The plot of Swarup's Six Suspects should sound familiar. Vicky Rai, the spoiled son of a UP chief minister, walks into a fashionable restaurant; when waitress Ruby Gill refuses to serve him a drink, he kills her. Seven years later, Vicky Rai is murdered at one of his own parties. Six of the people there are carrying guns, but which one of them did it?

Few readers will have difficulty recognising the real-life crime that inspired the book — the murder of Jessica Lall at Tamarind Court by Manu Sharma, son of a prominent politician. In addition, Swarup includes references to recognisable characters, from "Barkha Das", the television maven, to Mohan Kumar, a completely bent IAS officer.

There's a long history of true crime transmuting into fiction, so why was reading this particular book such a distasteful experience? It might be helpful to look at a few examples of crimes that found their way into literature.

Both Salman Rushdie and Indra Sinha fictionalised the Nanavati murder. In Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the chief protagonist of the murder that rocked Bombay appears in a cameo role as ‘Commander Sabarmati', who directs traffic out of a snarled jam using the murder weapon as a baton. Sinha's The Death of Mr Love attempted to make some sort of literary sense of the messiness of love triangles. Both writers made interesting literary characters out of Nanavati, rather than stopping short at a bland fictional portrayal of a real person.

One of the earliest examples of crime retold as fiction was the murder of "the beautiful cigar girl", Mary Rogers, whose corpse washed up in the Hudson River in 1841. By 1842, Edgar Allan Poe, already celebrated for writing the first modern detective story in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue', had hammered out ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget'. Poe transferred the murder from New York to Paris, but was otherwise open about the inspiration — in fact, his pitch to magazine editors was that in his short story, he had solved many of the more puzzling features of the case.

Poe was writing at a time when the US newspapers very closely parallel the present state of the Indian media. Like the present-day Indian media, many journalists thought nothing of reporting the most sensational elements of a crime, and speculating freely about the identity of murderer or victim before the courts had come to any conclusion. A few sections of the media were more responsible — the case of Mary Rogers lead to reforms in the New York police department, after rigorous newspaper investigations — but it was the golden age of lurid reportage.

In that respect, Swarup has literary precedents, though he may lack their style. Six Suspects is an overlong and not especially distinguished read, and it is just as cheerfully sensationalist about Jessica Lall's murder as many of the newspaper accounts of a few years ago.

Swarup had two other models before him. Agatha Christie often wrote from real life — though not necessarily about true crimes. She and her fictional detective, Miss Marple were both excellent eavesdroppers. A visit to the theatre to see the actress Ruth Draper led to the plot of Lord Edgeware Dies. Draper was known for her impersonations, and Christie began to weave a plot about an actress who might be hired by a murderer to impersonate someone.

Most of Christie's mysteries worked on this principle: she would incorporate material, and characters, from the real world, but the crimes were fictionalised. The reader might have missed out on the thrill of matching murder to the headlines, but the payoff in terms of suspense was infinitely greater.

Unlike Christie, the American crime novelist James Ellroy deliberately drew from real life. Ellroy's life was shaped by the murder of his mother when he was a young boy. He fictionalised — and solved — the murder in an early work, Clandestine, and later wrote a memoir about it, the gripping My Dark Places. It's instructive to read both books, and to see how the non-fiction narrative is so markedly superior to the fictionalised version.

It would be depressing if Swarup's book were to unleash a tide of mediocre, thinly fictionalised novels based on true crimes. Murder is at its most satisfying when it's presented as journalism, or when it takes a more literary, more readable form. "This is a true story" doesn't always mean "this is a good story".

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