My latest novel, CITY OF DESTRUCTION is now out…  It’s Bombay 1951. A political assassin’s dying words take India’s first female police inspector to Delhi in search of his conspirators, working with MI6 officers based on the subcontinent… History, mystery, heat… If that sounds like your thing, do please consider ordering from your favourite bookshop. Thank you! (And thank you to all those who have already bought, reviewed or supported around the world)… Other order options here: https://vaseemkhan.com/city-of-destruction/

You can find a piece I wrote about Delhi for the ASPECTS IN HISTORY website by clicking here.

And here are a couple of early reviews:

A HEAT mag BOOK OF THE WEEK: “The fifth in the Malabar House series is as charming, disarming & engrossing as ever” 

A LoveReading Recommends Star Book: “Political shenanigans in Bombay set India’s first female detective…on a new path in this clever and dramatically fiery novel” … “…wit sings through the pages… captures the absolute chaos of the time”… “City of Destruction is a cleverly compelling read and comes as highly recommended by our team.” 

Publication week is always a tricky time. The elation of being published is balanced by the anxieties that come with having a new novel hit the bookshops.

This week DEATH OF A LESSER GOD, the fourth in my award-winning Malabar House series, was published in the UK, in hardback. The book is set in 1950, Bombay… Englishman James Whitby is due to hang for the murder of an Indian lawyer. As Persis, India’s first female police detective, and Archie, a forensic scientist from England, investigate, they are led to a second murder – that of an African-American soldier stationed in India during WW2. Soon they find themselves travelling to the old colonial capital of Calcutta in search of a killer… The book is receiving a lot of love and great early reviews. Early orders really impact how a book is promoted, so I would be immensely grateful if you chose to order a copy. It also happens to be a thing of beauty! Would make a lovely gift. And you can find many options to order by clicking here.

This is my ninth novel. It doesn’t get any easier. Big publisher or small. Experienced writer or newbie. I won’t pretend that some of the jitters aren’t ameliorated by a publisher with marketing resources, but the one thing this industry has taught me is that no one really knows. 

Having said this, I am fortunate to have had a schedule of events to help launch Death of a Lesser God and great reviews – in the FT, the Literary Review, Heat Magazine, LoveReading, and the Mail on Sunday among others. The highlight so far? A ‘soft’ launch in Ann Cleeves’ home town of Whitley Bay. Ann baked me scones and we chatted about murder at her kitchen table – where she has written many of her Vera, and Shetland novels. Ann has been a great supporter of the books!

In each of these books I try and reveal some of the hidden history of the subcontinent.

The second half of Death of a Lesser God is set in 1950s Calcutta. In the book I describe the city thus: “Once a pestilential riverine swamp, infested by bamboo jungles where tigers roamed freely, snacking on unsuspecting locals, the city was, in part, an invention of the British, who’d purchased the rights to the local land and the villages that sat upon it. One of those villages had been Kalikata, from which it was said Calcutta took its name.”

Calcutta became a base for British operations in India, with the colossal Writers Building housing the monolithic bureaucracy needed to govern the subcontinent – ‘writers’ being the name for the army of East India Company clerks who populated the building, dressed in woollen suits in the searing tropical heat, mildewing in the annual monsoon, and dying, variously of dysentery, malaria, and drunkenness. Over time, the city became mired in the independence movement, until, in 1911, fed up with the argumentative Bengalis, the British upped sticks and moved their base of operations to Delhi. 

Chowringhee Square, Calcutta in 1945. Image credit: Public Domain

The Malabar House novels, beginning with Midnight at Malabar House, were born of my desire to explore India just after Independence, a nation still reeling in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination and the horrors of Partition when a million Indians died in communal riots. My lead character, Persis, is determined to prove herself in a man’s world, but is banished to Bombay’s smallest police station, Malabar House, populated by rejects and misfits. (The Times said: “Think Mick Herron in Bombay.”) The books contain many characters that reflect the viewpoint of Englishmen born or inhabiting India with the intrinsic belief that they were gods in all but name – ‘lesser gods’, if you will – hence the title.

If you do buy the book, I hope you enjoy it!

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In many ways India is a nebulous construct. 

Some think of her as a collection of countries, rather than a unified whole, held together by the fraying threads of history, the entire mass transfigured, time and again, by war, conquest, fate, and politics. The populace of this vast nation mirrors the heterogeneity of the landscape. From the fiery Punjabis in the north to the sanguine Tamilians in the south, from the Maharashtrians on the western coast, to the Assamese in the jungles of the east, Indians represent a kaleidoscope of humanity every bit as vibrant and colourful as the array of silks and spices so often associated with the country.

The challenges that India faces in the coming years are myriad.

Picture credit: Mayanksethi27 CC 4.0

In spite of a recent slowdown, India remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world. By 2027, India will have overtaken Germany and Japan to become the world’s third largest economy – behind only the US and China. 

This rampant economic growth comes at a price.

The nation’s cities are creaking beneath the sheer weight of ever-increasing populations. As fast as the government clears slums or attempts to resettle them, new slums spring up. The exodus from village to metro continues unabated. 

India’s pollution problem has reached epidemic proportions. The country is one of the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide. In response, the country’s political masters have announced an ambition for India to become a net zero emitter by 2070. A laudable goal, but one that relies on both political will across successive governments and an understanding that those at the lowest rungs of society still live a hand-to-mouth existence. For them, the urgency is in finding the next meal, not saving the planet from the consequences of – as many in the developing world see it – past climate evils committed by the west.

With a relatively young population, the need to create new jobs is a constant spectre for those in charge. At the same time, India’s middle class are living longer. It is only a matter of time before the country begins to feel some of the pain that western economies are experience in attempting to fund the consequences of longer life expectancies.

Modernity has made inroads into every aspect of the country. At times this has led to some suggesting that India is forgetting her roots, or, at the least, that those roots are weakening. 

And yet, there remains something stubbornly Indian about India. 

In the mind’s eye, many still picture her as a land of swamis and snake-charmers, of old-fashioned trains swaying across golden wheat fields and monsoon-drenched lowlands, of crumbling palaces and the nostalgic legacy of the Raj. 

All these things are part and parcel of the country’s DNA. 

Yet there is also a new, vibrant, and, at times, futuristic India. An India where village women are employed to enter raw data into programmes that train artificial intelligence algorithms. An India where city skylines are increasingly beginning to rival the skylines of New York, Singapore, London. An India where urban youth congregate in coffee shops, watch Netflix, and aspire to non-traditional careers.

This is a country on the verge of a cultural explosion, an entire generation released from the shackles of its own mythology. Yet this is also a nation that continues to celebrate its history, enshrining that vast provenance into the way Indian society thinks and behaves. Sometimes, that is a good thing; at other times it leads to an uncomfortable clash between past and present. 

During the course of this collection of short essays we have skated across the vastness that is the subcontinent. The truth is that another one thousand essays might have been included here and would still fail to adequately catalogue the immensity of India’s story.

Back in 2004, India promoted herself with a new slogan: ‘India Shining’, capturing her emergence onto the global stage. Will India continue to shine, despite the many issues that plague the country?

What is fact is that the Indian locomotive thunders on. Where will India be in another fifty or one hundred years? Only time will tell. But I’m betting that then, as now, her voice will be heard loud and clear across the world.

My latest novel, DEATH OF A LESSER GOD, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, and her co-investigator, Archie Blackfinch, a forensic scientist from the Met Police in London… … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 published on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

If you had told me ten years ago that I would become the first non-white Chair of the UK Crime Writers’ Association in its 70-year history, I would have laughed (maniacally, as befitting a crime fiction villain). That I have now taken the hot seat feels a bit like being tasered, without my fizzing limbs involuntarily doing the robot dance.

As I write these words I’m somewhere over the Atlantic, halfway to Canada, to speak at the Motive festival in Toronto.  Next week I’m speaking in Somerset, and then I’m at the British Library chairing an eclectic panel discussing Agatha Christie’s influence around the world, featuring, among others, a famous Bollywood film director known for his Hindi-language Shakespearean adaptations. In between, I’ll probably play a game of cricket, get out for another low score, make the walk of shame back to the changing room, and hurl my bat at an unsuspecting bin. All while resolutely ignoring the writing deadline hanging over my head like a giant guillotine.

Photograph: Charlotte Graham/Shutterstock

This piece isn’t about how honoured I am to follow in the illustrious footsteps of former Chairs such as Ian Rankin and Peter James (of course, I am) or my vision for the CWA (I’ve set that out elsewhere). Rather, these are my thoughts on what the CWA is for and what you might do with it if you decide that you want to be a part of it. 

The CWA has been around a long time. It is the UK’s largest association of crime writers and was originally set up with a specific purpose – to further the interests of crime writing and crime writers. Many writers have happily called the CWA home for decades. Others have felt that, in recent years, it hasn’t lived up to its original mandate.

I am a realist by nature. I prefer to present the unvarnished truth because that allows us to deal with things, rather than stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes, and sing la la la in a very loud voice. In a former life, I was a management consultant where I’d often have to smack people around the face with the proverbial wet fish to get them to wake up and see what was under their noses. Old habits die hard.

Here’s what I think the CWA is and – perhaps, more importantly – is not.

The CWA is not a yellow brick road to literary success – yet it is true to say that it is home to writers straddling the spectrum of success, both those who probably don’t need the CWA anymore and those for whom the CWA can provide inspiration as they begin their writing journey. The CWA is not a panacea for the many ills plaguing the publishing industry – yet it is true to say that the CWA aims constantly to further the interests of writers, even if it doesn’t always have the clout or financial muscle to force through change. The CWA is not an all singing all dancing members club – yet is true to say that, in our own small way, we seek to connect our members, if not always physically, then through a shared vision of what we’re all trying to achieve, namely, success – both individually and collectively – for our crime writing.

The CWA has never had more members than it does now. Many have been stalwarts for a very long time – please know that your commitment is valued. It’s also wonderful to see so many new faces joining and equally heartening to see many others returning to the fold. I’m not going to pretend that those returning writers – many of them household names in crime fiction – didn’t leave without good reason. The fact that they are back is a fillip to both the CWA as an organisation, but also, I hope, to the wider membership. Inspiration comes in many guises. Sometimes, it comes from simply knowing that you’re a part of an organisation that houses the great and the good in your industry, those who have made their mark and now want to offer encouragement to those who follow, even if only by their presence. 

I’ve said this elsewhere, but I’ll say it again. When I came into this industry, almost a decade ago, I didn’t know anyone. I was told by my agent to join the CWA and I found some friends here, and suddenly I felt less alone in an industry that can be truly frightening and confusing, especially for newbies. If I’ve had any writing success today it’s because I’ve had the support of friends and well-wishers. That’s what I want I the CWA to be.

The CWA has its shortcomings, of course it does. Sometimes, it makes mistakes. Maybe you won’t always get a welcome pack on time or an email you were expecting. Remember that we are a board of volunteers, together with a handful of part-time paid staff, trying to juggle fifty plates in the air apiece. If we had greater resources I’d promise you the earth and the moon – and chuck in Mars for good measure. But we don’t. All I can do is ask humbly for your patience and understanding and to not hunt me down and beat me like a piñata when things go wrong. 

Having said this, I believe there are many things the CWA gets right. 

Through the Daggers, the CWA recognises excellence and can help to elevate writers to greater success. Through the events that we run, we connect writers and allow friendships to bloom. I know, from personal experience, that those friendships are sometimes the only thing that sustains you when you’re in the trenches and feel like the industry is shelling you with mortar bombs. Such are the vicissitudes of the writing life.

The CWA’s new look board is more diverse than it has ever been. With new co-vice-chairs William Shaw and Sarah Ward, and new board members, Nadine Matheson, Stella Oni and Morgen Witzel – adding to a great existing team – my hope is that we now represent a very wide range of communities and backgrounds, reflecting the broad church that crime writing itself represents. That has to be to the good of us all, doesn’t it?

The desire to belong to something greater than ourselves is hardwired into us. In spite of the occasional misanthropic tendency – who among us hasn’t wanted to axe murder one of our nearest and dearest from time to time? – most members of the human race are gregarious by nature. We are at our best when engaged in collective endeavour – building pyramids, designing washing machines that aren’t magic portals aimed at turning a pair of socks into a single sock, etc. Being a part of the CWA is to be involved in such an endeavour, something greater than the sum of its parts. If I might be permitted to go all JFK on you for a moment, sometimes it’s about asking what you can do for the CWA (to help further crime writing’s interests as a whole, I mean), rather than what the CWA can do for you. That’s not to abrogate the CWA’s responsibilities to our members, but merely to encourage us all to think about how much we could achieve simply by being a mass of writers unified by a common vision – to take crime writing to ever greater heights.

Here’s what I’d like to see. If you’ve previously felt the CWA wasn’t for you, now might be the time to think again. If you’re a publisher/editor/agent etc involved in crime fiction, think of joining as corporate/associate members. We can always use the support and the money. And if you don’t think it’s for you, that’s also cool. We wish you well anyway. Crime writing is more than the CWA; and that’s exactly how it should be.

What you do with your membership depends on what you expect from it. Muck in if you want to. Or enjoy lurking quietly in the wings, silently cheering on the cause. Whatever suits your temperament. I make no demands other than one: treat each other with respect. No amount of success – or lack of it – entitles any of us to look down on or upset anyone else. 

On this flight I’m watching the recent Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is about parallel dimensions and how “every tiny decision creates another branching universe”. So, in another universe, I did not become the CWA Chair. In another universe, I remained unpublished, but kept on writing, purely for myself, until I popped my clogs and ended up in the great writers’ association in the sky. And if that’s your story, that’s OK too. Because none of us started writing in the belief that we would find fame and riches. We write because it speaks to a meaningful part of ourselves. We write because it is our secret joy, our tempestuous passion, the one thing no one can take from us, regardless of how great or humble our achievements.

To quote from Everything Everywhere All At Once: “Even in a stupid, stupid universe there is always something to love.” I love reading. I love crime fiction. I love literature. If you share those passions – no matter how stupid you think the writing universe can sometimes be – then perhaps the CWA is for you.

Vaseem Khan

London, 31 May 2023

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In the early hours of September 7th 2019, millions of Indians tuned in to watch, with baited breath, as the Vikram Moon lander attempted to descend to the surface of the moon. The lander, part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, represented the first attempt by India to land a module on the lunar surface, at its south pole, in a spot where no other landing had ever been attempted. Bear in mind that this is a region where an earlier mission – the Chandrayaan-1 – had detected the presence of water, in the form of ice. 

The odds of a successful landing were intimidating. A soft landing on another planetary body has only been achieved by three other nations – the US, Russia, and China. India was aiming to be the fourth.

Picture credit: Nesnad, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Image is an artist’s rendering of the ISRO Mars Orbiter.

This new mission represented more than just another visit to the moon – it was India’s way of signalling to the world its ambitions in both the global race to achieve low-cost space exploration, and its wider ambitions as a genuine superpower.

Alas, on this occasion, the mission was to prove unsuccessful, at least in its final stage.

Approximately two kilometres from the surface, mission control lost communication with the lander. It was later discovered to have crash landed. 

Nevertheless, ISRO – the Indian Space Research Organisation – declared the mission 98% successful – because it fulfilled the majority of the goals the agency had set itself, including lift-off, reaching the moon, lunar-orbit insertion, and lander-orbiter separation. The mission proved that India now had the technology and the capability to achieve interplanetary spaceflight.

The mission also represented the culmination of more than fifty years of slow but steady progress in achieving Indian ambitions in the space arena. 

The Indian space program officially began in 1962 with the establishment, by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, of the Indian National Committee for Space Research. Seven years later, the committee was superseded by ISRO, headquartered at Bangalore (now Bengaluru). 

In 1975, ISRO launched India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, and officially entered the space age. (Aryabhata was named after one of the earliest mathematician-astronomers from India’s classical age of scientific advancement. Among his many achievements, Aryabhata is believed to have advocated an astronomical model in which the Earth turns on its own axis. Today, a lunar crater is named in his honour.)

Almost four decades later, in 2014, India launched an unmanned mission to Mars – the Mars Orbiter Mission – named Mangalyaan. 

On September 24, 2014, the spacecraft entered Mars orbit, making India the first Asian nation to have achieved the feat. The mission was notable because it established India’s reputation for pioneering affordable satellite launches and space missions – the Mars mission cost just $74m, less than the budget of many Hollywood space blockbusters – for instance, the Sandra Bullock and George Clooney starrer Gravity.

India has set itself several new targets in the field of space exploration, including putting the first Indian astronauts into space using homegrown technology. Astronauts are already undergoing training for what has been named the Gaganyaan mission. (The COVID pandemic delayed the mission, but ISRO has set a revised target date of late 2024.)

As for Chandrayaan-2, India has put the failure behind her – a new mission, Chandrayaan-3, has already been sanctioned and will consist of a lander and a rover, but not an orbiter. There are high hopes that this time the mission will achieve its ultimate goal of placing a rover on the moon.

Why does any of this matter? 

You only have to look at the rhetoric coming from official channels, and the millions of eyeballs glued to the attempted Vikram landing, to understand that India’s space programme is an important aspect of how the nation sees itself on the world stage. Successful achievements in space allow India to place herself on a par with other global superpowers, signalling that the country has the scientific capability, the resources, and the will to succeed in any endeavour it turns its hand to. 

There is already talk of India aiming to land a human on Mars before any of the other major powers. 

Who is to say that she won’t achieve that? 

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that a culture that is thousands of years old, that houses one and a half billion individuals, and that has seen numerous waves of immigration and invasion over the millennia should represent one of the world’s most diverse melting pots. But just how diverse is India?

It’s been said that India is like a mini-continent, a collection of cultures and societal groupings rubbing along in relative harmony, with only the occasional conflagration of violence. Such violence, when it has occurred, has largely run along communal lines, unsurprising in a nation where all of the world’s major religions – to a greater or lesser extent – are present – or have been present in the past. India is a place where it is impossible to throw a stick without hitting a priest, pandit, swami, imam, or other religious personage. The population, is, of course, primarily Hindu, but if you stop to consider that there are some two hundred million Muslims in India – one of the largest Muslim populations in the world – you can see that sheer weight of numbers ensures that even small percentages translate into numerous adherents. 

The situation is further complicated by India’s caste system – particular to the Hindu religion. The system organises Hindus into four major castes, and then those who exist outside of the caste system – namely, the Dalits. This caste system is one of the world’s oldest systems of social stratification, one that serves to create yet another textured layer of diversity in the country. 

What of language, often a key barometer of diversity? India recognises several ‘official’ languages and an almost incomprehensibly large number of regional dialects – three thousand, at last count. The national language – Hindi – is spoken by only forty percent of the population. English serves as a vehicle of commerce and administration – but this is only because it was brought to the country by India’s erstwhile colonisers and then imposed upon the local populace in order to grease the wheels of the monolithic bureaucracy established to enable British rule.

Travelling around the subcontinent, regional differences become visibly apparent.

From cuisine to cinema, from cultural myths to local beverages, the country and its citizens exhibit striking differences as one ventures north to south, east to west. These differences extend even to appearance. Compare the Indians of the far north-east state of Assam to the citizens of Maharashtra on the western coast; the northern Punjabis to the southern Tamils.

In recent centuries, the country has seen the Mughal and British empires leave their mark. The effect of these foreign assimilations is evident when taking a simple walk around cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata – once Bombay and Calcutta. The diversity of architecture – with mosques, temples and Victorian-era edifices standing shoulder-to-shoulder – is mirrored in the diversity of the cities’ denizens.

In modern India, a land that has undergone a superheated economic transformation over the past three decades, yet another layer of stratification has become apparent, one that many western nations are familiar with – the gap between rich and poor. And the rich, in this context, are not the maharajahs and nizams of old, but the vast, newly-affluent middle class, the beneficiaries of India’s headlong assault on the world superpower rankings.

As wealth has accreted in the cities, so have migrants poured into the great metropolises of the subcontinent, creating vast slums in the process. Hundreds of thousands of villages still dot the Indian interior, but increasingly – as climate change (namely in the form of drought) and economic factors work against them – are finding it harder to survive in the new reality.

For many, India’s incredible diversity underpins the country’s identity.

As the nation continues to grow and evolve, it becomes even more imperative that this diversity is not relinquished. India’s creed, enacted at the moment of its independence, encompasses the nation’s pluralism and finds expression in the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s words: To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill- will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff.