The last thing I thought I was doing as I was writing my debut novel "The Great Game" was that I was inadvertently writing myself into a members' club.
Let me clarify: I knew I was writing in part about “membership”. I’m particularly proud of the scene where our narrator-hero, Balvinder Singh, is denied entry to the Garrick Club, where he is supposed to meet his companion, the gentleman thief, AJ Raffles for breakfast. He's denied entry, of course, because he is not a member and only members may enter its hallowed dining room. He is not a member, in part because he is an Indian, in the London of 1905.
Whilst the Garrick Club of the time had no explicit prohibition on non-white membership — and no explicit prohibition on female membership either, despite keeping women out for nearly two centuries until 2024 — that was precisely the point. It didn't need to write such rules down. It was more or less taken as given that no such people, unless perhaps they were royalty, were likely to be admitted by the committee. We would be, if you'll forgive the pun, blackballed.
Balvinder's experience of members' clubs is drawn from my own. I remember being a young thing in London in the late 90s, newly graduated from Oxford, and deciding to check out the Oxford and Cambridge Club to which I was given default membership (this, of course, despite my being, like Balvinder, of Indian origin.) I went with a friend, a fellow — white — recent graduate, suited and booted to the nines. We preened ourselves in the elegant dining room in the blazing summer sunshine.
I remember the sunshine was blazingly hot because I was positively sweltering, and started to loosen my tie and my jacket. Before I could complete either task, a white-coated waiter sprinted across the room, alarm and consternation written across his face, and made it very clear that "sir" was to remain fully dressed if "sir" wished to remain in the dining room.
I wasn't proposing to get naked — simply to adjust my attire to match the temperature and the direct sunlight. Perhaps I am particularly thin-skinned to still carry the scar of this encounter almost thirty years later, having not in the intervening time deigned to return to the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Perhaps. It did teach me something about what it is to be a member of British society as a British Asian, and I was probably playing with that in the novel.
All the more surprising, therefore, that even before the novel is published I have found myself, by virtue of writing it, a member of a particularly elite and wonderfully convivial club: that of British Asian crime fiction writers.
Vaseem Khan, Abir Mukherjee, Imran Mahmood, Ajay Chowdhury; the list goes on. All these British Asian authors have written multiple bestselling and critically acclaimed novels in the crime or mystery genre, featuring — rather, starring — Indian detectives. In a couple of cases, like me, in the historical crime genre. This is nothing short of revelatory and wonderful in itself. Even more wonderful is the fact that there exists a real warmth and bond of friendship between these authors, one they have most generously extended to me.
Being a habitual questioner of things, though, the very existence of this group prompts me to ask: how come? Is there something specific about crime fiction that appeals to those of us of subcontinental heritage? Is there some market gap that we are consciously or unconsciously all exploiting?
In the case of Vaseem and Abir's books, the parallels are kind of spooky. My novel has an Indian protagonist in 1905 London. Abir's books team up an Indian and an English detective in 1919 Calcutta. Vaseem's Malabar House series features a female Indian detective in 1950 post-independence Bombay. I had not read either of their books before writing mine — an error I have since corrected to my great delight — but it's impossible now not to look at the three different worlds as connected, as existing in a sort of conversation with each other, telling a previously untold story spanning the relationship between Britain and India in the early twentieth century through the metaphor of crime.
The idea of "convergent evolution" is the scientific notion that different species in radically different parts of the world can respond to similar environmental factors and produce similar outcomes. For example, the emu. The emu and the ostrich are not remotely related despite looking astonishingly similar. The ostrich evolved on the plains of sub-Saharan Africa, whilst the emu is native to Australia's deserts. Both environments permitted, encouraged, and gave an advantage to a large flightless bird with a long neck and powerful legs. Perhaps something similar is going on with this growing group of historical crime fiction writers.
As to exactly what that environment is, I don't have a definitive answer yet. It's one that I suspect I will continue to explore — alone and with my fellow writers, in conversations and in our books — for years to come. If I were to hazard a working hypothesis, it would be this:
There is something in the subcontinental and colonial mindscape that simultaneously craves order, justice, and the good functioning of law, and at the very same time is deeply suspicious when that law and that order is imposed by imperial powers. We live in a time where imperial powers — not the same ones that our grandparents and great-grandparents contended with, but the new American, Chinese, and Russian imperial powers — are flexing their muscles. Our scepticism and our hackles rise in ancestral remembrance and we reach for our pens.
Perhaps it is by looking back and either excavating or inventing times when our fictional ancestors stood up against the unjust laws of imperial Britain that we are playing our own act of tiny defiance. We are trying to correct wrongs that can never be corrected in the real world.
For
whatever reason, it's a club I'm honoured and delighted to be a member of. I'll
try and keep my clothes on and not be thrown out of it.
The Great Game by Arvind Ethan David (published by Thomas & Mercer) on 14th July, price £6.99 paperback original.
An
outsider in London investigates a series of brutal murders targeting English
aristocrats in a timely and provocative historical novel brimming with
intrigue, wit, and rage. London, 1905: Law student and military veteran
Balvinder dev Singh has found an extra legal way to fund his studies. As friend
and accomplice to the infamous gentleman thief AJ Raffles, he rubs shoulders
with the upper crust―and steals their valuables. That is, until their next
mark, an imperialist general, is grotesquely murdered in the library of his
Mayfair mansion. Bal and Raffles find themselves implicated in a series of
killings that soon attracts the attention of Scotland Yard―and the aging
Sherlock Holmes himself. As Bal works to clear his name, he must hide his
checkered past from a new acquaintance, the beautiful Irish violinist Maud
Adler. Her fiery views lead Bal to question his own place in the world. But
when he comes face-to-face with a plot to strike at the very heart of the
British government, he must decide how much he’s willing to risk for his
adopted city.
More information about the
author can be found on his website.
He can also be found on Instagram @arvind.david
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