Saturday, February 16, 2019

The Special Charms of Indian Detectives

In India to visit friends and relatives for a few weeks, I naturally brought mysteries for travel days and hotel stays, and this time I chose Indian mystery authors--and I don't mean books by English writers with Indian heroes, such as H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ganesh Ghote or Tarquin Hall's PI Vish Puri. I mean mysteries by authors who are Indian (or at least of Indian origin) and use an Indian setting. Best known internationally as a filmmaker, no list of Indian mystery writers is complete without the late Satyajit Ray. His 35 short mystery stories, featuring Bengali sleuth Prodosh Chandra Mitra a.k.a. Feluda, form a two-volume set, The Complete Adventures of Feluda, and follow Feluda's development from amateur to skilled investigator. However, fans of Agatha Christie may prefer Madhumita Bhattacharya's private investigator Reema Ray in The Masala MurderDead In A Mumbai Minute or Goa Undercover. Although technically not an Indian author since she was born in England and raised in the U.S., it's hard to leave out Sujata Massey because she has won both an Agatha Award for Best First Novel and a Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. She launched a new mystery series in 2018 with The Widows of Malabar Hill, in which Perveen Mistry, the first female lawyer in 1920s Bombay, investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows and soon is embroiled in murder. If you're a "Jewel in the Crown" fan, then go for Arjun Raj Gaind's series about the detecting skills of Maharaja Sikander Singh of Rajpore, a Sherlock Holmes fan; the 2018 paperback Death at the Durbar has the Maharaja under pressure to help the British solve a murder before it upends their George V coronation celebration in 1911 Delhi. Back in modern times, murder is less romantically silk-draped and bejeweled; for example, Ankush Saikia just added More Bodies Will Fall, a 2018 paperback, to his detective Arjun Arora series. This time Arora investigates the Delhi murder of a girl from Northeast India, a tribal area facing violent unrest and outside prejudice. Another dark take on today's India is Fraudster by R.V. Raman. Critically praised in India, the story drags the reader into a corporate world where the employees of a bank are murdered one-by-one as soon as they get too close to large-scale financial fraud. For more Indian mystery recommendations, see https://www.thecuriousreader.in/bookrack/mystery-novels/

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Weather Turns Witness in Forensic Meteorology

It's a rainy day in Southern California, and, as a mystery fanatic cozy indoors with a good who-done-it, it started me thinking about weather and murder--and the interesting role of "forensic meteorology" in investigations. I'm clearly not alone because The Weather Channel debuted its own true-crime series "Storm of Suspicion" last year, highlighting the role played by weather science in solving murders. For example, in one case, a husband claims that his wife was murdered, and he was knocked unconscious, by an intruder. Yet forensic meteorological analysis showed the lawn around the house would have been so soggy with dew at the time of the murder that an intruder would have left clear footprints. Lack of any footprints helped clinch the husband's arrest. In another case, footprints betrayed a murder-as-accident scheme: A woman is found dead at the wheel of her crashed SUV after apparently skidding off an icy road--until footprints in the snow are spotted walking away from the wreck. Yet another example hinges on lack of snow: An accused murderer claims he sustained a scratch on his hand while snowboarding and not during the attack--only it was raining at the time of the alleged snowboarding, melting a slight snowpack and leaving slopes too bare for the sport. The weather is such a common factor in tragic events that forensic meteorologists have been used as expert witnesses in murders, suicides, bombings, vehicle accidents, bad aircraft landings, property insurance disputes, hurricane and flood damage claims, building collapses, slip-and-fall insurance scams, and much more. Unfortunately, as global warming leads to more extreme and dangerous weather events, forensic meteorologists will be keeping busy! For an interesting article on how weather-related forensics contribute to solving crimes and settling legal disputes, see https://gizmodo.com/forensic-meteorologists-solve-crimes-youve-never-though-1586035339