Guest Editor, Vaseem Khan

Vaseem Khan is one of the most interesting and engaging authors in the literary world, so of course we are extremely excited to be able to introduce him as our Guest Editor. I first met Vaseem through his writing when I read his debut The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra and fell in love with a certain detective and baby elephant. This was deservedly chosen as one of our Books of the Year in 2015 due to a beautifully light touch which perfectly blends with the more sinister side of vibrantly colourful life in the city of Mumbai. I also adored The Perfect Crime, an anthology of 22 crime stories by authors from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, which he co-edited with Maxim Jakubowski. I went on to meet Vaseem in person at a Crime Festival and was completely charmed by his welcoming and quick witted self. We talked all things books of course and pounced on our love for one of the authors he includes as guest editor. We fell into the rabbit hole of discussing various works, delighting in the joint admiration for this wonderfully talented author so I was thrilled to see mention of him. Vaseem takes over as Chair of Crime Writers’ Association this year and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he brings to the crime-writing table as his passion for the genre is evident. I’m also oh-so looking forward to reading his next book Death of a Lesser God from the Malabar House historical crime series, the hardback is out on 10 August 2023. A very warm welcome to Vaseem...

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Vaseem Khan is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India, the Baby Ganesh Agency series set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime novels set in 1950s Bombay. His first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published 2015-2020, and is translated into 17 languages. The second in the series won the Shamus Award in the US. In 2021, Midnight at Malabar House won the Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger. The book was also shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Vaseem was born in England, but spent a decade working in India. His latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, was a crime book of the year in The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The Daily Express which called it ‘the best historical thriller of the year’. Vaseem is the current chair of the 70 year-old Crime Writer’s Association.

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The theme of my selection is ‘revelation through absurdity’. Humour can illuminate the most serious topics, allow us to hold something terrifying in our hands, to examine it without it consuming us. I use humour in my own novels; even murder can be uplifting with the addition of a wry smile or two. The recent resurgence of cosy and Golden Age crime fiction is ample testament to this! 

So why do I think humour works in ‘serious’ fiction? When I was ten, our English teacher asked us to write a short story for a competition. I wrote a one hundred page ‘book’ which I folded over and stapled together and created a hand-illustrated cover for. The book contained humour, though at its heart was a dark story about an unlikeable old woman and her dying cat. There may have been a murderous rampage with a fire extinguisher towards the end. (Yes, I was a very serious child.) I’m not sure what my teacher made of it, but I did hear, years later, that he became a drunk and quit the teaching profession. I’m hoping it wasn’t my early literary endeavours that pushed him over the edge.

I’ve never really wanted to do anything but write. I grew up in a poor immigrant family in London, England, where books were a luxury, not a necessity. My local library became my Aladdin’s cave. At seventeen, I wrote a novel, sent it off to agents, then told my parents that I was going to become a rich and famous writer and so I wouldn’t be going to university thank you very much. They looked at each other. They looked at me. They looked at the ceiling. A vein throbbed at my father’s temple.

So. I went to university. I became a management consultant. And then I went to India aged 23, and lived there for a decade. The India I saw transformed me. A land of swamis and snake-charmers, of lepers and slums, of communal riots and caste prejudice. But also a land being transformed by modernity, with skyscrapers and call centres, coffee shops and MTV, McDonalds and Marks & Spencer. When I came back to England, I wanted to write about this magical, infuriating, flawed nation. Through my crime novels I became India’s chronicler, and in so doing finally fulfilled my childhood dream.

My favourite novels use absurdity to reveal things about the world. And why not? After all, there is nothing more absurd than the human condition. The books below are my reference manuals, the books I turn to time and again to re-energise myself as I seek to similarly showcase the ofttimes grim world around us through the prism of humour.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

If I’m a writer today it is because of the late, great Pratchett. (I first encountered the Discworld series in my local library and those amazing books inspired me to write my first novel aged 17, a comic fantasy.) Pratchett was the ultimate chronicler of our foibles, with a jeweller’s eye for human silliness. The Discworld novels slaughtered sacred cows with gay abandon and showed us up for the pompous fools we often are. 

Guards! Guards! tells the story of a band of misfit cops – including a she-werewolf and a six-foot tall dwarf – attempting to defend the great cesspool-city of Ankh-Morpork from a conspiracy of dragons. If you haven’t laughed out loud several times by the end … you need to take a long hard look at yourself. 

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

John Irving is a literary novelist who understands that great pathos can sit comfortably alongside humour. His is a dry and ingenious brand of situational comedy, his characters often finding themselves in situations that defy credulity, whilst simultaneously wavering on the cusp of possibility. In A Prayer for Owen Meany we have his most memorable creation, a doomed young man, with a unique voice, and an even more unique fate. Irving uses Owen Meany’s tragic life to examine the meaning of faith in our modern world. 

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

I still remember the first time I came across this book, as I lurked in the basement of a bookshop in Bombay, hiding from a giant eunuch I was sure was following me. It was monsoon time in India, the sort of rain that can concuss elephants, so hiding in a bookshop was not a bad option. 

I remember the overwhelming feeling of discovering something magical. Rushdie showed me that through words you could make readers nostalgic for a time and place they had never known. This book was voted the best Booker prize winner in 40 years. It tells the story of modern India – through the independence struggle and beyond – using magical realism. The story comes to us through the eyes of Saleem Sinai who was born “at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence.” People may know Rushdie because of the controversy around The Satanic Verses, but this is the book that proves he is a literary genius. 

Rushdie’s excoriating satire rubbed many up the wrong way, including the former Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, who he lampooned in the novel, and who later took him to court … This, then, is the book that convinced me to write about my heritage, and where the India that we know today came from. My Malabar House novels, starting with Midnight at Malabar House, set in 1950s India, are a direct result of many of the things I learned from Midnight’s Children, such as the Amritsar massacre, the horrors of Partition, Gandhi’s assassination, and the last days of the British in India.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

One of those rare books that all but create a new genre. In this superbly crafted story of a singular young woman attempting to find her feet in a world that doesn’t make room for those who might be a little different (we might use the term neurodivergent these days – but please don’t crucify me if I’ve got that wrong!) or who refuse to conform to groupthink or who might simply be carrying baggage not visible to the naked eye.

The prose is pitch perfect. Honeyman writes beautifully, hilariously capturing the unique persona of her heroine. A book where every sentence is worth savouring. You can see why this was one of the biggest selling hardbacks of 2017, and why, since then, ‘up-lit’ has become a mega-genre.  

The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall-Smith

Millions of readers around the world have fallen in love with Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s first lady detective, a ‘traditionally-built’ woman who loves bush tea and possesses both wisdom and a heart as vast as the desert. McCall-Smith’s gentle humour touched a chord. Here was a cosy mystery series that gave us an insight into an exotic culture, with a side order of warmth and charm. 

When my first series was published – the Baby Ganesh Agency series – the national newspapers instantly compared the books to the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. I freely admit to using McCall-Smith’s books as a template, though mine, beginning with The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra – about a policeman forced into early retirement in modern Bombay – are slightly darker in tone. Nevertheless, that same gentle note of humour runs through the series. Plus a baby elephant.