You do that Urdu you sure do so well: A look at Indo-Pak crime writer Ibne Safi

As I continue my reading of Indian history, here's a repost about an Indo-Pakistani crime writer.

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  I don't know about you, but I can't resist a crime novel whose main action begins with a food fight in a night club:

"A couple of screws in Qasim's brain mechanism came loose, and the very next moment a plate full of meat and watery sauce hit the young man in the face."

 That's from The Laughing Corpse, sixty-second of the late Urdu-language crime writer Ibne Safi's 125 Jasusi Dunya ("The World of Detection" or "The World of Espionage") novels about the aristocratic Col. Ahmad Kamal Faridi (an inspector earlier in the series) and his acid-tongued sidekick, Hameed. (The name Qasim may be mere coincidence, but my favorite line from The Thousand Nights and a Night is "Your wit is as heavy as Abu Qasim's slippers!")

 Blaft Publications of Chennai, India; and Berkeley, California; has translated four of the Jasusi Dunya books into English. The Laughing Corpse has its slapstick moments, but it also has a cool, mysterious, manipulative protagonist in Faridi, and a surprisingly caustic sidekick in Hameed. Most of all, Ibne Safi knew how to create suspense and head-scratching mystery.

Ibne Safi began his writing in India in the early 1940s and continued from Pakistan after the partition of British India in 1947. He wrote through the 1970s and died in 1980. Like many pulp writers of the Indian subcontinent, he was prolific. He wrote more than a hundred titles each in Jasusi Dunya and his other main series, plus poetry and satire.

Read more about the author at the Ibne Safi site. Read more about the fantastically broad and colorful world of Indian pulp writing at Blaft's Web site and in the informative editor's and translator's introductions to the books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A spy novel with a fairy-tale ending ...

... Well, except for the people who died. Still, who'd have thunk it?

A few last thoughts about David Ignatius' Bloodmoney (previously discussed here and here), whose action centers on Pakistan, and whose main players are the CIA, an organization within the CIA, Pakistan's ISI agency, and various figures attached more closely or less to those intelligence services:

• The book strikes a nice balance between geopolitics and human interest. I cared about the characters, but always for reasons related to their roles in the main action.
• Ignatius has characters muse a time or two on the ubiquity of American power. These musings are never obtrusive.
• Ignatius manages the impressive feat of eliciting sympathy and goodwill toward a billionaire who, furthermore, made his money in high finance. Read the book, report back to this space, and we'll discuss this character.  
• I found two small typographical errors in the novel, though nothing like the mistakes one friend of DBB found in one of Ignatius' previous books. That reviewer, though, called Ignatius a "gifted and intelligent" thriller writer. He was right.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

How to build pace into a thriller

Bloodmoney progresses apace, and its pace is one of the things I like about David Ignatius' tale of espionage in Pakistan.

CIA operatives are disappearing, and the head of their unit needs to find out who's killing them. Two agents have vanished, and Ignatius quickens the pace nicely from the first disappearance to the second.

We meet the first agent over the course of three chapters, gradually coming to know his mission, his cover story, and the personal insecurities that let us know all may not go well with him.  Here's how we meet the second agent: "Alan Frankel had every reason to think he was safe."

With an introduction like that, you know this guy's life insurance had better be paid up. Moreover, it's a nice example of building momentum. Compressing the narration is a neat way to quicken the pace and to avoid monotony when relating a succession of similar events. And pace, it seems to this inexperienced reader of thrillers, is precisely what a thriller must master.

What are your favorite examples of well-paced thrillers or crime stories? How do they achieve their good pacing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Fear in Pakistan, or Who says the spy novel is dead?

David Ignatius' novel Bloodmoney is ripped straight from today's headlines — in fact, it anticpates some of them — and its opening chapters do a better job than those headlines in illuminating just how scary Pakistan must be for those compelled to work there.

Ignatius is a journalist turned novel writer who, unlike some members of that breed, can incorporate a telling detail without shouting out its importance. Here's a CIA operative on his way to a rendezvous in Karachi:

"They wouldn't like that neighborhood. It skirted Ittehad Town, the districts where migrants from the tribal areas had settled."

Here's that operative reflecting on his boss's advice about carrying out a mission:

"Gertz loved to say it: Safety first, brother. If it feels wrong, it is wrong. Bail out. But he didn't mean it. If you aborted too many meetings, people began to suspect you were getting the shakes. ... Which meant it was time to send out someone younger, who hadn't lost the protective shell of stupidity that allows you to believe, in strange city. that you have vanished into thin air."

Ignatius has extensive experience writing about espionage; the magazine where I first read about him said his columns are eagerly read at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. His novel Penetration received a new title when Ridley Scott adopted it into the movie Body of Lies.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Cop shows that get too personal

John McFetridge would likely disagree with that sign's sentiment, at least if talk turned to TV cop shows.

His latest post at Do Some Damage has me shifting uncomfortably in my seat because it hits hard at the cop-show myths of the bad-ass loner and his apparent opposite, the empathetic hero. This entails questioning the primacy of the lone-wolf maverick hero and the assumption that being a police officer is a bad job, among other crime-television commonplaces.

(Ste. Catherine Street)

And once that's been done, what's left? If I wrote crime fiction, especially police procedurals, and I read McFetridge's piece, I'd be thinking, "Am I nothing but a human recycling machine?" I've read the man's three novels, and I now understand a lot better why they have group protagonists.

For reasons of full disclosure: I know McFetridge, he's a Detectives Beyond Borders friend, and we are fellow natives of the city that produces the world's best bagels. Connoisseurs know that if it's not from Montreal, it's just a hunk of dough.

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Over on the other side of the world, if you happen to be in New Delhi on Friday, Blaft Publications and Tranquebar Press invite to the release of four English translations of novels by the late, great Urdu author Ibne Safi.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Two crime writers on corruption and cultural misunderstanding

Christopher G. Moore, crime novelist and student of cultural differences between East and West, wrote once that in Thailand

"The gift giving which flows as a tangible sign of respect is the slippery slope that descends easily into corruption. It becomes the basis of patronage and the client/patron relationship."

Elsewhere he has enumerated the right to ignore traffic laws as an unearned privilege that accrues to the Thai elite.

I expect that he'd approve of the following passage from Charlotte Jay's The Yellow Turban in which a character looks back at his arrival in Pakistan:

"If the doctor had offered me his bribe a month or so later after I had contracted a few of the local money-getting habits, I might not have been so overwhelmed with indignation. But I was new to the land. I obeyed the signals of traffic police without thinking and was shocked when Iqubal had slipped past them. I queued up at the post office for stamps, instead of thrusting my way through the grubby peons gathered round the window and slamming my money on the desk, as I was to do a month later. And the taking of a bribe was neatly labelled in my mind as antisocial—even criminal perhaps."

and this:

"Naturally he had heard of the corruption of the East but he had, I think, believed that this was largely a charge manufactured by certain Europeans to explain their own failure to understand the Oriental, and that with the departure of the British such evils would simply and automatically cease. And he was too honest and naïve to stand up to the collapse of his ideals."

Jay, an Australian, lived in Thailand when the novel, published in 1955, was released, according to a blurb for my edition. I'd guess from the two passages I cite here that she, like Moore, thought with considerable insight about what happens when Westerners try — and, in the second case, fail — to adjust to Eastern notions of conduct and ethics.

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Read more from Christopher G. Moore on East, West and the places where they meet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010