How Delhi became the setting for racy crime novels

In the past few years, an increasing number of writers, some famous and some not-so-famous, have been exploring the dark underbelly of Delhi in their novels

Damyanti Biswas calls Delhi India’s “beautiful and terrible capital”. If you read, You Beneath Your Skin, her racy crime thriller set in a cold, smoggy New Delhi, which evokes Jack the Ripper's London, you would know why.

Some books based in Delhi.

It is the story of Anjali Morgan — an Indian- American psychiatrist and a single mother to an autistic teenager — and Police Commissioner Jatin Bhatt. Bhatt, a married man has an affair with Anjali and enlists her support to solve a grisly crime spree unfolding in the Capital: Slum women are found raped, stuffed in trash bags, their faces and bodies disfigured by acid. Events spiral out of control and Anjali finds herself horrifyingly at the centre of all the violence.

The highly atmospheric novel published by Simion & Schuster India in 2019, Biswas' is a quintessential Delhi story.

“I have seen Delhi up close and personal, in all its fascinating contrasts. In some ways, the novel with its theme of violence against women, corruption, and unbridled ambition, couldn’t have taken place in any other city,” says Biswas, who is currently based in Singapore. “Its nightclubs are westernised, but its weddings are traditional. Its denizens love chaat and champagne with equal fervour, are not shy of showing off their wealth, and their class structure is steeped in greed, ambition, and patriarchy. Combine all of this with Delhi’s extremes in weather, and you have an ideal setting for crimes against women, by those with the means, motive, and opportunity”.

Villainy and Club You to Death.

Not just Biswas, the past few years have seen an increasing number of writers, some famous and some not-so-famous, who have been exploring the dark underbelly of Delhi — a city they believe has undergone a tectonic socio-economic transformation. Contemporary Delhi, these writers say, is a city of vaulting ambition and deep desperation, a heady cocktail that is spawning many crime stories. Take, for example, some of the recent titles: How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina, Villainly by Upamanyu Chatterjee of English, August fame, Club You to Death by Anuja Chauhan, and You Beneath Your Skin by Damyanti Biswas, among others.

Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich, was shortlisted for the United Kingdom’s prestigious Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Daggers, 2022, awards. The book published in 2021 by Little Brown, is the story of Ramesh Kumar, the son of a tea-stall owner in old Delhi. He is educated by a White nun, becomes an “educational consultant”, and writes a national entrance exam for “dim-witted” Rudi Saxena, who gets the first rank countrywide. Rudi and his rich family become famous overnight and Ramesh wants his pound of flesh. He becomes Rudi’s manager and soon, Ramesh and Rudi strike it big and are offered a game show on TV — “Beat The Brain”. The duo gets kidnapped and we witness cross-kidnapping, double-crossings, and hostage takings. The book has received rave reviews in the West and has been compared to Arvind Adiga’s Booker-prize winning The White Tiger.

Whisper To Me Your Lies and You Beneath Your Skin.

Like Biswas, Raina, who works as a business consultant, and divides his time between Delhi and Oxford, says his story could have taken place only in Delhi. For the story to work, he says, it needs a setting of the chaotic interplay of rich and poor that only the rapid, metastatic growth of Delhi can provide. “How can a place grow from 5 million to 40 million over the last few decades and not have a huge supply of the bored, indolent rich as well as the millions of newcomers who are desperate for a piece of the action?” asks Raina. “The money flooding into Delhi has broken all traditions, all our old ways of doing things, our families, our morals — the perfect setting for crime of all types”.

No wonder then that Delhi is a strong character in his book, which takes you on a rollicking journey from the dark, filthy lanes of Kashmere Gate to plush South Delhi homes. “The city is certainly the first character that came to me, and in the first draft, it was the most mentioned word. I think the collision of rich and poor, high and low, fair and dark-skinned, people thrust together by money and chance, unable to escape from each other, of avarice and greed and fortunes made from nothing is the story of modern Delhi, so it had to be in the book. Ramesh and Rudi’s is the sort of uneasy alliance that you can only find in a city which has grown far too fast and fat and rich,” says Raina, who is a fan of Ngaio Marsh, “for her cruelty", and Agatha Christie, "for her depiction of a traditional society falling prey to money and modernity.”

Almost all these Delhi crime thrillers are being adapted for the screen. If How to Kidnap the Rich has been optioned by HBO, You Beneath Your Skin has been optioned by Endemol Shine.

How to Kidnap the Rich has been optioned by HBO.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Villainy, written in his trademark taut prose, is a gripping tale of crime and retribution, where a lot of action takes place in prison cells, mortuaries and courtrooms. The page-turner, which marks Chatterjee's debut as a crime writer, also serves as strong social commentary — on the fraught relationship between masters and servants, class and corruption, and how easy it is for the rich to use the money to manipulate the system and escape punishment. Published earlier this year by Speaking Tiger, its story goes like this: When Pukhraj, the spoilt son of a jeweller of the Walled City, with three showrooms in Delhi at Dariba, Karol Bagh and South Ex, goes on a joyride in his father’s Mercedes, a bus turns from the wrong side and hits it. Pukhraj gets on the bus and shoots the driver dead with his father’s unlicensed gun. Pukhraj’s rich parents try to fix the crime on Parmatma, a hardworking and studious son of the family driver Atmaram. There are more murders in the novel to keep the readers hooked to the end.

Novoneel Chakraborty, a novelist and scriptwriter, whose crime thriller Whisper to Me Your Lies published in 2021 by Penguin Random House India, is set in Delhi says, the city has this all-pervasive sense of power. “No city has this, ‘do you know who my father is? attitude. It is the only city where people are killed over parking,” says Chakraborty, whose book is the story of a woman's single-minded obsession to find the killer of her boyfriend to seek emotional closure. ” The book, he says, has sold about 50,000 copies.

Not just stand-alone crime novels set in Delhi, some writers have written a series of books. Ankush Saikia, for example, has written a three-book Detective Arjun Arora series published by Penguin Random House. Arjun Arora is a private detective, who runs Nexus Security with his office in CR Park. He is a loner with a drinking problem and a troubled marriage. His Delhi is a city of extremes — from the weather to the types of people he encounters — and there is the threat of violence always hanging in the air. He is good at his work as a detective, but the cases he has to deal with, involving greedy businessmen, crooked cops, slimy politicians and the like, give him a very cynical view of life (and Delhi). “Delhi has this sense of violence in the air, unlike any other city. It is a much rougher city than Bangalore or Mumbai or any other,” says Saikia, whose fourth book in the series will be published in January next.

Arup Bose of Srishti Publishers, which has published some of the country’s top commercial fiction writers, says that one of the reasons behind the growing corpus of Delhi crime novels is that in the past decade the city has seen big crimes that have hogged national and international headlines. “OTT crime series like Delhi Crime have also created a lot of interest in crime fiction set in Delhi, the way Bollywood created interest in Mumbai underworld books,” says Bose. “Now we publish at least five crime novels set in Delhi. Till four years back, we hardly published any”.

Kanishka Gupta, who runs Writer's Side, one of the largest literary agencies in South Asia, says, of late, publishers in India have given a lot of importance to crime novels by Indian writers, but their sales have been nothing to write home about.

“Indian market continues to be dominated by Western crime writers, and it is not because they are better than Indian writers, but because of their fame and strong marketing machinery of their publishers. But OTT series such as Delhi Crime is once again creating a lot of interest in crime fiction by Indian authors,” he says.