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Completely clued in

CONFIDENT Aditya Sudarshan

All of 24, Aditya Sudarshan has made a confident debut as a novelist with “A Nice Quiet Holiday” (Westland, Rs. 250). The taut, literary whodunit tells the story of a murder in a remote hill station. Aditya, who studied law at the National Law School in Bangalore, says the novel was conceived in early 2007.

“I was doing an internship in the trial courts in Delhi. I had been reading plenty of detective stories just prior to that, and I wanted to write a strong and thoughtful one myself. I knew the ideas that I wanted to discuss — the clash of sensibilities, liberal and conservative, urban and small-town — the main characters of the judge and his law clerk, and the mountain setting. So the novel began in my head with these elements coalescing and then I started to write it.”

Aditya chose the mystery novel for his debut because “it has the power to be quite uniquely gripping and stimulating. The things that I wanted to say in this novel came to me in sharp, pithy forms. Those are forms that suit a mystery, because they can be sprung upon the reader like lightning bolts”.

Aditya, who practiced criminal law for nine months after graduation, feels his legal training helped in writing the book. “Studying law trains the mind to look at individual crises and emotional drama in an objective way, which is a big part of a fiction writer’s mentality too.”

While “A Nice Quiet Holiday” almost seems like a textbook whodunit with its closed circle of suspects, a Holmes and Watson in the Judge and his clerk, Anant, and the final exposition, Aditya insists it is not “really feasible to generalize a ‘standard form’ of the whodunit, because the leading writers have all had slightly different styles and approaches.”

The young writer counts G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories as his favourites. “He understood very clearly that a mystery story is not just a ‘puzzle’ or a ‘game’, but a story like any other, with ideas and insights, and a style and structure of its own.”

Aditya feels the whodunit “is as universal as a love story, because an appreciation of mystery, like an appreciation of romance, is a fundamental human trait.”

The novel is set in the fictional Himalayan town of Bhairavgarh. Aditya says he chose the hills as they “provide a sense of isolation and foreboding, as well as majesty, and those are elements that seep nicely into a mystery novel.”

Location, Aditya feels “is important, not just to a whodunit. In any novel the background must complement what is happening in the foreground. You need a strong setting, but not an overwhelming setting, and you need characters who have individual personalities but aren’t always making a show of them. And ultimately, story, setting and characters all succeed or fail together.”

While the novel is set in today’s world, there is no overt reliance on technology. “I definitely do think that detection is of interest only when the thinking behind it is of interest. If a machine is going to tell you all the answers (which in any case it never could), why would one respect the detective? Aditya, who wrote everyday after class at law school, worked backwards on his story. “I knew what was going to be at the heart of the mystery before I started writing it. And the other important thing for me, as regards the mechanics, was to have more to the novel than just the mystery. I think a novel requires multiple storylines, independent of the mystery, that complement it thematically.”

Aditya admits finding a publisher was “somewhat difficult.” He has finished his second novel which is “part murder mystery and part tragedy. It’s about a group of young people in Delhi making a film about a controversial ex-cricketer. I’m also currently completing a collection of short stories, each of which has a ‘twist in the tale’.”

For all those who want more of the shrewd Judge Shinde and his young and endearingly-awkward clerk, Aditya says: “I do plan to write more about Anant and the Judge, maybe not in a novel but in a collection of short mystery stories.”

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