Off the beaten track. Not the way most murder mysteries travel in and out of violence. Well, as Arjun Iyer, the protagonist of this novel might have chosen to express, the book is like having a bisi-bele-baath in Paris. His deeply loyal but irascible, devil-may-care Inspector Munuswamy might pick up some other custom-made analogy or metaphor or a simile that his senior is an expert in coining and add that reading this book will make a reader see an igloo in an equatorial forest. These off-the-track expressions are what spurred me onwards to turn page after page. Nachi or Narasimhan is the author of Death of a District Magistrate, an investigative thriller where the police get down to solving the murder of a powerful but controversial District Magistrate.
An unusually large number of murder mysteries have the investigator or detective either going on with his work despite the police or simply treats them as a source for added information. But not in this tale. For a change we get to read about police sleuths in action in their own idiosyncratic mode where the sarkari machinery isn’t shown to be unrealistic in functionality and comes with liberal doses of procrastination and wayward decision-making. So yes, this novel is different from those where the detective or the crime solver turns out to be either a journalist, an ex-army guy, or even some vigilante looking for his brand of justification. Despite the police being in the command position on the pages, there are no Bollywood styled macho men prancing around with bimbos or alternatively taking off their vests and blitzing their way through a dense setup of gangsters to retrieve something inane. For a change, the tale remains sedate and balanced throughout.
There are other facets in this novel that are different from the usual stuff published these days. For instance, DSP Arjun turns out to be an IIT-ian and from IIM and one who has climbed the corporate ladder in super-fast mode but suddenly decides to leave it all and join the IPS. This sounded difficult to believe because the temptation of a well-paid leadership role does not come easily and cannot be forsaken with ease. But then I happened to read that the author himself was the CEO of an FMCG multinational, has travelled to more than half a dozen countries, and is on a sabbatical from work. Now, if this sounds like a cliché where the protagonist is inspired by a writer’s own life, so be it. This CEO has indeed done a fair job but needs editorial help in tightening the plot, turning long explanations shorter, and moving on with the narrative just that bit faster.
The plot does not insist on roping in Mossad or CIA or encourages surly criminals flying in from North Korea or China and does not have any national secret in jeopardy. Here is the case of the murder of a civil servant who is way more prosperous than one cares to imagine… and has a host of relatives living in the sprawling house. Predictably, the scent of suspicion troops in and the reader joins in as the author sniffs all the intelligently spread-out clues until conclusions are in the grip of the vicious cycle of becoming useless. The book, as I have written earlier, is more like an investigation through conversations where the protagonist is on the verge of eliminating every possibility until… and this is where the gyrations of plot twists come in. So yes, there are twists and some of them are intriguing enough to spur a reader on to read more. The case has elevated itself from being declared as suicide to being classified as a murder – and this is ‘as clear as a conservatory’, if I use the sort of expressions that the DSP uses often.
The expressions that the protagonist uses in this novel have a charm of their own and I liked the way DSP talks about common courtesy having ‘become as rare as bisi-bele-baath in Paris’ that I used it even in the title of this review. So yes, this DSP, besides his prowess in policing, has a talent for wayward expressions that tend to be funny and ‘as thorough as a monkey searching for ticks’ or facts never being just plain but always ‘as plain as a… plain naan’ or plot twists as surprising ‘as a vegetarian T-Rex’. Get the point? These twisted phrases come together to give the book a force that prevents wherever the narrative threatens to totter and fall. They are rescuers and I wish there were more such innovations in language because they do lift a palpably pulpable book to the heights of having a niche saved on every bookshelf.
What is equally interesting is that the crime that is finally solved has everything to do with things that most of us common folk are concerned about… I mean, there are things like insurance frauds, family intrigues, and money laundering that exude a different thriller experience than always having jet-setting spies creating havoc for a few million dollars! The author did not run across to bring in riots, religion, or national politics to prop the plot and I am glad the book remains grounded in stuff that reflects the daily concerns of the common man.
Yes, there are places where the plot dozes off and the language waits to be led out of a maze that it has created. And yet the story ambles along with a few stretches where it hobbles. If the author does decide to extend his sabbatical to write more fiction, we just might get to read another one with unique twists in the plot as well as expressions.
Details of the book:
Title: Death of a District magistrate
Author: Nachi
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN: 978-1-68538-237-7
.
.
.
Arvind Passey
30 March 2022
