the readers, I hope that you read my books.
The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee (Vintage Publishing) Out Now
In the Burning Ghats of
Calcutta where the dead are laid to rest, a man is found murdered, his throat
cut from ear to ear. The body is that of a popular patron of the arts, a man
who was, by all accounts, beloved by all: so what was the motive for his murder?
Despite being out of favour with the Imperial Police Force, Detective Sam
Wyndham is assigned to the case and finds himself thrust into the glamorous
world of Indian cinema. Meanwhile Surendranath Banerjee, recently returned from
Europe after three years spent running from the fallout of his last case, is
searching for a missing photographer; a trailblazing woman at the forefront of
the profession. When Suren discovers that the vanished woman is linked to Sam's
murder investigation, the two men find themselves working together once again -
but will Wyndham and Banerjee be able to put their differences aside to solve
the case?
The Shots review of The Burning Grounds can be read here.
More information about Abir Mukherjee and his books can be found on his website. He can also be found on Facebook, on Instagram and on Twitter @radiomukhers
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