Partners in crime: Glen Peters (left) with Dominic Williams, head of marketing at Parthian Books

Crime and the Calcutta connection

The British Council is to be commended for making research funds available for the play reading of Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta, the murder mystery by Glen Peters set in the Anglo-Indian community of Calcutta in 1960.

The central character is a schoolteacher, Joan D’Silva, an attractive widow in her early thirties who solves the murder of Agnes, an 18-year-old Anglo-Indian girl.

I caught up at the London Book Fair last week with Glen who tells me he is leaving for Calcutta on May 7 for the reading which will be by members of Tincan, the highly regarded Calcutta-based theatre group and be held at the Seagull bookstore.

Travelling with Glen is Richard Davies, publisher of Parthian Books, an independent publishing house in Wales which has brought out the novel. HarperCollins is considering whether to publish the novel in India (it should).

Richard, an author himself under the pen name of Lewis Davies, has taken three of the women characters in Glen’s novel and written a 20-minute treatment based partly on the dialogue in the book. The idea is to hold a workshop and expand the treatment into a two-hour play which will tour India in the autumn and also be performed in Britain — providing corporate sponsors can be found.

The party from London will also include Rebecca Gould, who will produce the play — “I love Calcutta, I’ve been there several times” — as well as Shereen Martineau, a well known actress in Britain whom I have seen cast as Viola in a West End production of Twelfth Night.

Glen, himself an Anglo-Indian, was a pupil at Don Bosco in Liluah before he emigrated to England with his parents in 1967 at the age of 16. This is a quick return to Calcutta for Glen since he and his wife, Brenda, who live in London and also have a magnificent estate in Wales, had a holiday in India only last December.

“How much do you know about poisons?” Glen suddenly asks me over lunch.

It is all to do with Glen’s second novel in which Joan D’Silva, a sort of Indian Miss Marple, solves another murder, set this time at a Dalda factory in Lucknow.

“A batch of Dalda has been contaminated,” he adds mysteriously.

Already booked

Glen Peters has to get back to London for the Festival of Asian Literature from May 5-27 organised by Asia House. Glen will discuss “Asian crime fiction” with two other panel members, Diane Wei Liang, author of Paper Butterfly, and Hirsh Sawhney, who wrote Delhi Noir.

Other highlights at the festival, which is said to be “the only festival in the UK dedicated to writing about Asia and Asians”, include Baul music by Mimlu and Paban Das.

There is also a session on China and Pearl S. Buck’s life in that country with Hilary Spurling, and another on the conflict in Kashmir. Francis Pike will be discussing his book, Empires at War, on what he believes to be the “unwinding of American influence” in Asia with China historian, Rana Mitter.

The opening night event on May 5 — Fatima Bhutto talking about Songs of Blood and Sword with Janine de Giovanni — is already sold out, I am informed.

I suspect some of the punters had read Khushwant Singh’s recent account of when Fatima “did me the honour of calling on me… I could not take my eyes off her. I kept gazing at the pin-head of a diamond sparkling on the left side of her nose and her long jet-black curly hair falling on her shoulders”.

Next year it’s possible Shashi Tharoor will discuss his new book, “Lalit Modi: my role in sending him back to the pavilion”.

Missing in (in)action: The empty HarperCollins India stand at the London Book Fair; (below) poster of Tony Blair’s forthcoming memoirs

Missing Blair

Last year, the HarperCollins India corner at the London Book Fair, when India was the “market focus”, had buzzed with activity and a bevy of beauties. This year it was pretty much deserted, for the volcanic ash over Europe crisis sadly disrupted the whole fair.

Everyone feels sorry for South Africa which succeeded India as the focus for this year. However, everyone is excited about next year’s London Book Fair, the 40th, when it will be Russia.

Random House put up a huge poster of Tony Blair’s forthcoming memoirs, The Journey, but an event featuring the former prime minister had to be cancelled because he was unable to make the journey from the Middle East.

Despite the thin attendance, I enjoyed wandering round the Earl’s Court exhibition centre, noting among the posters, one for Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming novel, Luka and the Fire of Life.

I looked through pictures of evocative old images in Bollywood in Posters (Om Books), by S.M.M. Ausaja, with an irritable foreword by Amitabh Bachchan: “The only thing I do not like about this book is the use of the word to describe the Indian Film Industry, in its title.”

An important industry seminar on book sales in India, organised by Nielsen, had to be cancelled but I learnt that the company is to publish figures on book sales in India. It has tied up with an Indian panel which will make available “electronic point of sale” data from bookshops from large metros across India to Nielsen in London.

The Indian publishing industry is expanding fast and there is demand in the West for reliable statistics on book sales in India, according to Nielsen executives.

Andre Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielsen, says all this is very much a first step since it is recognised that books are still sold over the counter for cash in India (e.g.in New Market) or on pavements.

Clients in the West also want access to the full list of books available in India.

“What we will also make available is bibliography,” says Breedt.

Good innings

We are all very grateful to ITV4 for all the people invited into the IPL studio in London: Graeme Hick, Ronnie Irani, Clive Lloyd, John Emburey, Dimi Mascarenhas, James Foster, Andre Nel, Neil Harvey, James Anderson, Saqlain Mushtaq, Alec Stewart, Graham Thorpe, Mark Ramprakash, Simon Hughes, Mark Butcher, Vikram Solanki, Matthew Hoggard, Min Patel and Gladstone Small.

But, alas, Mandira Bedi cannot finally come and provide us with her distinctive take on T20.

Mallya Cannes

Vijay Mallya is moving the action from cricket to Cannes where I am told he is planning to give a party — not on his private island, as he did last year, but not too far from the Croisette this time.

Fishy tele:Simon Reeve

Tittle tattle

It was cruelly entertaining watching the charming British author and BBC documentary filmmaker, Simon Reeve, travel through Calcutta in part four of his travel series, Tropic of Cancer. He is invited home by his Bengali guide whose wife cooks him muri ghanta (fish head).

The couple fall about as simple Simon is made to suck out the fish eyes and consume the brain.

“The eyes were ok,” poor Simon would say later, “but I wasn’t so keen on the brain.”

His brainy guide takes him to the canal fed by raw sewage from where the fish Simon ate might have come — more than adequate revenge, I think, for 200 years of British rule.