Although Vaseem Khan is British-born, it was the decade he lived in India that has inspired his crime writing, as well as his current position in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London, which applies science to help prevent, reduce and detect crime.
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Khan is best known, to date, for his Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series, featuring retired Inspector Chopra of the Mumbai police and his unusual side-kick, Ganesh, a one year old baby elephant. Khan has explained that he thought "it would be different and fun to cast an elephant in a crime-fighting role ... on a purely practical level, elephants possess all the qualities of the best detectives".
However, in his latest novel, Midnight at Malabar House, the first in a new series, Khan has moved into more serious territory, India in 1949, just after independence. He says that its his "attempt to look at a period of Indian history that's not often examined in fiction ... a couple of years after Gandhi's assassination and the horrors of partition".
Midnight at Malabar House is set in Bombay and introduces Inspector Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective who struggles to assert herself in a paternalistic, misogynistic society. Her appointment seven months earlier had "occasioned hysteria" in the press.
Although she topped her year at the academy, Persis has already been sidelined to a crime unit in Malabar House, "a menagerie of misfits ... the unwanted and the undesirables" exiled and despised for blunders and mistakes. Persis' mistake is that she is female, smart, stubborn with a "prickly personality" and a refusal to conform, which means she's seen as a troublemaker.
On New Year's Eve, 1949, Persis has volunteered for the midnight shift to avoid the parties on the streets. As a result when the phone rings to report the murder of former diplomat Sir James Herriot at a costume party of his house, Persis becomes the investigating officer in a politically sensitive case because Sir James had been working for the new government, examining atrocities committed during partition.
It soon becomes apparent that Sir James may have been "a consummate diplomat trusted by the Indian government, but he was also a cad, a cad on the verge of bankruptcy".
Persis reluctantly accepts the help of Archie Blackfinch, a criminologist on secondment from the Met in London, discovering how essential his forensic skills are in tracking down the murderer.
Midnight at Malabar House is a murder mystery within a thoughtful exploration of an India fractured during Partition and the resulting ongoing social, political and religious turmoil.
