The outsider: How Gurugram became a crime writer’s muse

His early novel Millennium City mirrors Gurugram’s own story, weaving real estate rivalries and fictionalised serial killings into the narrative of its meteoric rise.

When Joygopal Podder moved to Gurugram in 1988, the Millennium City was still little more than farmland, forested hills and empty stretches. A handful of row houses, two apartment blocks, Garden Estate and Silver Oaks, and a deserted DLF Qutab Plaza dotted the landscape. The now-bustling NH-48, then NH-8, was a narrow road, while Sadar Bazar remained the commercial heart. Anchoring the city’s early stirrings was the five-year-old Maruti factory.

Joygopal Podder. (HT PHOTO)

Podder, then 28, left behind a rented flat in Delhi’s South Extension to buy a modest row house in DLF Phase 1, moving in with his mother. Born in London and raised in Delhi, he was working as a sales manager with a leading FMCG company, commuting daily to the capital. “I had discovered old and new Gurgaon during my visits to Sadar Bazar shops,” he recalled.

Marriage followed in 1990, children grew up in the city, and life intertwined with Gurugram’s rhythms of change. Today, Podder and his wife live in a gated community apartment, reflecting the shift from open plots to high-rise living. What sets him apart is how this transformation shaped his creative journey.

At 50, in 2010, Podder turned to writing, with Gurugram as both backdrop and muse. “Out of my 22 novels, more than half are either grounded in Gurugram or a lot of the hectic action happens here,” he said. His fictional detectives belong to the local police force, grappling with conspiracies set against the city’s glitzy skyline and darker underbelly.

His early novel Millennium City mirrors Gurugram’s own story, weaving real estate rivalries and fictionalised serial killings into the narrative of its meteoric rise. Other books carry distinct local imprints: assassination plots in Ambience Mall’s basement, killers in Leisure Valley, and boardroom betrayals in glass towers. In Beware of the Night, bodies surface in the Aravalli forests along the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, while A Million Seconds Too Late explores industrial feuds in Udyog Vihar.

Podder has blended his memories of Gurugram’s small-town past with its corporate present, using the contrasts between old migrants and new, the haves and have-nots, and rural and urban to fuel fast-paced thrillers. “If my plots sound racy, it’s because most of the fun stuff happens here: gun battles in mall basements, corporate plots in high-rises, and stabbings in Leisure Valley,” he said with a laugh.

The city shaped not just his stories but also his career. Podder credits Gurugram as the force behind his frenetic early writing, which earned him recognition in the Limca Book of Records for six consecutive years as the fastest published crime fiction author of India and a spot on the Forbes India 2014 Celebrity 100 Authors list.

From scattered fields to skyscrapers, Gurugram has grown with Podder, not only as his home but also as his lifelong muse.

(Joygopal Podder is a crime fiction writer and long-time resident of Gurugram. Listed in the Limca Book of Records and Forbes India’s Celebrity 100 Authors, he has written 22 novels, many of them set in the Millennium City.)