Bestselling crime author Abir Mukherjee tells us about his latest book and the best fish and chips he's ever had.
Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the Sam Wyndham series of crime novels set in Raj era India. His debut, A Rising Man, won the CWA Endeavour Dagger for best historical crime novel of 2017 and was shortlisted for the MWA Edgar for best novel. His second novel, A Necessary Evil, won the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing and was a Zoe Ball Book Club pick. His third novel, Smoke and Ashes, was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 Best Crime & Thriller Novels since 1945. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in London with his wife and two sons. All of Abir's books are available through Suffolk Libraries.
There are a number of authors whom I’m indebted to, and whose works I still look out for and will buy as soon as they hit the shelves. Top of this list has to be Ian Rankin - I’m a huge Rebus fan, but I love the stand-alone novels too. In terms of inspiration, I’ve always been fascinated by the predicament of a good man upholding a corrupt or evil system. To that end, I adore the works of Philip Kerr, Martin Cruz Smith and Robert Harris, all three of whom write novels shot through with wit and an intelligence.
I also love the hard-boiled gumshoes of American crime fiction, and like so many others, I’m a great fan of Raymond Chandler. Then there are the authors who’ve helped me develop from a budding novice to a fully fledged author. I could reel off a long list here, but I need to make special mention of Val McDermid, who’s been a real source of inspiration to me and, I’m proud to say has become a good friend. Finally, and in a special category, there’s William McIlvanney, whose Scottish detective, Laidlaw, is a fantastic creation. I think McIlvanney was a true genius.
I like to think it helped – otherwise I wasted the previous twenty years of my life needlessly being an accountant! Seriously though, they say that writers generally come into their prime in their fifties, so I think starting at the age of 39 wasn’t bad. I think most people need a degree of life experience before they find their voice. I don’t know if I’d have had anything interesting to say if I’d started writing in my twenties. In terms of my journey to publication, I’d always wanted to write a book but never had the confidence. That, and a well-honed tendency to procrastinate meant I’d never actually written more than a chapter of anything, and I doubt things would have changed had it not been for two pieces of good fortune.
First, I was running late one morning and caught an interview with Lee Child on breakfast TV. He recounted how, having never really written before, he’d started writing at the age of forty. I’d never read any of his work till then, but I went out that day and bought a copy of his first book, Killing Floor, and devoured it within forty-eight hours. I was amazed at how simply written and well plotted it was. I’d recently had an idea for a story centered on a British detective who travels to India after the First World War, and reading Killing Floor gave me the motivation to put pen to paper. Nevertheless, after about ten thousand words, I made the error of reading what I’d written and began to doubt whether any of it was any good. I’d have probably given up if it weren’t for the second piece of good fortune.
I’d been doing some research on-line and came across details of the Telegraph - Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, looking for new and unpublished crime writers. The entry requirements were simple: the first five thousand words of a novel, together with a two-page synopsis of the rest of the book. There was only one stipulation – that the entry contain some international element. I tidied up the first chapter, wrote the synopsis and sent them away. Having never submitted anything before, I didn’t expect to win, so it was a complete surprise when, a few months later, I was contacted by the organizer of the competition and told that my book was going to be published. The problem was at that point I didn’t have a book, just half a first draft of fifty thousand words that didn’t always fit together.
Sam and Suren basically came as a pair. Sam’s a war veteran and ex-Scotland Yard detective. Life has made him a cynic - he’s scarred by his wartime experience and burdened by survivor’s guilt and comes to Calcutta looking for a fresh start away from England. I’m not sure what the inspiration for him was. He’s an outsider, someone who’s not truly at home anywhere, and I think part of that comes from my own background, being the son of immigrants to the UK.
At the same time, I’m a big fan of detectives such as Ian Rankin’s Rebus, Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, and I think fictional detectives to some degree need to be fish out of water. They see things differently from other people. While Sam is jaded, his assistant, Sergeant Banerjee, is young and idealistic. Newly recruited into the Calcutta Police, he’s a bright lad, and one of the first Indians to be inducted into CID. His real name is Surendranath, but his British superiors found that too difficult to pronounce and instead christened him Surrender-not. It’s a name he’s gradually getting used to. His decision to join the police force led to tensions within his family. His father in particular is shocked by his son’s decision, accusing him of siding with oppressors of his own people. Surrender-not sees it differently.
His view is that even when the British leave, Indians will probably still keep murdering each other and someone’s going to need the skills to solve them. Surrender-not embodies the conflict felt by many educated Indians of the time, torn between their rose-coloured view of British justice and the repression of their own people. He’s also quite shy and awkward, and he’s particularly inept at talking to women, white or Indian – that is unless they have an interest in cricket. To an extent, both Sam and Surrender-not embody different parts of my own personality. Sam has my cynicism and suspicion of authority, while Surrender-not represents the hopeful, optimistic side of me…and my chicken legs!
The book is set in two timelines, Eastern India in 1922 and East London in 1905. As seasoned readers of my books will know, Sam Wyndham has a wee bit of an opium problem, and this book sees Sam head off to rehab at an ashram in the hills of Assam. On his way there though, he sees a ghost from his past; a man he thought had died in England almost twenty years earlier. The book began as my tribute to Agatha Christie. From the start, I wanted to write my take on the locked-room mystery, and I think I’ve come up with a method of murder that hasn’t been done before and which even seasoned readers will hopefully find fiendishly difficult to work out. But as I was writing, I became troubled by what was going on in the UK, especially the growth of anger and extremism and the erosion of tolerance and decency. I find this fear and intolerance hard to reconcile with the Britain I know and love.
Suddenly, while writing a book set in India, I felt I needed to write something which reflected my Britain: one that is far from perfect, but one which still stood up to the likes of Oswald Mosley and rejected Enoch Powell’s. I wanted to remind people what history shows us: that when intolerance and hatred raise their heads, the vast majority of British people take a stand against it. I find it fascinating that the streets of the East End of London, which today are home to Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, were a hundred years ago, home to Eastern European Jews, fleeing persecution. Much of the press at the time vilified them in exactly the same way that certain papers do with Muslims today. Yet over time, those immigrants, their families and descendants have become part of the fabric of British life. They maintain their own distinct culture but are still British. The same has happened with many other communities including my own, and it will happen with these new immigrants as well. I set half of the novel in the East End of 1905 because I wanted to show that we have been here before and that we have risen to the challenge. I wanted it to be a book about hope and about remembering who we are as a nation, so that we may try and live up to those standards of tolerance and decency that I believe still run through us.
Quite a few, to be honest. On the non-fiction side, I’d have to point to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This book changed my views on what human progress really means. At one point, he postulates that as a species, we may have been happier as hunter gatherers than we are today, and that for the last five thousand odd years the human race has been enslaved by humble cereal crops. I’d never considered that before. In terms of fiction, I think my world-view has, from an early age, been influenced by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. It’s a book I have read more times than I can remember, and few have been as prescient or left more of a mark on me.
On another note, the book I have most identified with is The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I think Lahiri is one the most brilliant of authors of her generation, having won a plethora of awards including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Hemingway award. The Namesake is the story of the Ganguli family, their emigration from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. The parallels with my own parents’ move from the same city to Britain were uncanny. I can’t underestimate the effect it had on me.
I’ve just handed in the first draft of the fifth book in the Wyndham and Banerjee series. It’s provisionally entitled, ‘The Shadows of Men’, and sees our heroes trek to Bombay on the hunt of a man they believe to be a murderer. It’s set against a background of Hindu-Muslim violence which threatens to tear the country apart and undo all of Gandhi’s good work of the previous few years, and for fans of the series it contains a big surprise. I won’t say more than that. I’m now starting to work on a stand-alone novel. A modern-day novel set in the US and UK, which will deal with issues such as radicalisation and terrorism in a way which I hope is both fast-paced and thrilling, but also written with intelligence.
I tend to read several things at once, some factual and some fiction. At the moment I’m reading Mark Edward’s new book, The House Guest and an advanced copy of Midnight at Malabar House by my friend Vaseem Khan, author of the Inspector Chopra novels. This is the first in a new historical crime series for him and features a female detective, Inspector Persis Wadia. Both are great reads. I’m also listening to Why Does E=mc squared?(and Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. I love books about science, especially quantum theory, though I tend to get confused with the maths after the first fifteen pages.
Being a writer was always my dream job. I spent twenty years working as an accountant and didn’t really think of anything else. I suppose, if I couldn’t be a writer, I’d have liked to be an astronomer or an archaeologist, though both seem like a lot harder work than being an author.
I want to say thank you for reading the books. When I started writing, some seven years ago, I never thought that people would take them to their hearts. It’s been really humbling. I hope I’d be able to come and talk to your readers one day post COVID-19, not least because I love Suffolk. Some of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had was in Aldeburgh.
The Dalai Lama once called me fat.
