A new spin on private eyes

It’s been a lifetime of reading about detectives. Summer holidays, slices of guava slathered with salt and chilli powder, picking up a book by Agatha Christie and dissolving into a story about a moustachioed detective with a love for order and neatness. Somewhere along the way came a Bengali private investigator from Calcutta, with a teenage sidekick. And then, once I was a bit older, it was 221B Baker Street and the genius of Sherlock Holmes.

Writers have created detectives in all shapes and sizes. Some are deeply flawed, others have a touch of the eccentric to them. Some cannot rest till they have chased down the criminal, and yet others may be so fat that they solve a case sitting in a room.

What got me thinking about detectives was British-Zimbabwean writer Alexander McCall Smith’s new work. An immensely prolific writer, McCall Smith first endeared himself to readers with his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.

Set in Botswana, the books follow the cases and life of Mma Precious Ramotswe, a feisty woman who sets up a detective agency. Over cups of bush tea, she solves cases that range from fraud to murder. Full of compassion and understanding for the people she meets, Ramotswe is a delightful character with a deep love for Botswana ingrained in her.

The Quiet Side of Passion; Alexander McCall Smith; Hachette India; Fiction; ₹886

Then I came across The Quiet Side of Passion, released this year. Set in Edinburgh, there are now a dozen books in the series, and they tell the story of Isabel Dalhousie. She is not really a detective in the traditional sense of the word, because she does not set out to solve crimes. She is, in fact, the editor of a magazine on ethics; philosophy is what she thinks about and deals with. But as we read, we realise that Isabel, even while being a philosopher, approaches the world in a way not unlike a detective. To what extent will one go to dig out the truth? Why must the truth be told? Who understands what is really true? — these are the questions that haunt her.

Here, the crimes are not about a body in the library or arsenic in the coffee. Instead, Isabel is confronted with the problem of a mother she meets at the school gate. The woman says her son was born of an affair with a well-known musician. But Isabel is soon assailed by suspicions. What if the woman is lying? Is it in Isabel’s place to find out more about this, or should she simply let it go?

Isabel has to get to the truth, and in her world this means a lot of pondering, of talking to the people who may be in the know, of quietly challenging the version of events that has been told to her.

A privileged intellectual, Isabel is not really built to confront the seamy side of the world; and the one time she does so, it does not end too well for her. But McCall Smith lightens it all with charming details of domesticity, the city of Edinburgh, academic life, its grudges and the minutiae of being an editor.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes; Alexander McCall Smith; Hachette India; Fiction; ₹699

The second novel that came my way is The Department of Sensitive Crimes . With this book, McCall Smith joins the growing number of Nordic Noir authors such as Arnaldur Indriadson, Lars Kepler, Ragnar Jonasson and many more. Except, in his hands, the cases are not really the stuff of traditional noir. Here there are no mutilated bodies, no violent deaths or abuse, no torture. Though the protagonist, Ulf Varg, is cast in the mould of the Scandinavian detective — he lives alone with a dog (who is deaf) and his personal life is rather empty (his only friends are his colleagues and an aged neighbour) — the cases he investigates are quite out of the ordinary.

His department deals with happenings that appear too odd to be tackled by conventional police detectives. It is a strange assortment of cases — from a man stabbed at the back of his knee, to unravelling a web of lies told by a group of college girls, to finding out if werewolves are haunting a travel lodge. As a detective, Ulf is observant, creative in deducting his solutions, and supremely energetic in pursuing his leads. And yet, in telling his story, McCall Smith teases open lives quietly, so that it is not just about a crime but also understanding why it happened. He deals with small human moments, all-too-human lapses of judgement, pauses to reflect on what it means to be Swedish, and throughout there is the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Instead of the unrelenting examination of the darkness of human nature, he provides little rays of humour and sympathy.

Both the books are easy, pleasant reads and got me mulling about McCall Smith’s detectives. While Precious Ramotswe is a self-made woman with an instinct for sniffing out the truth, Isabel is more the philosopher-thinker, who has to battle even with herself when she sets out to investigate. And Ulf, who appears to be cast as the loner detective, breaks the mould and picks up small signs and clues from the people around him, never losing his compassion. The detectives’ search for the truth mirrors the way we may all be detectives — from journalists to writers to religious thinkers to scientists. Is this why certain detectives live on in our heads, goading us to search beyond the obvious — to be a satyanweshi , the seeker of truth?

Sudeshna Shome Ghosh is a Bengaluru-based editor

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