'Mysteries are being told in voices of people who don't fit stock image of Hollywood police detective'

Sujata Massey (right) is the author of the Perveen Mistry books: The Widows of Malabar Hill, The Satapur Moonstone, The Bombay Prince, and The Mistress of Bhatia House (2023). (Photo courtesy Sujata Massey)

Lawyer Perveen Mistry made her literary debut in 2015, in a novella titled Outnumbered in Oxford. The Perveen Mistry novels by Sujata Massey have since carved a niche at the intersection of historical fiction and crime novels. In the fourth and latest book in the series, The Mistress of Bhatia House, Perveen Mistry takes on the case of a domestic helper who is falsely accused of abortion and then suspected of murdering her boss.

In an interview over video call, Massey spoke about Perveen Mistry, the real women lawyers who inspired the character of Perveen Mistry and how they influenced the decision to set the stories in 1920s Mumbai and what she looks for in a good crime fiction novel. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about your research for the Perveen Mistry books.

India had some of the earliest working women lawyers in the whole British Empire. Cornelia Sorabji began practising in the late 1880s, after she finished her law education at Oxford. Another Indian woman lawyer named Mithan Jamshed Lam was based in the area that we now call Maharashtra.

So western India was a place that was more accepting for women to go into the professions, or maybe I should say, for their families to allow them to pursue higher education and professional goals. They still faced a lot of discrimination in the workplace, but the fact that they were able to get these educations and find a way to practice was really exceptional.

I was able to learn a lot about them because both the women wrote memoirs, and Cornelia specially wrote quite a bit about her experience. A lot of the cases that she took were (to do with) women and children, whose voices were not readily heard... In those days, especially if a woman was widowed, any monies that she might have inherited. any property that she might own, her children's rights, all of that could be very much at risk after her husband died. There were cases where women, widows, were poisoned or banished and locked up in different places. And that was a lot of the work that Cornelia Sorabji did.

One of the things that I admire so much about Mithan Jamshed Lam, is she managed to reform Parsi divorce law in 1936. And if you've read my first book, The Widows of Malabar Hill, you know how very difficult it was to get a divorce. Later on, it became much better after Mithan Lam worked in the law.

Why set the Perveen Mistry books in 1920s' Bombay - what was it about that period and place that interested you?

Between the 1880s and the 1940s - that whole time period was exciting, for starters. But what I liked specifically about the 1920s is you had the suffrage movement where women were becoming empowered around the world. And you also had the rising power of Mahatma Gandhi's freedom message that it was actually spreading beyond the elite, to all people in India. There were times that he (Mahatma Gandhi) was out of out of jail, and there were times that he was in jail. And in this particular book, he's, he's gone into jail on charges of sedition after events that happened in my third book, The Bombay Prince, which was when the Prince of Wales came to India, and there was a lot of rough rioting, and the government blamed the whole problem on Gandhiji.

So, it's like I have a lot of exciting political things to work with, I have empowerment of women to work with. And then, we just can enjoy some of the things about the music of the 1920s and the clothing of the '20s.

How did you become interested in the history of the subcontinent?

What motivated me to start writing historical fiction set in India is my experience of going to visit Calcutta over the years from childhood on into adulthood, and seeing these tremendous changes in the neighborhoods in the streets - an entire blocks of old houses would be gone, and it might be a brand new shopping mall five years later, and so it was really kind of disturbing to me to see the loss of have beautiful buildings. Of course, I want the city to do well and have businesses and all those things that having a shopping mall can bring, but I was thinking about these lost memories, and these lost experiences on the streets. So I just started digging into the streets and the buildings and wondering about the people who had lived behind the windows of these grand old houses. And that's how I started writing historical fiction - I thought, this is the way that I can cement in my mind, what I remember being there and learn more about what I've missed. So is was just like a very emotional desire to write historical fiction. And also I was discovering that there were stories that I didn't know having grown up in the West - I didn't know about Subhash Chandra Bose's movement that was running at the same time as Mahatma Gandhi's movement, and how people were trying to decide which is the better way to become free? Do we have the patience to stay with Gandhiji? Or should we use these actions of Netaji? So that was a big part (of the standalone book I wrote in 2013, set in 1920s-40s Kolkata). And I'm very interested in those ideas.

And how did you stumble upon Cornelia Sorabji's memoir?

I was doing research in what women were able to do and not able to do during the colonial period. I'm always on the internet, or at the library, looking for examples. I think probably I had wanted to know if there was a woman doctor, if there had been any women doctors. And somehow I went down a rabbit hole, and I found an article - I think it came out at MIT. That was about Cornelia Sorabji. So what I did was I just printed it out and put it in a file that I have of really interesting women who were groundbreakers, who did things in education and medicine - and she was the lawyer. Then some years later, I decided I was going to try to write a mystery series, but set during the time period that I enjoyed - this late colonial period. And I remembered that I had somewhere an article about a woman lawyer... so I could create a woman lawyer character. And so once I found her name, again, I started searching, and I found that she had published several books in her lifetime about her work, some of them were rare books that I was able to access from book dealers overseas, like I had one book come from Australia, another time, I found that a library had scanned one of her books, and may put it into the public domain. So it was I was able to read the memoir that way.

So why Mumbai, you mentioned going to Calcutta several times while growing up?

Western India was where these early women lawyers were. So for the sake of accuracy, I set it there. Because, for example, in Calcutta, there was a woman who did all she did all the studies to be a vakeel and she qualified, but they wouldn't allow her to work. She was refused by the court to work.

Cornelia Sorabji also travelled and worked all over India. But she was from Pune. Mithan Lam was from Bombay. So that just told me this is the hot spot for women's education. It also was one of the places where women were able to start going to, say, the University of Bombay, though they had to fight for it. Cornelia was the first woman to graduate with a degree from the University of Bombay. And then she later she went to Oxford.

Another wonderful thing is the preservation in Mumbai. There's better preservation there than a lot of places. So I can go into old buildings that have been beautifully preserved and often have a lot of the original furniture from the turn of the century. There's that incredible train station, the former Victoria Terminus. There all these places that I can go and walk in the footsteps of my characters.

Did you visit Mumbai while you were writing the book?

Oh, yeah. I've been writing about India since I guess the first book came out in 2013. So I think that the first time I was in Mumbai was 2009. I regularly come for research, to Mumbai.

You have been part of a group of women who write mystery and crime fiction. Can you tell us a little bit about some of these groups? Why are they necessary even in 2023?

Yes, well, in the 1980s, a group of women met at a convention of mystery writers in the United States. And they decided to form a group called Sisters in Crime, because they realized that although they wrote more than half the mysteries that were being published in the country, they were getting very few reviews in newspapers. So they began trying to advocate for publicity and attention for women writing mysteries. And really this group has expanded to include men; they just have to agree with the principle of supporting women's writing. But it goes on now that we have all kinds of webinars, and there are meetings and books published by the group to help each other, and it's just a phenomenal organization.

Both as a reader of mystery novels and a writer, what do you think are the absolutely essential characteristics of a good mystery?

You need to have believable characters who have problems and quirks that that you can understand. Or, if not necessarily understand, they are intriguing. You shouldn't use stereotypes of characters.

I think that it's nice to have a central problem in the book that sort of makes sense in life. For example, this theme of how difficult childbearing was and how women had no control over what was going to happen with their lives once they became wives - that was something which was a very big problem. But people at the time thought there was nothing that could be done about it except for the community-minded people that were trying to create hospitals (this is part of the plot of The Mistress of Bhatia House).

So you have a central theme that makes sense, whether it's in the histories past or whether it's current, and then you in then you have the crime. You don't always have to have a dead body, you can have somebody disappear and be found - I always like those mysteries. They're all different ways you can do it. And they don't have to be violent. There are a lot of people who don't like super-violent mysteries. But I'm more of the camp where I'm interested in people, I'm interested in social problems, emotional problems, character. And I love it an interesting setting, not a generic setting. Mysteries can take you into small towns, they can take you to a big city that you've been at, or always been interested in. Increasingly, mysteries are set all around the world. And they're told in the voices of people who do not fit that stock image of a Hollywood police detective.