This is Delhi Noir

In-between the lines of reported news, behind the facade of civilisation, and hidden from the spotlight of society’s attention — this is where the most intriguing crimes happen. In India, where so much is hidden and known only to a few, innumerable crime stories wait to be told.

In his newest thriller, The Heist Artist, Vish Dhamija has set his crime in the world of conmen and murky political leaders and businessmen. Overlaying this background is the hush-hush world of stolen art.

It starts with Vagh Pratap Singh in disguise. He’s currently pretending to be Albert Reuben, a professor of Art in a college in Delhi, with a special interest in Impressionism and van Gogh.

In-between his lectures, he chats with his students about the art scene, helps them select paintings for their homes, and takes a special interest in a stolen, missing, van Gogh painting called ‘Poppy Flowers’.

All of this is a facade, of course. Because Vagh Pratap Singh — better known as the Captain for his military bearing and planning — is a con man extraordinaire. He’s been commissioned by a UP politician named Udhham Kumar to locate and steal ‘Poppy Flowers’, which is rumoured to be somewhere in the Delhi grey market. His art lecture students are mostly upper-class housewives in the high-society-arty set, so the Captain is fishing for clues here.

Udhham Kumar, in the meanwhile, has set up a woman named Sylvia to keep tabs on Singh.

Soon, a casual conversation turns into a lead, and Reuben/Singh is invited to verify the antecedents of the stolen painting by its current owner.

The owner is a businessman named Bipin Patel, but Singh knows that Patel was actually a gangster back in Mumbai, before settling in Delhi, buying a large farmhouse, and setting himself up as an art lover.

It turns out he has the original painting, all right — inside a safe, in a secured office inside a guarded building with cameras everywhere.

Singh begins planning his heist. Udhham Kumar insists on two other people being with him throughout: Sylvia, and another goon of his. Singh, reluctant to include others, but awaiting his large payout, agrees. But Udhham is planning something else: he doesn’t expect “the Captain” to survive long enough to get any money from the operation.

That was why he’d insisted on Sylvia joining the crew. But Sylvia has secrets of her own...

Will the heist go through smoothly? What about the aftermath? If you’ve read any heist thrillers before, you know the answer to at least one of those questions is No.

Vish Dhamija cooks up a good plot, with lots of twists and turns. No one in the cast can be trusted fully, and alliances are formed and broken again. In the typical tradition of noir thrillers, the police are way behind in the chase, but the lead characters are their own worst enemies.

Indian crime fiction has long been represented by pulp fiction in the other Indian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali. Because of the literary-fiction affectation of the Indian English market, crime has usually been considered beneath the dignity of mainstream publishers. It is only recently that Indian English writing has expanded enough to have its own take on the subject of crime and thrills — driven both by the younger audience reading in English for entertainment rather than edification, and by the translations of popular Indian pulp fiction into English.

But the Indian setting is a double-edged sword for English books: do we expect gangsters like Udhham Kumar, or his minions, to talk in good English? Dhamija writes well, in the language a college educated, white-collar worker, would. Captain “doesn’t give a rat’s ass” about things, Udhham Kumar, a thug, compliments someone with, “That’s my girl!” and calls others
“Class A idiots”.

Paradoxically, Dhamija’s own fluency with English pushes the book towards unbelievability. We’d expect the low-lifes in the cast to speak a rougher language, peppered with curses and street lingo. That language would, in fact, be part of the allure of the genre, as writers like Donald E Westlake and James Hadley Chase have shown.

Partly to get around this, English-language thrillers have focused on white-collar crime — the banking-domain work of Ravi Subramanian, say, or even the earlier legal thrillers of Dhamija himself. But here, we have a wider variety of cast. To really pull it off, Dhamija needs to get his writing edgier, more reminiscent of street lingo — possibly with more local-language words used along with context?

But that is for the future — the path Indian thrillers in English will follow in the years to come. Today, the genre is finding its feet, expanding to various locales and sub-genres, and gaining its readership. The Heist Artist, as a genre-expanding thriller, is a welcome addition.

Recommended for thriller fans.