Criminal lanes, skillfully manoeuvred

Vikrant Parmar

Detective…the word, more often than not, invokes an image of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes traversing the misty lanes of London in pursuit of an elusive killer, or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot solving a complicated case while giving his moustaches a wholesome twirl. For author Kalpana Swaminathan that is not the case though; for her, it is the razor-sharp female detective — Lalli. In her collection Murder In Seven Acts, part of her Lalli Mysteries series, her detective springs into action once more, a decade after the first book in the series was published.  

Lalli, a former cop, is sixty years old, yet her toughness is intact; her proclivity to smell crime is even sharper. She returns in this brilliant page-turner to solve seven complex cases, which require acumen and instinct in equal measure. Along with her associates — De Q, Sita, Savio, Shukla and Kale — Lalli, who is interested in ‘the unnatural disorder of things’, goes about decoding the most convoluted mysteries with utmost passion.

In the opening story titled A face in the crowd, a face appears time and again to provide clues to a crime committed long ago, which is finally resolved by the ever-so-sharp Lalli. The Quantum Question is about letters that unite former friends at a house, where a murder most foul has taken place. Lalli turns to the ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ to find the solution in this one and then proudly beams, ‘I just beat him at his own game’. In The Sixth Pandva, an innocent man is consigned to flames after being drugged, something that does not evade the trained eye of Lalli, who ‘collects curiosities that will, inevitably, lead to murder’.

A particularly interesting story, Murder Pret-a-Porter is about a young tailor who fights for the rights of his ageing father and in the process becomes a victim. However, before dying he leaves behind a cryptic clue that points towards the murderer. For Lalli, who believes ‘the dead make sure of justice’, it is enough to bring the culprit to book. 

In the Suicide Point, Lalli is drawn to a well in the suburbs of Mumbai to solve a case of suspected suicide. What follows though is the exposure of a sinister world of human-bone-trading, where the well turns out to be a dump-yard for bodies. 

In the story, Murder in Seven Acts, a desk ornament becomes a clue that helps expose a crime that is very well executed. Threnody, the last in the collection, literally means a wailing ode performed in memory of a dead person — in this case, ‘poisoned lovers’.

The author’s language has a surprisingly simple, yet meaningful flow. Sentences like ‘sometimes, a man must be allowed to die before he can begin to live’ are a refreshing whiff, as also a pointer towards her fertile world view. Despite a few instances where the stories meander for a wee bit longer than desired, the plots have been handled quite dexterously. The characters, led by Lalli, are amiable and come across as believable.  All in all, a good offering from a seasoned hand!