Her father was a policeman but Madhulika Liddle’s interest in crime fiction comes from her mother’s side. The great grandfather has been an aficionado of detective fiction, and her mother inherited both the love for the genre and the books. When it came down to Madhulika, the genre became more specialised: historical crime fiction. A book her mother bought — Robert van Gulik’s The Chinese Maze Murders — was what first got her hooked to it. Madhulika grew up to write her own crime stories and created a detective in the 17th century, a young Mughal called Muzaffar Jang. He evolved slowly from a short story, to a novel, to a collection of short stories and another novel. Now she is ready with his fourth book — a crime novel called Crimson City.
Like Poirot or Holmes, her detective Jang is slowly becoming a regular in her books, but Madhulika shapes the character through each. He had started off in The Englishman’s Cameo — her first novel featuring him as a man who is forced by circumstances to investigate a case. Since then, his innate curiosity and love for justice has spurred him on. “From being just another young nobleman, he’s gone to being a man to whom even Mir Jumla, the Diwan-i-Kul or Prime Minister, has assigned an investigation (in Engraved in Stone),” Madhulika says.
In Crimson City, he’s investigating serial killings, while also involved in finding culprits for two other unconnected crimes. What is more, the detective got married at the end of the previous book Engraved in Stone. The wife begins to help in the work, in going where Muzaffar can’t go. He didn’t start off a married man. Madhulika had envisaged him as a removed-from-all-that-baggage detective. “But my editor, when we were working on The Englishman’s Cameo, said, “He’s 25. In an age when men got married at 17 or even younger, he cannot not have a romantic past, at least.”
But while working on the murder stories, what Madhulika most worries about is the mystery. The history part is not a problem — she has been reading and researching Mughal history for so many years now. The writing is also something that ‘flows fairly easily’. “It’s the plotting of the mystery, making sure it’s intriguing enough etc. — that is the real challenge for me. Crafting a good detective story is difficult,” she concludes.
