Murder at the Grand Raj Palace: Why Crime Writers Love a Good Hotel: Guest post by Vaseem Khan

Vaseem Khan:
Murder at the Grand Raj Palace: Why Crime Writers Love a Good Hotel 

Agatha Christie, the unrivalled Queen of Crime, loved hotels. Many of her novels were written in, inspired by, or featured hotels. The Old Cataract Hotel in Death on the Nile; The Burgh Island Hotel of Evil Under the Sun; The Imperial Hotel in Sleeping Murder. The grand dame herself once vanished only to turn up eleven days later at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, now the site of one of the world’s largest crime festivals.

For the fourth novel in my Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series – featuring Inspector Ashwin Chopra, formerly of the Mumbai police, and his one-year-old baby elephant sidekick – I chose to follow in Christie’s footsteps and set the novel in a hotel, one with a long and storied history on the subcontinent.

In Murder at the Grand Raj Palace, American billionaire Hollis Burbank dies under mysterious circumstances in his suite inside Mumbai’s finest hotel, the Grand Raj Palace. The senior investigating officer is being pressured to label the death a suicide, for the sake of political expediency. He invites old friend Chopra in to do some discreet digging. As Chopra works his way around the grand old hotel he discovers numerous suspects who may have wished the American ill. He also stumbles across a particularly dark chapter from India’s past that may have had a bearing on the case. To complicate matters, the evening before he was killed, Hollis Burbank purchased India’s most expensive painting at an art auction held in the hotel…

As with the other books in my series, I weave the crime narrative with a dissection of the realities of life in modern India. Indeed, my aim with these books is to take readers on a journey to the heart of the subcontinent, to place you on the streets of Mumbai, amidst the choking traffic, the heat and dust, the chaos of street vendors, beggars, lepers, eunuchs, stray dogs, cows, goats … and elephants. India is poised on the cusp of becoming a global superpower. Globalisation, wealth, and westernisation have transformed the country. Yet historical problems remain. Nowhere is this more apparent than Mumbai – once Bombay – India’s ‘city of dreams’, a place where glamour and wealth sit side by side with vast slums, caste prejudice, and inequality on a scale unseen in the west. In the best traditions of Christie, I use my books as a vehicle to comment on this changing society. Chopra himself is a serious man, one who cares deeply about the social ills that he sees around him. The fact that he has inherited a baby elephant and finds himself cast in the role of its impromptu guardian serves only to highlight his dogged commitment to ‘old-fashioned’ values of decency, morality, and a desire to enact justice in an often unjust world.


In writing this fourth book (the first, for those new to the series, was The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, a Times bestseller in the UK and an Amazon Best Debut; the series has since won a Shamus Award in the States) I called upon the ten years that I lived in India where I worked as a management consultant to the hotel industry.

At the tip of Mumbai is the Taj Palace Hotel – the hotel that the Grand Raj Palace is based on. It was whilst wandering around this incredible building that the idea for this story first came to me. The Taj is India’s most iconic hotel. It was built a century ago by Indian industrialist Jamsetji Tata when he was refused entry to the nearby Watson’s hotel because of its ‘whites only’ policy. Tata vowed there and then to build a hotel more opulent than anything the British had ever seen. And that’s exactly what he did. For more than a hundred years now the Taj is where anyone who is anyone stays when they visit Mumbai. From screen sirens of the Twenties, to the Beatles, to the Obamas. The hotel is steeped in tradition and history and so I thought it would make the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie style murder mystery – with an elephant!

***

Titles in the series:
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra
The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown
The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star
Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

Author contact details: 
Website: http://vaseemkhan.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VaseemKhanOfficial/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VaseemKhanUK

Mumbai--the Perfect Setting for a Crime Series Featuring a Baby Elephant: Vaseem Khan

Today I welcome back Vaseem Khan, the author of The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, the first in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series set in India and featuring a baby elephant! He first saw an elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when he arrived in the city of Mumbai, India to work as a management consultant. It was the most unusual sight he had ever encountered and served as the inspiration behind his light-hearted crime novels. Vaseem was born in London in 1973, went on to gain a Bachelors degree in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics, before spending a decade on the subcontinent helping one of India's premier hotel groups establish a chain of five-star environmentally friendly 'ecotels' around the country. He returned to the UK in 2006 and has since worked at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science.

Vaseem Khan:
Mumbai – the perfect setting for a crime series featuring a baby elephant

I first went to India aged 23 to work with a hotel group based in Mumbai. You could say that my debut novel The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra was born on my first day there. The book follows Mumbai police inspector Ashwin Chopra who is forced into early retirement but cannot let go of the final case of his career – the death of a poor local boy – whilst simultaneously faced with the outlandish dilemma of taking in a baby elephant named Ganesha sent to him by his enigmatic uncle.

I remember walking out from Bombay airport into a wall of heat, and the first thing I saw was a group of lepers and beggars milling around the taxi rank. At the first traffic junction we stopped at there was a thumping on the window. I turned to see a very large man in a sari – my first eunuch. I turned back to the road and there, lumbering through the traffic, was an enormous grey Indian elephant! This surreal sight stuck with me and eventually became a part of the novel I wrote when I returned to England ten years later.

But why Mumbai? readers ask me. 

For me Mumbai is one of the world’s great cities, colourful, diverse, loud, exuberant, full of absurd contradictions, yet equally full of warmth and compassion. Above all it is a place of people – twenty million of them! – whose generosity of spirit cannot be captured by mere words. This abundance of humanity is why India is perfect for a crime series. Because crime fiction is about the human condition and nowhere in the world is the sheer range of humanity so magnificently expressed as on the subcontinent. The physical landscape of Mumbai is also a character in its own right in my series. The city is constantly evolving – with new multiplexes and malls and skyscrapers sitting side by side (sometimes uneasily) with slums, and beautiful old buildings showcasing the different eras of India’s past – from ancient Hindu temples, to Mughal architecture, to the colonial edifices built by the British.

In its oldest incarnation Mumbai was once a series of seven islands occupied for millennia by Koli fisherman, before the Portuguese established a trading centre there in 1534 and calling it Bom Bahia or ‘Good Bay’ from whence the name Bombay is derived. A century later they gifted the territory to King Charles II of England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza. Charles promptly leased the islands to the East India Company who transformed them into a city, drawing in settlers and building expansively. By the end of the 1700s Bombay was the ‘Gateway to India’. The city grew at a ferocious pace so that today millions live cheek-to-jowl within its ever-expanding borders. In 1995 Bombay was rechristened Mumbai, after Mumbadevi, the stone goddess of the original Koli fishermen.

With the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series I aim to take readers on a journey to the heart of modern India. The second book in the series, The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown, is out soon and is about the theft of the legendary Koh-i-Noor diamond, first mined in India, now a part of the British Crown Jewels which, in my story, are being exhibited in Mumbai, where a daring heist takes place. Of course, Chopra and little Ganesha are soon called in to recover the great diamond!

To find out more: http://vaseemkhan.com
Or follow me on Twitter @VaseemKhanUK
or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VaseemKhanOfficial

A Crime-Solving Elephant- it makes perfect sense! Guest post by Vaseem Khan

Today I welcome Vaseem Khan, the author of The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, a surprising read for me, and one that I really enjoyed. Vaseem Khan is the author of The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, first in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series set in India and featuring a baby elephant! He first saw an elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when he arrived in the city of Mumbai, India to work as a management consultant. It was the most unusual sight he had ever encountered and served as the inspiration behind his light-hearted crime novels. Vaseem was born in London in 1973, went on to gain a Bachelors degree in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics, before spending a decade on the subcontinent helping one of India's premier hotel groups establish a chain of five-star environmentally friendly 'ecotels' around the country. He returned to the UK in 2006 and has since worked at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science. Elephants are third on his list of passions, first and second being great literature and cricket, not always in that order.

Vaseem Khan:
A Crime-Solving Elephant – it makes perfect sense! 

The first elephant I encountered in literature was named Uncle. Uncle wore a purple dressing gown, held a degree from Oxford, lived in a castle, and appeared in six wonderful books by J.P. Martin, written in the sixties. You could say this was where my love affair with elephants began. Add to this the decade I spent in India during my twenties and it was inevitable that my debut novel The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, would feature a baby elephant.

The novel follows Mumbai police inspector, Ashwin Chopra, forced into early retirement, but unable to let go of the final case of his career – the death of a poor local boy – whilst simultaneously faced with the outlandish dilemma of taking in an infant elephant named Ganesha sent to him by his enigmatic uncle.

Readers ask me why I chose an elephant as a sidekick for Chopra. Aside from the fact that I am passionate about these incredible creatures, there are many practical reasons why an elephant makes perfect sense as a crime fighter. Firstly, elephants are supremely intelligent, one of just a few animals classified as being ‘self-aware’. They also possess excellent memories, a trait that has been amply employed by many renowned fictional detectives – elephants really do not forget! Elephants are also known for their complex emotions. This emotional range is important to me – part of the charm of my series lies in the relationship that develops between the somewhat rigid Chopra, his exuberant wife Poppy, and the, at first, despondent elephant calf that has been sent into their care. There is also the fact that elephants and humans have worked together in many arenas – industry, the circus, pageantry, transport, and war. When you think about it, it’s not beyond reason that an elephant might partner with a private investigator!

With this series I take readers on a journey to the heart of modern India, where I spent ten incredible years at a time when she was transforming into the global powerhouse that she is today. Mumbai is one of the world’s great metropolises, often called ‘the city of dreams’. People come to Mumbai to make their fortune, to become famous on the sets of the world’s most prolific movie industry, to start micro-businesses in the city’s slums. But where there are dreams there are also nightmares, and Mumbai suffers from high rates of crime, as well as many other social problems. Like most Indian metropolises the city is facing a cultural onslaught from westernisation – which brings both good and bad, as I describe in my novel. The sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes of this modern India flesh out my canvas as Chopra and little Ganesha pursue an exotic gallery of villains over the course of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series. 

The second installment is out soon and is called The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown – about the theft of the legendary Koh-i-Noor diamond, first mined in India, now a part of the British Crown Jewels which, in my story, are being exhibited in Mumbai, where a daring heist takes place. Inevitably Chopra and little Ganesha are called in to investigate!

To find out more: http://vaseemkhan.com

Or follow me on Twitter @VaseemKhanUK

 or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VaseemKhanOfficial