BOOK REVIEWS: Feminist Thrills In Reading Crime Fiction – Unmana, Meeti Shroff, Kalpana Swaminathan
I had a personal revelation on reading & writing this month at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2025. The ‘Murder, She Wrote’ panel was hosted by Jane Borges and featured female crime fiction writers Kalpana Swaminathan, Unmana and Meeti Shroff. The spaces of publishing and crime fiction (just like graphic novels and academia) tend to be such brodoms, that I just had to attend.
My revelation started with a way back into reading, after years of struggling. Reading is fundamentally an act of talking to oneself and with varying levels of relationship, with the author. I know now that I like paperbacks because they allow me to inscribe in the margins uninterrupted. This instinct usually has me running to post on the socials, inviting the clutter of online reactions into my mind. Paperbacks also feel more visceral and where better to reaquaint myself than with a genre like crime fiction?
I bought one book by each of people on the stage and asked them for autographs. This is such a delightful ritual for a lover of words, an act of love & bonding for a writer/reader such as myself. I know just how much it means for an author to see a person pay for their work and to ask them to sign their books. I was moved by the gratitude and delight I saw in each of their eyes, varying by their age and personality.
It was always there. It’s so fundamental to female people denied credit & respect in so many ways that they truly cherish it when it is given (unlike men who if they’ve made it to such a prestigious stage are often encumbered with arrogance and predatory entitlement). There’s nothing quite like the bond that forms between women/female people over positive emotions freely expressed.
Jane Borges was probably on this panel because of her book Mafia Queens of Bombay (a look at the real-life crime lords in Bombay’s history). But I haven’t read that book yet. Still, her presence gifted me with this great friendship and a mental healing trip down my past.
The panel discussion itself was fantastic. Vibrant conversation between accomplished thoughtful women. Crime fiction often delivers neat resolutions, but real life isn’t always that generous. That’s what makes contemporary crime writing by women so compelling—it embraces ambiguity.
Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd – Unmana: Editing influences & flipping the gender normal
It’s been awhile since I read a cosy mystery so I’m a bit rusty on the genre’s tropes. Let me start with what I did like.
1. It’s written by a non-male author. It’s getting to be like food for me and in first taste, I can usually tell whether an offering carries the histories of survival & resilience or has the bland flavour of no-consequences white male entitlement. It makes the book more wholesome in that ghar ka khana vs mall food court generic garbage.
2. It’s set in Bangalore, a city I enjoy without knowing it well enough to notice any differences from my experience and the world of the book. I remember growing up with Enid Blyton books and imagining places like Cornwall or Picadilly Square completely in terms of making them up in my mind. This book brings me sweet encounters of recognition when I read ‘Sandal Soap Factory Metro Station’ and the like.
3. And finally, most important of all, it is centered around the female life experience. Not just as witnesses (or commonly victims of) crime but as active agents unraveling it. The gender normal of most stories (including women-centric genres like cosy mysteries) has male characters with the power to drive plot twists and rarely passes the Bechdel test (or a version of it for books).
This is flipped over in this story with all major characters on the good folks side being female, including the investigating police officer. The suspects are many and almost all male (a comment on the gendered nature of violent crime?) I’m willing to let this conceit hold (see point 1).
Now to things that could have been done better. I made it to the end of the book in one night and with no great effort so I’d put these are development areas rather than flaws in the book. It’s immediately obvious who the author’s favorite influences are considering she names several chapters in homage to Alexander McCall-Smith books. The protagonist is also heavily modelled (pun unintended) on the cheerful ladies of his No.1 Detective series. But the similarity ends there.
Nilima doesn’t enjoy the financial stability of Mma.Ramotswe or Isabel Dalhousie. She’s navigating the chaos of 2010s Bangalore, not the amiable desert air of Botswana or the crisp upper-crust suburbania of Scotland. She is fleshed out the best, with a tragic backstory of familial discrimination and currently accessorised with a cigarette and a love of books. She is desperately lonely and occasionally blunders on the sterotype of short-haired, prickly, fat lesbian. The story suffers by its author’s love of McCall-Smith when it tries to suggest the kind of camaraderie that came naturally to Mma.Ramotswe and Mma.Makutsi between Nilima and her colleagues and falls short.
Shwetha was a bit harder to imagine beyond a rather formulaic ‘beautiful siren’ of gossamer dupattas and diaphanous skin. It wasn’t till the second half of the book that her arc picked up and became less manic pixie dream boss and more real person with her own complex motivations. Poorna I initially imagined as an airhead Instagram influencer type but she turned out to be a take-no-prisoners Greta Thunberg kind of Gen Z native. The about-face on the attitude to this character weakened Nilima making her seem like an unreliable narrator. The book does ride rather closely on her point of view.
The great thing about women-centric books is when they explore the range of emotions and motivations that characters go through; so rare in books by male authors that often focus more on actions and one-upmanship. I did enjoy watching the dynamic between these three women unfold. It was also fascinating to watch how Nilima, Shweta and Poorna navigate conversations with other women outside this trio – the suspects, the inspector and others. Our conversations define who we are being and the place we see for ourselves in the world. I wish this book had focussed more on these.
Good crime fiction intertwines complex plots with intriguing character arcs. The murder storyline felt like an annoying appendage dogging the women as they navigated this world. The crime plot itself was astonishingly simple and the approach to solving it felt haphazard and luck-based rather than the controlled unraveling that a good cosy mystery can do. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been as interesting a book to read had the characters not needed to focus on something this dramatic. Still, the murder plot vis-a-vis the character arcs didn’t mesh well enough. I really only read the book because I wanted to know what was going on with each person, rather than whodunnit.
I say this because the book is being called a Bibliomystery but this story could just as well have happened anywhere else and the detective could easily have been a hobby gardener instead of a bibliophile. There was no real relevance to the murder in a bookstore and nothing much to Nilima being an enthusiatic reader. The sole nugget I found was when Nilima says she always looks at what books people own to tell her more about them. I didn’t see that echoed anywhere else in the book. True, books have become more private as we view them through screens. How does someone who struggles to fit into the world use this fast-failing technique to navigate then?
In sum, the characters of Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd left me intrigued enough to want to learn more about their lives. I’m not quite as sure I’m interested in watching them solve another murder. Mma.Ramotswe may well be an exception in being a women’s drama series masquerading as detective fiction.
The Death of Kirti Kadakia – Meeti Shroff: How to hold up a woman you don’t like
This book is hard for me, personally. Being of anxious temperament, I’m uncomfortable holding the thought of murder in my head. This means, I need to get through a story as quickly as possible – something that is facilitated by the usual male authored skull-and-dagger crime thriller plotlines.
But cosy mysteries are true to the people they’re most associated with – women. They tend to be less graphic and linear in their narratives. They feature female protagonists who unravel deep truths rather than just solve cases. The stories are more akin to detangling a complex knot in a steaming hot kitchen while being pawed at, than ticking off suspects in a systemically supported linear way.
What this also means is that cosy mysteries tend to be character-driven more than plot-driven. It’s not just the protagonist but her world that we, the readers must get invested in. Her journey through the story is based on navigation through whispered conversations in backrooms, sniffing out clues in gossip on her networks and instincts honed from years of well, being a woman having to figure out unspoken cues.
This is where the book was a challenge for me. I do not like the protagonist or her world. It’s a strong, personal reaction because I’m a citizen of the same world but in a different class-bound location.
How do I ride on the shoulder of a character whom I don’t like or respect? I know people like Radhika and I’ve also known people like Kirti Kadakia. Nothing makes me care about solving that awful old man’s death, not even the people he leaves behind. My every instinct is to dismiss the characters in this book as being rich, overprivileged assholes. It’s hard for me to feel sympathetic to someone who has a retinue of live-in servants, who has multiple homes to go back to when divorced/professionally stuck/pregnant/grieving and people who will make it a comfortable home for them without asking. S
Still, like the author said, it is a slice of Bombay life, a slice she knows well. That I don’t inhabit that group should not hamper my ability to enjoy the story, ideally. And indeed, had this book been set in a different country or even in a different city from my own, I might have been able to do that.
Having watched all three authors on stage (albeit for a short while), I’m pretty sure they’re writing close to their worlds and lives. How feminist would it be of me to reject a woman for inhabiting a different space from mine? Would I do that with a man? The answer of course is, I would not have that choice with a man. With a woman from a different history from mine, I see any opportunity to discern how much of my resistence is learned misogyny, how much of it is experienced class clash and what of it is truly pure reaction to the story.
I had a similar (albeit in a different aspect) revelation while watching the show Bombay Begums. Could I still support the voice of a woman I did not like, when she was calling out MeToo? I struggled but I know I should. Consent is every human’s right, regardless of whether you like them or not. Being a feminist to me, means going above my personal feelings about them.
It also reminded me of enjoying Sex & The City. The characters were never meant to be relatable to me. I did not like the protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw and took a mean kind of pleasure in watching her bumble through bad decisions. It felt like a secondhand triumph to see a very 2020s character like Miranda Hobbes be validated later in life.
I probably would have enjoyed reading about Radhi’s world, had it been a romance. That would have been wealth porn, pandering to the same instincts that make me watch reality TV. And for this reason, this book may be the most interesting of this collection in showing me something about myself. Crime fiction does after all reveal so much about human nature – including social barriers & class divides.
It takes time. I read a chapter. I feel overwhelmed with resentment and go on trauma flashbacks triggered by characters who sound familiar in unpleasant ways. I read something else. I remember why I’m doing this. And I return. So this book is going to take a lot longer for me to write a completed review. It is interesting, what it’s bringing up in me and about me.
Murder in Seven Acts – Kalpana Swaminathan: Battling ageism with mirth & badassery
This has been the easiest of the three books for me to access. But the book cover is my least favorite of the three, given its cliched black-for-murder theme. I’ve also not gotten to the part that explains the wedding gown so context is probably lost on me.
In the hour before the KGAF panel, I was excitedly yapping with my new friend (prompting disapproving shushes from a staid SoBo veteran). I was telling him about a previous event whose speaker had disappointedly succumed to the audience request to sing, instead of reading from the Kabir book she had written. I was interrupted by a slightly older lady.
“It was a mistake to bring that musical instrument onto stage and sing then.”
It perfectly encapsulated my volley of words trying to net the impression of music being much more populist (and well, needing far less brainpower or emotional investment to enjoy) than books. But at that instant, full of my own intellectual superiority and ageism, I smiled back her vaguely, noting that her teeshirt said something about ‘Irony’. I wrote her off as somebody who thought she was cool when she was younger.
Then the panel began and my friend in an overawed tone said,
“Ramya, that lady who spoke to you is one of the authors!”
She took the stage and how. She took potshots at the publishing industry, she called out the elitism of literary circles. She even made fun of her fellow panelists, all looking on with a combination of embarassed awe. And her book? Let’s just say Lalli is her in page form. In the author’s own words,
“I don’t want to be called the Indian Agatha Christie. Lalli is not anything like Miss Marple. She goes cycling at odd hours of the morning, she scales walls. She’s a sixty-something woman that doesn’t behave like older ladies are supposed to.”
When Kalpana Swaminathan stepped off the stage, I noticed her teeshirt said,
The opposite of Irony is Wrinkly.
I love it. I love her. How can I not? She’s who I want to grow up to be. She is the person who inspired those memes about cackling older women, impatiently amused at how they shock the rest of the world. And the book? It’s all short stories, so there’s less room to develop a complex plot. I have been able to spot the murderer pretty early in every single story so far.
Still I keep going. The writing, like the author herself, grabs you by the neck and demands you pay attention if you’re a human and not a goldfish. It moves faster than you can blink and somehow does so without either the illusion of movement or by distracting you with pretentious words. Lalli is irrepressible. It’s the energy of the person itself that comes through on the page. There’s a magnificent story to get to! And another! And another! What are you doing, man, stop wasting time and hop on to the back of my cycle and let’s go go go!
My favorite story so far is (of course) about a rebel author being harassed by the moral police. The author nicely sets him up to be a windbag male posturing and being a pompous ass while glossing over the everyday mundaneities that his family must endure.
The story is also really courageous in these saffron-tinted times. Lalli as a paper surrogate for Kalpana Swaminathan makes no bones about her contempt for grimy politicians, for the blatant weaponisation of religion in politics and for the complete lack of spirituality in it all. This was the best thing to read when my socials are filled with proudly orange people in a festival of harassment & hatred. This is the kind of book that makes me not care what genre the author writes in. In fact, if she were a chef specialising in bhindi dishes, I would throw away my disdain of the foul vegetable and eat nothing but okhra, ladyfinger day and night.
Reading crime fiction by women authors
Traditional crime fiction has felt a lot like a puzzle; it turns readers into detectives too, playing race with the writer to see if we can spot it before the author shows us the answer. But these books have given me a chance to read differently. I’m observing the fractures in relationships, the internal unsolved wounds inside people, the unreliability of any character, the very womanhood of doing something as essential to life as coping after a murder – collaboratively.
Unlike the classic hard-boiled detective trope, the women in these books aren’t lone wolves solving crimes—they are enmeshed in the worlds they inhabited, complicit in ways that feel real. As a woman relating to other women (even fictional ones), my responses feel intense and rebound on me as much as they impact the people who created them. It has been a challenge to write this post even considering all three authors might read it. At one level, there is the sharam of being read. And then there is the fear of hurting their feelings, they who I respect for breaking this gender barrier. Well, I guess the discussion was never going to be short of bloody.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
Update: Meeti Shroff-Shah (The Death of Kirti Kadakia) read my post and wrote back to me with the following:
“Hi Ramya, it was interesting for me to see that this portrayal of privilege can also be triggering for a reader. I write about this world, not only because the privilege exists, but also to show just how stifling it can be. There is a visceral need amongst these people to keep up appearances. They are conditioned into presenting the perfect facade to the outside world – regardless of cost to their own happiness. There’s a saying in Gujarati that if u can’t afford rouge, give yourself a tight slap but present only a rosy cheek. And that is what I wanted to explore with my series. I hope u do finish the book!
A part of me is whooping that an author read what I’d written and wrote back! Another is intrigued by the deeper motivations for creating a fictional world a certain way and sorely tempted to jump right back into the book. And finally, I am charmed by the empathy that comes before personal feeling in what she says. This is why we need more female authors. Our world needs more empathy & respect and it’s women who are going to have to reshape our narratives for that.