Jolly Good Jaunt

I had fun with these books, I really did.

However, several minor details: The first paragraph was supposed to be the standfirst, and the first letters of "South Extension Amateur Theatrical Society" and "Delhi Institute for Rationalism and Education" were meant to be in bold, in case nobody gets the joke; the initials for both "organisations" spell "SEATS" (as in theatre seats) and "DIRE" (presumably the state of superstition vs rationality in India).

India's CSICOP, meanwhile, is known for its mouthful of a full name: Indian Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which is an affiliate of the US-based Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

Hence, the "fixed" version of the published review below.

Maybe I should have left more clues or something for the editing team.

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Jolly good jaunt

Reading about the exploits of a Punjabi private detective and his assistants is like taking a fun and fast-paced Indian autorickshaw ride

first published in The Star, 12 June 2011


It's been a while since I've read a good detective story, especially one that's not only action-packed but also has witty writing, fast pacing, and quirky dialogue.

And a memorable lead character like Vishwas Puri. The portly, pompous Punjabi private eye and proprietor of Most Private Investigators Ltd is the protagonist of British journalist-turned-author Tarquin Hall's series of detective novels set in India.

For Puri, danger is his ally (he dices with death with each chilli pakora he eats) and confidentiality is his agency's watchword (never mind his Bollywood dreams for his case files).

Tarquin Hall's Vishwas Puri novels

Being mentioned in the same breath as Johnnies-come-lately Poirot, Holmes, et al (who, like himself, don't really exist) offends him. Puri insists that his profession, his methods, go way back to the time of Indian sage and diplomat Chanakya, who wrote a treatise on spying and investigation over 2,000 years ago. He scoffs at younger competitors who appear to watch too much CSI, dress like Horatio Caine and think the handheld UV light is the ultimate crime-solving tool. Portly he may be, but he's also tough in his own way: Have you ever eaten a naga morich, one of the world's hottest chillies, without flinching?

Good detectives in India don't work alone, so Puri has a team of experts, most of whom are code named. There's Tubelight, a former professional thief; Handbrake, Puri's chauffeur and once-cab driver; Nepali femme fatale Facecream; tech wizard Flush; Ms Chadda, telephone operator of many voices; and Elizabeth Rani, Puri's secretary. At home there's his loyal wife Rumpi and his mum. Puri's mum, known only as Mummy, is a bit of a sleuth herself and is, apparently, something of a clairvoyant.

But this is India, and his talents don't appear to receive great acclaim. Puri languishes in semi-obscurity, largely scorned by the police. His daily bread involves sussing out prospective grooms and numerous petty crimes, when he's not solving major cases such as the Case Of The Laughing Peacock, the Case Of The Pundit With Twelve Toes, and one about a missing polo elephant.

We are thrust into the Case Of The Missing Servant, Hall's first book in the series, in the middle of one such groom-sussing stakeout. Not long after Puri wraps that up, a clean lawyer – a rarity in modern India, it seems – comes a-calling. The lawyer's maidservant is missing and awful rumours of her disappearance are swirling around him. It's not long before the lawyer is jailed for a crime he says he didn't commit – and then someone tries to shoot Puri.

The bigger hazard for our sleuth, however, is his girth, which marks him as a candidate for obesity-related ills, but that has not diminished his love of fiery chillies, pakoras, and other spicy, buttery Indian fare. The Missing Servant also introduces us to India's marriage customs, class divisions and its supposedly shady real estate scene.

We know that Puri survives the assassination attempt, the chillies and cholesterol, because The Case Of The Man Who Died Laughing came out about a year later. The second book highlights the struggle between superstition and science in India, with a bit of sci-fi thrown in. Guru-buster Dr Suresh Jha is killed, seemingly by the four-armed goddess Kali. The murder victim and his association appears to be based on real-life Indian guru-buster, the late Basava Premanand and his rationalist group, the Indian CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal).

While Puri and gang are off chasing goddesses, magicians and a fake guru, wife Rumpi and Mummy amuse themselves investigating a robbery at a kitty party (typical ones usually involve middle-aged women gossiping and drinking tea, so fish your minds out of the gutter now, please).

Hall's writing and language grow on you, like an overly chummy Punjabi with a booming voice who wraps a thick hairy arm around your shoulder, hustles you to the nearest bar and plies you with drinks. I found myself wanting to speak in tongues by the time I finished the two books, rolling my tongue outrageously as I aped the characters. Plus, you get more than one case and more than one detective. Mummy holds her own as she pokes her nose into danger – and grows on you as Delhi's answer to Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote.

Word play abounds. In The Missing Servant, one chuckles at the shallow pun in the desperate lawyer's plea to "find this bloody Mary!"; Puri's multi-talented telephonist belongs to the South Extension Amateur Theatrical Society. In The Man Who Died Laughing, the late Dr Jha is founder and head of the Delhi Institute for Rationalism and Education. And then there's the running gag that involves Puri getting a knock in the head, either by accident or by an unknown assailant.

Hall's India is one big caricature where circumstances serve the cartoonish narrative and plot. The unsavoury socioeconomical and political climate and unflattering stereotypes help make Puri and gang, victims and the supporting good guys stand out – perhaps a bit too much. Though Puri is not above it all. Problems at home include water and power cuts ("load shedding") and a brother-in-law who fancies himself Punjab's Donald Trump. And our old-fashioned gumshoe bemoans creeping Western influences and declining morals, and believes that mums – and women in general – don't make good detectives.

But you won't care, because you'll have too much fun with these novels. I sure did.

However, there have been no new Vish Puri novels out since The Man Who Died Laughing. It would be a shame for the series to end after such a spectacular take-off. And I really want to know about that missing polo elephant.

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The Case of the Missing Servant

Tarquin Hall
Arrow Books (2009)
312 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-09-952523-3

The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Tarquin Hall
Hutchinson (2010)
334 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-09-192567-3

Some Monthly Reads

Some books slated for review in The Star arrived at my desk today, courtesy of the MPH book people.

Mitchell Zuckoff's Lost in Shangri-La (left) and Chan Koonchung's The Fat Years

• Lost in Shangri-La
  A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and
  the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II
  Mitchell Zuckoff
  Harper (2011)
  Non-fiction
  384 pages
  ISBN: 978-0-06-209358-5
• The Fat Years
  The Notorious Novel No-one in China Dared Publish
  Chan Koonchung
  Translated from the Chinese by Michael S Duke
  With a Preface by Julia Lovell
  Doubleday (July 2011)
  Fiction
  307 pages
  ISBN: 9780385619189

The Fat Years will probably be slated for publication in The Star's Monthly Reads in July. And it means I'd better wrap up this month's review.

I haven't been as prolific as I'd like with regards to book reviews. I'm trying to be cautious as well, because writing a review based on first impressions can be a risky proposition.

Guess it's time to get cracking.

The Dulang Washer

Working on this book was fun. That the story is probably one of the better ones we've received so far this year had something to do with it. At posting time, it's still with the printers, hence the cover photo.

We intend to release it this August, but it might be in bookstores as early as next month. For a sneak peek at the novel's backstory, go here.

The Dulang Washer is set in Malaya, in 1890. In the tin-mining camps of Perak’s Kinta Valley, only the strongest and bravest survive. One day, an ox-drawn cart rolls into one such camp. Among the human cargo inside is...

Mee Ling. The young, wilful daughter of a farmer in China, her desire for freedom and independence leads to her abduction and arrival in a foreign land and perhaps a fate worse than death, if not for...

Aisha, who takes the frightened Mee Ling under her wing. Burdened by a secret tragedy and driven by a sacred vow, the mysterious Malay maiden labours as a dulang washer to support two families, while staying above the mine’s politics and fending off the advances of the mine’s unscrupulous proprietor...

Fook Sin, who has enriched himself at the expense of the mining camp's indentured labourers. He sees the camp as his fiefdom and will brook no opposition to his rule. He also covets Aisha, whom he hopes to add to his stash of secretly hoarded treasures. However, his reign will soon be threatened by...

Donald Redfern, a former British army officer who left his country for the chance to better his young family's life. Sent to the mine as its new overseer, Redfern finds succour from his loneliness and homesickness in Aisha's language lessons and small gestures of compassion. But he will also clash with...

Hun Yee, a young Hakka miner whose recent victory against his opium addiction allows him to once again pursue his dreams of being the boss of his own mine. But when he acts against a fellow miner’s unjust punishment, he inadvertently challenges Redfern’s authority and piques the interest of both Mee Ling and Aisha.

Of all the myriad hazards of the mining camp, which will prove to be the more dangerous: Fook Sin’s desire to cling to power and his ill-gotten wealth, or Redfern's growing obsession with Aisha, which she'd unwittingly fuelled with her kindness? And what will this mean for Hun Yee's dream, Aisha's vow and Mee Ling's hunger for freedom?


Paul Callan was born in Dublin, Ireland. His love of storytelling was fuelled while attending Chanel College in North Dublin. As a young man in London, he abandoned his first attempt at becoming a novelist in pursuit of a business career. After marrying his Malaysian wife, he visited Malaysia many times, and fell in love with the country and its people. He now divides his time between his homes in Kuala Lumpur and London. The Dulang Washer is his first novel.

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The Dulang Washer

An Epic Tale of Love, Valour and Secrets

Paul Callan
MPH Group Publishing
388 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-967-5997-55-6

Web site

Buy from Kinokuniya | MPHOnline.com

A Monsoon Blows In

"This is a true story of 1930s Malaysia, of jungle operations, submarines and spies in WWII, and of the postwar Malayan Emergency, as experienced by an extraordinary man."

Days ago, out of the blue, Monsoon Books offered me books to review or feature in the media. A package from them came last Friday, but I was not informed until yesterday evening.

Malayan Spymaster: Memoirs of a Rubber Planter, Bandit Fighter and Spy is the story of Boris Hembry, a British rubber planter who joined the fight against the Japanese occupiers in World War II as an intelligence officer and later, the communist insurgents during the Emergency.

Hembry's memoirs were written for his family and not meant for publication, but they felt that his life in Malaya and his struggles deserved a much wider readership.

"We dedicate it to those expatriates of many generations whose devotion to that beautiful country and its peoples helped to lay the foundations of present-day peaceful and prosperous Malaysia," writes Hembry's son, John in the preface. Boris Hembry passed on in September 1990.

My thanks to Monsoon Books for what promises to be an interesting read, and many thanks to the family of the late Boris Hembry for their generosity in sharing his extraordinary story.

A Subtle Degree Of Restraint

At a series of creative writing workshops under the British Council Creative Cities programme, run with UK-based writer development organisation Spread The Word, participants looked to the energy and character of the city of Kuala Lumpur for inspiration. The stories in this collection are the results of those workshops.

Creative Cities is a British Council project set up in 2008 and was developed in 15 countries in Europe. It provides a platform and a toolkit which can be used by individuals and organisations to help improve their cities.

Spread The Word, with the assistance of established professional writers, helps writers reach their full potential through workshops, mentoring schemes and other activities.

Most of the stories take place in KL, or were inspired by KL. In an urban restaurant, a woman is irked by the presence of a huge round vase as she explores love and weight loss. Will the vase survive? ...And how delicious are those after-lunch mochi?

A married woman struggles with her husband's infidelity and forbidden feelings for a neighbour's teenage son. One outlet for her frustrations involves the desperate housewife fantasies she writes on her computer. How will this play out?

As she swaps stories with her friends at a swanky Bangsar joint, an uptown woman learns something that sours the sweetness in her little secret. Shock! Horror! Will she consign the little package she's carrying into the dustbin?

A timid teacher finds the courage to stand up for what's right. But troubles at home threatens to turn her workplace triumph into a pyrrhic victory. Despite a flu, a man at Amritsar is awed by the vision of loveliness he guides in a search for the mysterious beauty's roots, miles away from home. She finds what she's looking for, but has he?

Across the city, viewers following a tacky game show witness an unassuming contestant's spectacular victory and watch her humiliation as the prize for her efforts is revealed. A crowd gathering at the scene of a drowning brings a man back into his childhood and the tragic death of a schoolmate.

A Subtle Degree of Restraint and Other Stories is published by MPH Group Publishing and will be available in all major bookstores.

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A Subtle Degree of Restraint and Other Stories

Various Authors
MPH Group Publishing
138 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-967-5997-47-1

Buy from MPHOnline.com

Look, Books!

...because my brain, like Odo the Changeling from Star Trek: TNG, is still reconstituting from the weekend and is unable to come up with snazzy titles.

Last Friday, someone from books distributor Pansing dropped by. Earlier, we passed them a copy of a book we could not distribute for some reason or another, hoping they could. We received that copy today, but that book's status is still unclear. I hope to have some good news regarding it soon.

Some new books from Pansing

They also left us with a bagful of books, three of which were passed to me. My weekend reading list may soon spill over to my weekdays...

• The Poison Tree
  Erin Kelly
  Hodder and Stoughton (2010)
  Fiction
  359 pages (with Prologue for The Sick Rose)
  ISBN: 978-1-444-70106-7
• Inside Wikileaks
  My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website
  Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Tina Klopp
  Jonathan Cape (2011)
  Non-Fiction/Current Affairs/Political
  282 pages
  ISBN: 978-0-224-09401-6
• The Plantation
  Di Morrissey
  Pan Macmillan Australia (2010)
  Fiction
  458 pages
  ISBN: 978-1-4050-3998-7

Okay, so not all of them are "new" new, but new enough. We will have to do something with some, if not all, of these books.

Times Of Turmoil

Some may complain about books that's clean, not exciting and all that. In short, boring. That was my very first impression of this collection. But I returned to it weeks later and was amazed at the shift in my perception.

How many weeks later? I'm not sharing.

As a result, I may have been... effusive in my praise of the book. But after rolling around in what passes for journalism these days, what a gust of fresh air!

Something to keep firmly in mind.

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Times of turmoil

A deft touch conveys stories of upheaval without resorting to unrealistic extremes

first published in The Star, 03 June 2011


Isn't today's media action-packed? Blood and guts, bullets and bombs, skin and sex, and reality TV shows where f-bombs drop like names at a socialites' ball. And it seems as though whole sections in bookstores both real and virtual have been taken over by genres that combines elements of all the above and then some.

I wonder if it is perhaps in reaction to this trend that publishers Marshall Cavendish have re-released something cleaner and calmer.

Born in 1951 in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), to parents of Chinese descent, Minfong Ho was raised in Thailand and graduated from America's prestigious Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in economics. She became a journalist, and then taught English at Thailand's Chiang Mai University. She currently resides in New York with her family.

During her first years at Cornell, she turned to writing to fight her homesickness. Her short story, Sing To The Dawn, won a prize and was later expanded into a novel published in 1975. She would go on to write more novels and story collections. Rice Without Rain (1986) was based on her experiences with Thailand's turbulent politics in the 1970s, and her times as an aid volunteer helping Cambodian refugees during the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia inspired The Clay Marble (1991).

Marshall Cavendish has compiled these three works into a single volume, The Minfong Ho Collection. All three novels feature young Thai or Cambodian village lasses whose daily struggles are compounded by bigger forces intruding upon their little worlds.

In Sing To The Dawn, we are introduced to Dawan, a brilliant, headstrong student who wins a scholarship and a chance to study in a big-city school.

However, she faces objections from her parents and the apathy and fatalism of her fellow villagers, all of whom seem to view the idea of a girl getting educated as something radical. Her so-called blessing also drives a wedge between her and her brother.

Seventeen-year-old Jinda gets caught up in Thailand's student-led democracy movement in the 1970s in Rice Without Rain.

A group of university students arrive at her village, bringing with them the promise of change. Brought to the city, ostensibly to speak out against greedy landlords, Jinda soon learns that she is but a pawn in a bigger struggle, and that the price of change may be too high to pay.

The Clay Marble's 12-year-old Dara has lived through two "liberation" campaigns: one led by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian royals, and the other by Vietnamese forces fighting the previous regime. When the Khmer Rouge's reign crumbles, she and her family join the refugees fleeing towards the Thai-Cambodia border. Along the way, Dara meets a fellow refugee with a knack for making toys out of clay. But the peace she finds in a refugee camp along the border is eventually shattered when the war finally catches up.

What's refreshing about these three works is how unremarkable they look at first glance. Ho doesn't dramatise the human tragedies with graphic depictions of wartime atrocities – something that seems to be de rigueur nowadays in print, on TV and online.

Unlike the reports filed by some of those "celebrity" journalists on 24-hour "news channels", the subjects take centre stage, not the writer. Ho's use of simple, unadorned language does not detract from the respect and sensitivity she shows her characters and their world, and the gravity of the issues the young heroines face.

Gender and class discrimination, corruption, superstition versus modernity, and the callousness of the powers-that-be in their bid to maintain the status quo become all the more poignant when one sees that little has changed in these countries since these works were first published in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this collection, Ho does not shed excessive blood, rip bodices or curse like a flotilla of pirates to tell her tales. She doesn't have to. The deft touch of her pen, tempered by first-hand experience, brings to life the voices and the pain of these three village girls, and that alone is enough. Though meant for children and young adults, readers of all ages will find this honest, easy read almost like journalism at its finest.

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The Minfong Ho Collection

Minfong Ho
Marshall Cavendish Editions
399 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-981-4302-45-6