Bengaluru’s crop of crime and detective novels has been growing at a steady pace in the last decade or so. While the genre might be a relative newcomer, it already has a solid stable, from Zac O’Yeah’s Hari Majestic series to Harini Nagendra’s Bangalore Detective Club books, to name just a few. Last year, marketing professional Harish Vasudevan made his own entry in that list with Redemption, published by Westland Books.
Those in the recent art circuit in the city may already be familiar with Vasudevan, who had served as the Acting Director at the Museum of Art and Photography. Debut work or no, Redemption does not pull any punches – Vasudevan moves swiftly to set up the building blocks of a story. A clear villain appears, two murders at the hands of a seemingly untouchable figure, and the protagonist is left in dire straits.
With an author who has known Bengaluru since the 90s, it was perhaps a natural physical setting for a crime novel. Vasudevan, who first moved here in 1993, recalls, “It was a sleepy little town, what people call a pensioner’s paradise. It was a dream city for us who were starting our new life. I came back in 2014 after having left in 2002, and it felt like a new country….”
It is this new, fast-moving Bengaluru that the framing events of Redemption find their beginning.
Vasudevan is also a long-time fan of crime novels, from works by authors such as Lawrence Block to James Hadley Chase.
While Vasudevan makes a clear distinction between his professional life and his writing, he notes, “Because writing is an integral part of the work I do, it helps in making sure I am constructing a reasonable story or argument in the book itself.” As far as the theme behind his first book, Vasudevan says, “One always reads about a crime taking place, but unless it is a big crime, you seldom hear how it was resolved, how the victim got justice. Public attention has moved on to the next thing.”
The episode that sparked off Redemption was a case in Andhra Pradesh that Vasudevan had noticed, where the son of a local politician sexually assaulted a woman. Vasudevan then conceived of a narrative that could follow such a case to the end, bringing “redemption” to the victim. Having selected Bengaluru as the stage of the events, he needed a technological angle. Vasudevan says, ” If it were a woman taking revenge, the physicality would be challenging. So the weapon I gave her was the knowledge of technology.”