Visa fraud investigator at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, Dominic “Biscuit” McLeod is legendary for “his prowess in drinking beer, playing cricket and swearing like a Dilliwallah” until
Visa fraud investigator at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, Dominic “Biscuit” McLeod is legendary for “his prowess in drinking beer, playing cricket and swearing like a Dilliwallah” until the tragic death of a colleague sets him off on an adventure leading from the villages of Punjab to the walled compounds of Gurgaon and Chanakyapuri, with dodgy visa agents, crooked cops, Aussies journalists, Afghani pimps and American spies for company. It’s an ambitious plot, but then that’s exactly what The Sad Demise of Manpreet Singh, the first novel by Delhi-based writer Patrick Bryson, aims to be.
It was in 2010 that Patrick first thought of writing a crime novel set in Delhi, having received a great response to a short story he wrote for Tehelka magazine’s “Pulp and Noir” fiction edition. It was a city he had just moved to, and part of Patrick’s work at the time involved monitoring the daily news. Reading in the newspapers about visa frauds and gruesome murders, the writer says it seemed natural to merge the two.
Taking traits based on himself and a few other people he knew, Patrick had his intrepid investigator, Dominic McLeod. “For me, (Dom) is compelling in that he has a foot inside two worlds,” Patrick says of his protagonist. “When he is with his Indian friends, they treat him like a Dilliwallah; when he is with his expat mates, he is the laidback beer-swilling Aussie. But being a part of two worlds also means that he doesn’t belong fully to either one.
While he can understand and get along in each space, he is always a bit of an outsider. That made him an excellent protagonist in the crime setting — because most detectives in literature don’t ‘fit in’. They see the world for what it is, and don’t seek to belong.” Weren’t there any apprehensions that readers here would perceive a Western character solving a crime in India unfavourably Patrick thinks otherwise. “Dom — or Biscuit, as he is known — isn’t really a policeman, or even a private detective. He hasn’t been brought in to do someone else’s job. He is simply a man trying to find out how his colleague died.
That wish leads him into a world of corruption and murder — where there are many bad guys, some Australian, some Indian, and some American — so his nationality doesn’t really come into it. I think one thing that helps him is his refusal to give up in situations where others would settle for the status quo. That probably has more to do with his stubborn character, than his ethnicity. If anything, I think Indian readers will appreciate how desi Dom is,” he explains.
Dom isn’t just stubborn and tenacious — like all of the memorable characters in detective and crime fiction (think Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes et al), he also has his fair share of quirks and eccentricities. Patrick points out that these quirks have two purposes: One, they make the characters seem more human, and endearing. Two, they also serve as a distraction, and draw our attention away from the (crime solving) abilities of the protagonist.
“This is definitely true of Dominic. He can be considered unusual just for being Australian and choosing to live in Delhi — before you even look at things like his excessive drinking and dry humour. His outsider status and his laidback nature mislead the other characters about his real purpose, and his true abilities,” says Patrick.
And characters are at the heart of the story, even in crime fiction. “I’ve read a lot of lists of things to avoid in crime fiction, from G.K. Chesterton’s to Elmore Leonard’s. They are worth absorbing. It boils down to making your characters interesting and your plot believable; you can’t cheat on your research,” says Patrick. “Crimes should be solved using logic, and not by intuition, accident or through use of the supernatural.”
