Normally I’m a little sceptical about this whole new chick-lit-meets-crime-fic genre that seems to have mushroomed recently. It either winds up being really angsty (tough female heroine has never found love and is treated badly) or really cliché (she is saved in the nick of time by her handsome, studly supervisor) or just unable to stick to a genre (skipping wildly from here to there in the attempts to be Agatha Christie meets Marian Keyes.)
Anything that is ‘something meets something’ is usually a book you should avoid. Remember that advice. It’ll come in handy someday.
But, I’m always happy to change my mind. (Isn’t that one of the very fun prerogatives of being a woman?) And so when Piggies On The Railway landed on my bedside reading pile, I picked it up with interest, but not much hope. And boy, was I wrong. This book made me eat my words. I may have scoffed before, even at the cutesy pink colour with the silhouette of a girl on it (of course, we’re lucky it wasn’t a shoe or a handbag.) but oh, my. I didn’t read the author Smita Jain’s previous work, rejecting it on the grounds of too many Ks and Ks where there shouldn’t be (it was called Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions) but after reading this book, I’m certainly going to pick it up.
Let me tell you a little something about Piggies On The Railway. For one thing, it’s the first book in a long, long time that has actually made me laugh out loud. This is a big achievement, not least because I find myself gravitating towards sad books these days, but also because, you know how it is. You might perhaps give an inward chuckle at a humorous passage, but when’s the last time a book made you laugh out loud? A genuine, noise-from-your-mouth sound? I thought so. Me neither.
The heroine, Kasthuri Kumar, who everyone calls Katie, is a former cop, now a private detective, and while quite competent at her job has a delightful inner monologue going on. That’s the chick lit part. The detective fiction in itself wasn’t quite as detective-y as I’d like (I figured out who the killer was quite early on); some other bits of the book felt a bit false and put there just to enhance the scene. But Katie’s working through it, her secret scene with her competition, her crush on the guy who hired her all make for a really good piece of writing.
And so, I’m looking forward to the next instalment of Kasthuri Kumar. I’m curious about her friends and the people she works with. I could live without the crime bit, but eh, that’s just me. It’s funny, it’s real and if you never thought you could identify with an Indian cop character, here’s a good place to start.
The columnist is an author