JOIN USA caper in comic-book style
The Ambassador and The Private Eye is not a novel as the note at the back of the book would suggest, but a collection of short stories. It features two detectives — Koel Deb, a former police officer who rides a Harley Davidson and has an ultra-functional prosthetic hand, and Michael Marco, an elderly, rheumy-eyed, sharp-brained former Somali diplomat. Marco happens to be in Kolkata after pulling off a remarkable rescue act (in an earlier book one presumes) and is waiting for a flight back home when a chance meeting with the redoubtable Ms Deb leads him to solve many mysteries with her.
Krishnan Srinivasan, a retired diplomat himself, invites the reader to be part of the crime-solving endeavour and one can see why. While he’s adept at building the crime itself, the solutions themselves seem beyond him, which is a pity in a genre where a satisfying conclusion is everything. The possibilities for who did what and why seem limitless in many of the stories so that the end feels very much like your guess is as good as mine.
Sometimes the premise itself feels dodgy. For example, a wealthy 89-year-old widow of an Uber driver finds herself the victim of a property grab, or a Bodo militant hires a private detective to find out who’s out to get him. At other times it’s the way a story unfurls and the unlikely scenarios one is presented with. The fearless Ms Deb wanders through remote jungles and lonely roads in dangerous country, and through city streets and back alleys, doing all the fieldwork and gathering information with ease like she inhabits a parallel universe where women are simply born equal. She questions and suspects come undone. Often she’s paid huge sums of money by her clients (and sometimes she empties their meagre savings into her coffers) but she never really manages to solve any of the cases herself. Instead, she must rely on the deductive powers of the Yoda-like Marco, who puts together all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzles she brings to him to give us our ta-da moment.
There is something of the quality of old comic books in these stories. It’s like they are set in a fictional land where other rules operate, though it’s all ostensibly located in West Bengal. People go around freely carrying guns and shooting each other. Koel herself gets into all kinds of trouble and only just manages to extricate herself in the nick of time. If I were the local police, I’d be quite exasperated with her meddlesome activities.
Despite these considerable flaws, the book works in fits and starts because of the writing. Krishnan Srinivasan maintains the pace, and therefore excitement.
He explores a range of crimes to keep it interesting for the reader: from scams, cons and kidnappings to robberies, murders and bomb blasts. The language is as accomplished and polished as one might find in any crime novel of quality. Pity about the details and the damp squib endings.