Book review | 'Grave Intentions', a cosy crime mystery set in Bundelkhand

Bundelkhand. (Photo: Shruti Singh via Unsplash)

Published in 1841, American author Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, created literary history. In Monsieur Auguste Dupin, readers recognised a new fictional character, the gentleman detective. The story also heralded a new genre, the locked room murder mystery aka the puzzle-whodunit. Writing at a time when rapid urbanisation had led to social upheaval, Poe’s story, set in Paris, struck an immediate chord with readers for the cool, elegant deductive reasoning, or "ratiocination" — a term Poe invented — employed to solve the mystery. The themes reflected the zeitgeist: newspapers had started to report on the rising crime rates in the city; to deal with the new challenges, the police force was modernising and relying on forensic science to solve crimes. In this scenario, the amateur detective symbolised the brains versus brawn approach that appealed to readers. It prompted two British authors, living in very different eras, to construct their own versions of the gentleman detective. Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in the 1850s, created the London-based Sherlock Holmes. Seventy years afterwards, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, a Belgian immigrant, made his appearance in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920), marking the Golden Age of Crime Fiction.

Grave Intentions (A Harith Athreya Mystery) by RV Raman (2023, Pushkin Press, 288 pages, Rs 499)

Setting it right

A century later, cosy crime, a sub-genre of which Christie was undoubtedly the queen, has transplanted on India soil with mixed success. Though there have been successful avatars of the gentleman detective in Bangla — Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi — fiction writers in English have tended to model their sleuths on the American private investigator first made popular by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. He is the cynical, hardboiled loner whose beat is usually within the mean streets of the big city. However, the pattern is changing once again and the classic detective, who lives in the city but travels to the countryside to solve mysteries, has made a comeback.

RV Raman, already known for his corporate thrillers, is at the leading-edge of this whodunit trend. His investigator, Harith Athreya, was launched in A Will To Kill (2019). Set in a colonial-style mansion in the Nilgiris, the tale has all the mandatory ingredients — a wealthy patriarch, multiple wills, contentious heirs, mysterious deaths, fog, landslides, bumbling cops, art theft. Sufficient twists and turns — some predictable, others imaginative — ensure a suspenseful read. The story’s strengths lie in the vivid evocation of a picturesque setting with moods ranging from sublime to spooky; in the quiet method of Athreya’s investigative skill and in the dramatic final reveal. Grave Intentions (A Harith Athreya Mystery), his second novel, cements Athreya’s reputation as the man in control who, no matter how unusual the setting or inexplicable the crime, manages to solve it.

A stash of puzzles

The story begins when Athreya arrives in Bundelkhand. Commissioned by a foreign funder of archaeological excavations to investigate suspected financial fraud in a project, his first visit to the excavation site – on the banks of the river Betwa – is enlivened by the appearance of a woman in white, glimpsed on a densely wooded riverine island, Naaz Tapu, that the locals avoid because of the mysterious deaths that have occurred there. A centuries-old legend has it that the island is haunted by the ghosts of a grey-eyed Muslim lass, Naazneen, and her lover, a Hindu prince, who eloped to avoid his father’s anger. Adding an even more eerie twist to the ghost story is the real-life archaeologist Nazreen Vaziri, an enigmatic beauty with an uncanny resemblance to the long-dead Naazneen.

Apart from her, the cast of characters consists of the dig director, Mrs Markaan, a despotic, unlikeable woman; Dr Korda, a cadaverous man with intense eyes, the cataloguer of the dig; the scientist couple, Ulhas and Mitali; Adhira, the gregarious accountant and administrative head, her boyfriend Madhav, an archaeologist recently sacked by Markaan and a sprinkling of other seemingly innocuous folk. Add to the mix, a network of antique thieves, the Bronze Runners, operating in the background as an ever present threat. While the reader gathers these details, a hundred pages slip by. At some point in chapter seven, Markaan disappears into the night. The search leads Athreya to Naaz Tapu where the missing lady is found dead with her head bashed in and claw marks on her body. Enter the police, Inspector Bhupinder Singh, who, true to tradition, is no match for Athreya. Deferring to his expertise the inspector leaves it largely to Athreya to find out if the death was, indeed, a consequence of financial fraud. Alternately, was Markaan a victim of the Bronze Runners? Or had the supernatural power said to be haunting the island struck again? Each one is a puzzle that Athreya must solve.

Inventive storytelling

Though complicated in plot, Grave Intentions is an uncomplicated, fun read. Harith Athreya is a man we might know: well-connected, happily married, a frequent guest at embassy parties and musical concerts. Though well-regarded as a sleuth, he is a bit of a mystery himself because of this incongruity between the ordinariness of him and the rarity of what he does. Unmarked by any peculiar character traits such as pipe-smoking or a speech peppered with foreign language phrases, he has an unobtrusive manner, is pleasant and blends in any gathering even as his busy mind unerringly picks up all the relevant details from the get-go. For instance, when shown around the archaeologists’ living quarters for the first time, he immediately notices that the place has only one entrance. If this appears unsubtle or prescient, it doesn’t matter. Readers of the genre know that it’s precisely the sort of scrutiny that comes in handy several chapters later when the detective is tracing everyone’s movements on the night of the murder.

Though filled with all the timeworn tropes, Grave Intentions is the perfect comfort food for our times. As in the past, loss, violence and social change are once again in the air. Travelling to remote spots to solve mysteries with Athreya is tempting.