Indian crime fiction scene is a mess littered with works, which at their best can be generic and predictable and at worst lazily written and poorly edited “thrillers”, written with the broadest of the strokes. I don’t think I ever read an ingenious crime fiction written by an Indian set in our milieu, our best crime stories come from Bollywood, or the news channels. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay’s Patang has a glowing review from Sriram Raghavan, the best genre filmmaker we have, and it is definitely a cut above the rest, Silence of the Lambs meets Shutter Island if you will, but ironically suffers both from predictability and improbability.  

A serial killer strikes Mumbai in the monsoon season, writing to the media and the Police that he would be killing 4 people. A massive manhunt ensues, the modus operandi of the killer is explored, and he was even given a nickname by the media based on a theme he kills with and a clue he leaves at the scene of the crime. The Patang Killer, since he kills people at dizzying heights. Not particularly ingenious, I told you.  

Mumbai Commissioner seeks help from Private Eye Chandrakant Rathod and I’m not sure what he is. He seems like a journalist turned private detective, but he seems to know who’s who of the entire Police Department, most of them fan-boys of his work and willing to put their jobs on stake for Rathod. Everyone calls him a genius and he in turn calls the killer a genius. We know each of them is a genius because the writer keeps telling us in every chapter, lest we forget that we are dealing with a couple of geniuses here. He nabs the connection between the murders, as is any detective’s wont, but the story isn’t strong enough and there are no red herrings, making it all easy for the genius detective. 

There are some stray references to Mumbai monsoon, but the detailing is not as meticulous to consider the book to be atmospheric. The book scores some brownies in the way Bhaskar explores Chandrakant Rathod’s psyche and towards the end of the book, Rathod, seems to be overwhelmed and defeated by the task in hand and shows ominous signs of spiraling out of control. These parts were dealt well and the reader can sense Rathod’s desperation in solving the puzzle, but the ending spoils them all. Still as a character study, Rathod’s journey towards the end seems complete and the book redeems itself to become slightly better than the sum of its parts, in retrospect.

Bhaskar infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and the pages fly through at a breakneck pace. It is difficult to put it away for a long time, which is an achievement in itself, and the writing shows up a lot of efforts that went in towards the later part of the book. As a genre piece, it checks all the boxes, right up to the twist ending, but all of it is a tad underwhelming for the genre fans. As I said earlier, it is better than a lot of Indian crime fiction we routinely find on book shelves across the country, but that is not saying much about the book. 

PS: I decided to read only crime and noir fiction this year, so please suggest any great works by Indians or setup in India, in the comments that you have come across.