On the crime trail

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He doesn’t waste much time. Bang on, he opens the book with a steamy love scene. By the end of the second page, the plot takes a startling turn — the passionate lover turns a killer, setting the tone for the suspense-filled novel.
Compass Box Killer by filmmaker-writer Piyush Jha is an interesting pix of passion, murder, mystery and a lot of masala — all in one, a perfect filmi combo. “The crimes of passion always make for a gripping plot,” believes Jha, who has recently come out with his second book. His first, Mumbaistan, a compilation of three novellas set in Mumbai, was released a few months ago and became a bestseller, encouraging him to take up writing even more seriously.
The opening of a book is a key element to getting a reader hooked, feels Jha. He says, “The fascinating part of crimes of passion is that one always wants to hide it. And that adds a lot of layering to the plot, making it an interesting read and creates suspense till the end.”
Compass Box Killer is a continuation of one of his stories –– Injectionwallah — from Mumbaistaan, which features Inspector Virkar. “This one takes on the cop’s journey to other investigations,” says Jha, who plans to develop a series on the character. “In fact the next part would be out within a few months,” he adds.
The writer’s fascination for crime developed pretty early in life. As a teenager, he witnessed a murder. “I was just a few kilometres away when a famous gangster was shot dead. That incident intrigued me and aroused my curiosity about crime. I wanted to understand the reasons behind killing somebody. The infamous Mumbai underworld also fascinated me and that is when I started reading crime thrillers,” he says.
Among the crime thriller novelists Jha admires are Ian Rankin, Robert Ludlum, Jeffery Archer and Lee Child.
The dangerous world of crime intrigued the writer so much that as a college kid he took it up as a project, ‘The Rise and Fall of Crime Fiction in India’. “I researched on the topic and came to the conclusion that after 90’s when TV came into existence, nobody explored the genre of crime thrillers; not even in the vernacular languages in which it used to be very popular earlier,” he says. But he points out that there is still a market for crime fiction which is evident by the number of crime shows on television.
A writer by profession and an explorer by nature, Jha is well familiar with every nook and corner of the commercial capital. His friends call him “the Google map of Mumbai” and thus, while writing the novel, it was but natural that the backdrop of the book and one of its core elements was the essence of Mumbai.