murder in old bombay (2022)
Dec. 23rd, 2024 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticospend enough time reading historical romances and mysteries and you will learn to be wary of the 19th century India setting (unless you enjoy a storyline which is “british colonialism was neither complex nor problematic,” which i do not). i don’t remember exactly what alerted me to the fact that this one was different, but it is. Murder in Old Bombay* by Nev March is set in the 1890s in Bombay (Mumbai), and takes place amongst a population who are firmly caught in the middle of british colonialism. the protagonist, Jim Agnihotri is biracial, the son of an Indian mother and unknown white british father, raised in a british orphanage, and has spent his life in the british army. he is british enough to access whites-only army facilities but too Indian to be considered for ranks above Captain (because white brits can't be expected to take orders from an Indian).
the book opens on his recovering in an army hospital where he has been reading newspapers and a lot of sherlock holmes. buoyed by those two things he decides that he's going to offer himself as a detective to the family of two women who died after falling from a clock tower. the courts ruled it suicide, but the husband of one of the women wrote the newspaper to protest that verdict, and jim finds himself moved by the letter and disturbed by some of the facts of the case. and so begins his detective career.
this book is a mystery, but not a whodunnit. there isn't an eleventh hour reveal of the culprit, the way you would expect in a Christie. a lot of the book is jim doing legwork, and descriptions of the ways in which that was challenging in 1890s India. he travels to Lahore to investigate a lead, and ends up stuck there, caught between rebelling Afghan tribes and british troops, unable to leave or communicate with his employers due to stopped trains and downed telegraph lines. there's a lot of detail in the book, often ver loving, along those lines and others. i was continually charmed by the way march described the sounds of specific bird calls that jim noticed from time to time. it is a book that is very at home in its setting.
jim isn't the only character in an awkward social place specific to the conditions of colonization. his clients, the Framji family, are Parsees (or Parsis), descended from Persian refugees who migrated to India in the 7th century to escape religious persecution (they are Zoroastrian). they have aligned themselves with the british in many ways, sending their children to England for education and doing business primarily with the british or other Parsee families. the book isn't interested in passing judgement on them for this, in a calm acknowledgment of reality and shades of grey that i appreciated (especially after spending so many hours with veilguard's black-and-white morality). neither does the book whitewash the reality of conditions for Indians who were not able to access the same privileges as the Framji family.
overall, it was a delicious, crunchy piece of cultural pie with an interesting mystery and compelling romance baked in (although for my money the strongest relationship in the book is between jim and the entire Framji family, who he comes to love so very deeply). there were aspects that i think didn't really serve the book, but was enjoying myself so much that i didn't mind them. this was march's first book, so i am inclined to cut her slack. she is also a Parsee Zoroastrian, and included a piece of her family's own history in the mystery, giving it to the Framjis. i enjoyed that too. i'll definitely be checking out the sequels.
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the book opens on his recovering in an army hospital where he has been reading newspapers and a lot of sherlock holmes. buoyed by those two things he decides that he's going to offer himself as a detective to the family of two women who died after falling from a clock tower. the courts ruled it suicide, but the husband of one of the women wrote the newspaper to protest that verdict, and jim finds himself moved by the letter and disturbed by some of the facts of the case. and so begins his detective career.
this book is a mystery, but not a whodunnit. there isn't an eleventh hour reveal of the culprit, the way you would expect in a Christie. a lot of the book is jim doing legwork, and descriptions of the ways in which that was challenging in 1890s India. he travels to Lahore to investigate a lead, and ends up stuck there, caught between rebelling Afghan tribes and british troops, unable to leave or communicate with his employers due to stopped trains and downed telegraph lines. there's a lot of detail in the book, often ver loving, along those lines and others. i was continually charmed by the way march described the sounds of specific bird calls that jim noticed from time to time. it is a book that is very at home in its setting.
jim isn't the only character in an awkward social place specific to the conditions of colonization. his clients, the Framji family, are Parsees (or Parsis), descended from Persian refugees who migrated to India in the 7th century to escape religious persecution (they are Zoroastrian). they have aligned themselves with the british in many ways, sending their children to England for education and doing business primarily with the british or other Parsee families. the book isn't interested in passing judgement on them for this, in a calm acknowledgment of reality and shades of grey that i appreciated (especially after spending so many hours with veilguard's black-and-white morality). neither does the book whitewash the reality of conditions for Indians who were not able to access the same privileges as the Framji family.
overall, it was a delicious, crunchy piece of cultural pie with an interesting mystery and compelling romance baked in (although for my money the strongest relationship in the book is between jim and the entire Framji family, who he comes to love so very deeply). there were aspects that i think didn't really serve the book, but was enjoying myself so much that i didn't mind them. this was march's first book, so i am inclined to cut her slack. she is also a Parsee Zoroastrian, and included a piece of her family's own history in the mystery, giving it to the Framjis. i enjoyed that too. i'll definitely be checking out the sequels.
*bookshop.org affiliate link