Gender stereotypes, often reflected in literature genres, face criticisms for maintaining generalisations. While romance novels are typically associated with female authors and readers, westerns tend to attract a predominantly male audience. In contrast, crime fiction has thrived with contributions from both genders, challenging conventional perceptions. The idealised portrayal of women as saints in popular culture is quashed by contemporary crime fiction, which introduces complex female characters, bidding adieu to stale traditional tropes and a step towards breaking age-old notions of femininity.
Keya Karmakar Basu, a private English tutor, has brought out her third Bengali crime fiction book, Lady Detective, Aromac.
The protagonist, Aromac, is a 27-year-old woman who has pursued her undergraduate degree in biotechnology and is currently working for a company named ‘Bio-In’. The author describes her as robust and healthy enough to physically fight off people in times of crisis. Her intelligence, bravado and never-give-up attitude will surely make readers embrace the character with open arms.
The first story, titled Spark Detective Agency, marks the debut of Aromac. Her journey as a detective begins in Kolkata itself. Aromac, in this short story, unfolds the consecutive murders of a family who has just shifted from the village of Sonar City to Kolkata. Coincidentally, Aromac also comes from the same village as this family, which even excites her more to solve this case personally.
The book consists of five short stories in total, each occurring in a place that the author has already been, mostly as a tourist. In a conversation with The Statesman, Basu said, “Whenever I go to a place, either as a tourist or as to work, there is an underlying aim within me to explore the place, its geography and history, and to transfer into stories of crimes. My stories are the coalescence of my fictive mind and true historical or current incidents that give birth to such crime fiction.”
The second short story in her book, Crime in Coorg, was derived from the history of Coorg, in which the Sikh emperor, Ranjit Singh or Bhiraraja, stashed his tangible treasures before he was sent into exile by the Britishers. Coorg’s historical content is derived by Basu from the book, Gazetteer of Coorg, by G. F. Richter.
In her story, the treasure, which had been mapped and calligraphed in an ancient language, has been passed down through several generations. Aromac unfolds the lost treasure, followed by the disappearance of two foreign tourists, and therefore shows her excellence as a lady in the crime section.
The last story, Hyderabad ey Hijack was written after the author’s admiration of a popular Telugu male superstar who knocks villains off on the air in his movies. Here, the author, through her protagonist, directly challenges him on the basis of her physical and mental strength in accordance with that of a male superstar.
Basu’s interest in criminology and crime fiction is highly inspired by Agatha Christie’s detective characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Suchitra Bhattacharya’s ‘Mitin Mashi’, Damyanti Biswas’s crime novels, and Abhijnan Roychowdhury, the author of Anilikha Rahasya Samagra, were also reasons to stimulate her fictive thoughts and add her own contribution of another sleuth character in Bengali literature.
On asking about her journey as a detective and crime fiction writer, she elaborated about the incident during the lockdown that provoked her to write. A renowned newspaper in Bengal released an advertisement for the submission of short stories, and she prepared herself by creating a detective one. Unfortunately, lockdown ceased all such publications, yet her stories of detective Ishaan and cybercrime investigator Bishaan received positive feedback, and she therefore continued with her third character, Aromac.