A Rising Man

“… the Bengal Civilian who goes to Writers’ Buildings and sits in a perfect office and speaks flippantly of ‘sending things into India,’ meaning thereby he refers matters to the Supreme Government. He is a great person, and his mouth is full of promotion-and-appointment ‘shop.’ Generally he is referred to as a ‘rising man.’ Calcutta seems full of ‘rising men.’” (Rudyard Kipling)

I like detective stories set in a different time and a different place. Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk in Shrewsbury, really hit the spot as did Bernie Gunther in Nazi Berlin. Those sort of books are baked beans with a baked potato – comfort food. Now there’s a new kid on the block: Abir Mukherjee. His debut novel, A Rising Man, is set in Calcutta in 1919 and ticks all the boxes. Who knew the Special Branch was originally the Special Irish Branch, I didn’t. Donna Leon’s detective novels bring Venice to life and Abir evokes Calcutta in the Raj well enough to convince me.

The English detective’s side-kick (indispensable in the genre) is Sergeant Surendranath (“Surrender-not”) Banerjee. It’s an inspired coupling allowing interesting digressions skilfully woven into the fabric of a trad detective story.

The Ooty Club not so long ago had a sign: “No Riff-Raff”. In A Rising Man, there’s a notice at Calcutta’s Bengal Club, ‘No dogs or Indians beyond this point’. Surrender-not, who is allowed to make some quips, says “the British have achieved certain things in a hundred and fifty years that our civilisation didn’t in over four thousand…We never managed to teach the dogs to read.”

If you are going to sprawl on warm sand this summer you might enjoy reading about the hotter and more humid Calcutta in 1919. There are a shoal of red herrings, some well camouflaged clues, plenty of local colour and a satisfactorily unexpected denoument. Better still there are three sequels to look forward to.