The case of the writer who fell in love with India
Thankfully, Tarquin Hall doesn’t bristle at comparisons between his detective, Vish Puri of the Most Private Investigators, and Agatha Christie’s Poirot
© Tom Pietrasik
I didn’t set out to create an Indian Poirot,” says Tarquin Hall thoughtfully while rubbing repellent on his arms to ward off mosquitoes, responsible for an outbreak of dengue fever in New Delhi.
Tarquin Hall
Born: , London
Lives: New Delhi
Main Protagonist: Vish ‘Chubby’ Puri
Hall, from England, is seeing his portly Puri, known as ‘Chubby’ to family and friends, grow in popularity. He recently returned from a tour of the United States to promote The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken , the third in the series, and there is a film in discussion.
Yet he doesn’t consider himself a ‘crime writer,’ and his fiction is less notable for its ‘whodunit’ character than for entertaining insights into modern India in all its traffic-tooting, pungent, sari-colored brilliance. It is a land where, as Puri contemplates in The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing , the “India of beggars and farmer suicides, and the one of cafés selling frothy Italian coffee were like parallel dimensions.” Characters use cell phones, hang out in malls and even hack into the Pentagon, but they can also believe in superstitions about jinn . Puri, as a devout Hindu and a detective who believes in logic and deduction, slips between the two worlds.
Hall, author of the highly regarded nonfiction work Salaam Brick Lane , has lived in India on and off since the early. He had been thinking about a nonfiction book on “changing India” when he was commissioned to write an article on Delhi detectives. “They are often hired to investigate prospective brides and grooms and are just fantastic characters. I loved their stories and the variety of cases. One told me how he infiltrated a nudist colony in Goa, while in another case he posed as a Xerox toner smuggler. It struck me as a good way to discuss modern India.”
