“I decided to track down some Delhi detectives and write about them,” says The Case of the Missing Servant author Tarquin Hall. “I interviewed several and this culminated in a piece for the Sunday Times in the UK. I was amazed by their stories…matrimonial, murders, kidnappings, fraud. One detective described to me how he had even gone undercover in a nudist colony! Another showed me all his homemade bugs and talked about how he bribed employees at telecom companies to provide mobile phone records.”
The head of Delhi’s Most Private Investigators Ltd., Vish Puri, searches for a missing servant and pursues other cases in this first book in the series. Ajay Kasliwal, a lawyer who has a case against corrupt government officials, is suspected of killing his servant Mary who’s missing. Kasliwal hires Puri to find her alive. A body is found, but it is Mary? Puri thinks something’s not right. He must keep digging.
“The book came about after I was talking to my wife’s cousin in Delhi,” says Hall. “Her parents were trying to get her married off and she was telling me about how she had been investigated by a private detective. Apparently this man called up her work colleagues and asked them about her character: Did she smoke? Does she have a boyfriend? He also asked one of them to bring her out into the street so the parents of a prospective boy could drive past and get a look at her. I guess they didn’t like what they saw because they never got in touch.”
“Simon & Schuster bid on the book through my agent, so that’s how I met them,” says Hall. A fellow author introduced Hall to his agent Christy Fletcher of Fletcher & Co in New York.
Hall’s editor is Amanda Murray at Simon & Schuster. “Amanda wants the first draft a year in advance of publication,” says Hall. “Once I hand it in, she comes back with comments on the plot and suggestions on big things like the characters, but also details like language that might be unfamiliar to an American readership.”
Hall has written five books. The next book in the series is The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, about a scientist who is killed by an apparition. Hall was born and raised in London and lives near the 2012 Olympic site.
The Case of the Missing Servant characters are well defined. The detective Puri is an Indian version of Agatha Christy’s Poirot. The book has many Indian words and names that may be unfamiliar. A glossary at the back comes to the rescue. The descriptions of the many varieties of food there is enough to make you hungry. Delicious.
Rating: 3 Stars
The Case of the Missing Servant: A Vish Puri Mystery by Tarquin Hall. Hardcover, 320 pages, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, June 2, 2009, Language: English. ISBN: 9781416583684
