Characters like Mia and Rachel aren’t just suspects, they’re women battling expectations and buried secrets. Mia’s desperate need to provide for her child comes at a personal cost she’s willing to pay in silence.
Meet Ell P, the bold and unapologetic author behind the thrilling novel Shameless in Stilettos. With a unique blend of crime fiction and eroticism, Ell’s writing explores the complexities of human desire and the secrets we keep.
Excerpts from an exclusive interview
What inspired you to blend crime fiction with bold, unapologetic eroticism in Shameless in Stilettos?
Shameless in Stilettos was the result of preparing for a pitch fest. I had a couple of novel ideas and half written manuscripts under my belt, but I wasn't happy with them. I had realised that I was writing to satiate the moral landscape of a typical reader rather than for myself. I was always someone fascinated by dark themes like crime, thrillers, supernatural, horror etc; but I was tired of crime novels where women were either victims, vamps, the frumpy secretary or serious detectives in beige trench coats who never cracked a smile. I wanted to write a thriller where women weren’t just plot devices or “strong female leads” with the emotional depth of a teaspoon. I wanted women who are messy, complicated, unapologetic about their sexuality, maternal, ambitious, and, most importantly, human.
Blending eroticism into crime fiction wasn’t about spicing things up; it was about peeling back the layers of control, power, and shame that often hide in plain sight. Desire, especially female desire, is still seen as taboo in Indian fiction. But come on, women think about sex, power, control, obsession, revenge, and sometimes all at once. I wanted to write a story where we don’t look away from that. So yes, we have voyeurism, we have kinks, we have secrets behind closed doors, but they all serve to show what people hide and how far they'll go to protect what they love or fear losing.
How did your diverse upbringing across India shape your storytelling approach and the characters in your novel?
Growing up across India felt like constantly slipping into different skins. I’ve been the Delhi kid, the small-town observer from Indore, the outsider in Mumbai, and now the expat struggling with diaspora in Europe. And that kaleidoscope of experiences has helped me craft characters who feel real, who carry different kinds of baggage, ambition, and guilt depending on where they’re from and what the world expects of them. Despite the fact that Shameless in Stilettos is set in Bangalore, my characters are from all over, Rachel & Vikram are from Kerala, Nisha is from Tamilnadu etc, Mia is a Bengali, and every single one of them has moved, settled into Bangalore and called it their home. Setting the book in Bangalore was a no-brainer. It’s my home, and there’s a deep sense of both comfort and contradiction there. It's a city where yoga studios sit next to bars, where gossip aunties live across from secret swingers. That tension - the seen and the hidden - is exactly what the book thrives on. Every street corner in Bangalore could host a secret.
Was there a particular challenge in writing about taboo topics like unconventional sexual desires and societal norms?
Oh, definitely. Writing about taboos is like walking a tightrope in heels; you want to look fabulous doing it, but one wrong step and you're flat on your face. I knew I wanted to explore desires that aren’t usually talked about openly, especially in Indian fiction. But I wasn’t interested in titillation for its own sake. I wanted to ask, 'What happens when women don’t apologize for what they want? What happens when power is negotiated through sex, not despite it?'
The hardest part was holding my nerve. There’s always that tiny inner voice asking, 'Will this make readers uncomfortable? What will my family think? Will I be able to look into the eyes of my parents and my child and proudly talk about the book?' But I’ve learned that discomfort can be a sign you’re telling the truth. As long as I stayed honest to the characters, and they were VERY insistent on having their say, I kept going. Plus, the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive. In hindsight I realise I shouldn't have been so worried, there is a market for Shameless in Stilettos and the readers have been so beautifully encouraging of my work that I couldn't ask for more..
Can you talk about the character of Inspector Meenakshi Rao and what inspired her troubled, complex nature?
Ah, Meenakshi Rao. She’s not your sanitized, emotionally balanced cop. She’s angry, grieving, numbing her pain with pills and poor choices, and yet, she’s brilliant. She sees through lies because she’s surrounded by her own. I’ve always been fascinated by detectives who are just as broken as the cases they’re trying to solve. Meenakshi doesn’t just investigate crime, she embodies it. Her guilt, her losses, her refusal to fit into any societal mold make her the perfect, imperfect investigator.
She wasn’t inspired by any one person, but rather a whole genre of detectives who were never given permission to fall apart. I thought, what if I created a woman who’s come undone, but is still terrifyingly sharp? What if she’s not there to win hearts, but to drag the truth out, kicking and screaming? That’s Meenakshi. She’s not likable. She’s necessary. Many people ask me, is there a woman in real life that inspired Meenakshi Rao and my answer is always - many. Meenakshi is the culmination of the women I know and admire, who weren't born strong but were forged in fire and became the furious, angry warriors they were meant to be.
How do you balance dark, gritty crime with the emotional depth and vulnerability of your characters?
It’s all about letting the crime and the character wounds bleed into each other. Every murder in any book is connected to someone’s secret longing or shame or grief. So like any good crime thriller, in Shameless in Stilettos also while the surface plot is about finding the killer, the real story is about what the crime reveals—about motherhood, about trauma, about the things people do when they think no one is watching.
Characters like Mia and Rachel aren’t just suspects, they’re women battling expectations and buried secrets. Mia’s desperate need to provide for her child comes at a personal cost she’s willing to pay in silence. Rachel, the good girl gone gloriously rogue, is discovering how intoxicating it can be to live by her own rules. These women don’t need saving. They need space to be. And that’s where the emotional core of the book lies.
What do you hope readers take away from the story’s exploration of grief, trauma, and self-discovery?
I hope readers realize that grief doesn’t always look like tears and soft piano music. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s detachment. Sometimes it’s picking up a knife and not knowing whether you’ll use it on someone else or yourself.
Shameless in Stilettos is about the stories we hide under perfect Instagrammable lives. It's about how trauma doesn’t erase desire, instead sometimes fuels it. It’s about the journey to self-discovery through the ugliest, most unexpected paths. If readers walk away with a deeper empathy for flawed, chaotic, brilliant women who are doing their best in a world stacked against them, I’ll call that a win.
