T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: A British obsession

For the last few years, I have become a fan - not quite an ardent one but a fan nevertheless - of a Singapore-based detective fiction writer called Shamini Flint. She has a nice sardonic style which compensates for the lightness of the mysteries her hero, one Inspector Singh, solves.

Inspector Singh runs true to the genre. He is a short, fat Sikh with a very sharp brain covered by a turban which is a cause for much amusement in East Asia. He solves mysteries in India, China, Malaysia, Cambodia and, of course, Singpo, as the locals like to call it.

He loves greasy, spicily hot food and very cold beer. He smokes. He refuses to wear uniform boots, preferring sneakers instead. He irritates everyone who is not like him and there are none like him.

He is constantly nagged by a wife who is very culturally rooted in India. As the younger generation says, she gets on his case all the time - on eating habits, clothes, manner of speech, attitude to relatives and, above all, his disdain for money. He avoids her as much as he can.

You get the picture. A perfectly normal marriage, every man's dream.

Weirdos all

For some inexplicable reason, detective story writers love to create this kind of a hero. Rare is the normal detective.

Sherlock Holmes was weird in too many well-known ways. G K Chesterton's Father Brown, like Inspector Singh, was short, fat and brainy. Like Singh he, too, was also constantly underestimated.

Likewise, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot - pronounced Yaircule Poiro - was also short, stout if not fat and brainy beyond measure. And, of course, no one took him seriously. He was always referred to as that "ridiculous little man" by the British.

Not all detectives are short and fat, however. Some of them are tall and large, like Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe and Robert Galbraith's (aka J K Rowling) Cormoran Strike. So are Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse and Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford.

I can go on giving examples but the point ought to be clear. These detectives are all a little peculiar.

Thus, Poirot had a fetish for orderliness. Morse had this thing about drinking half-tumblers of neat whisky and western classical music of the depressing Wagner kind.

Wexford is large and not weird but his sidekick, Inspector Burden, is in what the Americans endearingly call an anally retentive way.

Then there are the Americans who mostly lack character except when they also double up as lawyers like Perry Mason or those lawyer chaps in John Grisham novels. But they don't count. They are not detectives.

But there are two Americans who have a distinct persona. But neither is weird in the way British characters are.

One is Robert Verdon's Dave Gurney, a depressed former policeman from New York who is full of guilt, self doubt and angst. The other is Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta. She is a doctor who deduces things from forensics. She has this thing for cooking and has a restaurant-type kitchen in her home. But not weird, no sir.

It is mainly the British who create these kinky characters. A major exception was Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, who was from the upper classes and led a perfectly normal life. But he was the exception that proves the rule, more-or-less.

The short point is this: Barring a few exceptions like Wexford and Miss Marple, why can't the British writers make their main characters normal? Why the need to make them weird in some small or big way? Oddly enough with British writers, even when the characters are otherwise perfectly normal they are made to appear weird.

One example was H R F Keating's Inspector Ghote. Now we have Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri. Both are made to look weird by exaggerating their Indian-ness.

That's in the "Yaircule Poiro" tradition because Agatha Christie had done the same thing by exaggerating his French-Belgianness. Mr Smith tries hard not to fall into this trap with Precious Ramotswe but doesn't always succeed. She often comes off looking a bit off the beam.

I haven't read any European writers except Georges Simenon who invented Jules Maigret. He was perfectly normal.

Then there are the new Swedish writers. They are normal unless you regard an obsession with social duty as being weird.

Which brings me back to Ms Flint. Not being British and living in Asia, why has she made Singh look faintly ridiculous and quite weird? Why could he not be a normal man?