London: UK-born Abir Mukherjee's debut thriller set in Calcutta in 1919, A Rising Man, has been shortlisted for a prestigious crime-writing prize.
He is one of six authors selected from a longlist of 18 for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, which is sponsored by T&R Theakston, a brewery in the market town of Masham, North Yorkshire.
It is awarded annually at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, held every July. The winner receives £3000 and a small, hand-carved oak beer cask.
This year's prize, created "to celebrate the very best in crime fiction" and open to UK and Irish authors, is for a novel published in paperback between May 1, 2017, and April 30, 2018.
News of Abir's nomination comes as he is about to release his third novel, Smoke and Ashes. His second work was A Necessary Evil.
The winner will be decided by the panel of judges, alongside a public vote that opens online on July 1 and closes on July 14. The winner will be announced on July 19.
Abir's new tale, Smoke and Ashes, is set in 1921 - two years on from when his debut novel opened. He has created an unlikely partnership between Captain Sam Wyndham and his Bengali assistant, Sergeant "Surrender-not" Banerjee. The latter is patrician, Cambridge educated and socially a cut above his boss, who has arrived from the UK to join the Calcutta police. Wyndham is haunted by his memories of the Great War and is now "battling a serious addiction to opium that he must keep secret from his superiors".
Abir has said his ambition is not simply to tell a detective story but to set it against the background of racist British attitudes when the days of the Raj drew to a close and the fight for Independence became more intense.
