Preamble
If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
I read this in July last year and have just been very slow in reviewing it. When you’re hunting for it, it’s not to be confused with A Murder on Malabar Hill (featuring a young female lawyer, Perveen Mistry, who solves crimes in 1920s Bombay)!
I enjoy historical mysteries generally, but this is a period that I haven’t read much fiction from or much fiction set in, so it was nice to learn something new while enjoying the narrative.
Set in mid-century India, Midnight is the first in a series (so far of five novels) following Inspector Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective, working out of a police station full of minor misfits and sidelined coppers, and on the night shift, at that. Of course, gender dynamics and postcolonial tension abounds, helping to structure the novel as well as providing some additional jeopardy for Wadia. As in the UK, where women first entered the police service in non-detective support roles centred around female prisoners, women in India also were first employed to deal with the women who might be involved in criminal activity, but came to detective work rather later. Khan draws Wadia skilfully, providing us plenty of her family and personal life as well as the procedural police work itself, so that we can understand the stakes for her in the work.
Set just two years after partition, everyone and everything is political, particularly when the murder victim is English diplomat Sir James Herriot, who is investigating potential crimes committed during partition. So, is the killing politically motivated, or personal? In his range of subjects, Khan draws some interesting characters that reflect the different ways in which people can fit in to the new India, or not, as the case may be.
There is some adventurous pacing that relies on Wadia and a Scotland Yard criminalist (i.e. early forensic tech!), Archie Blackfinch, careering around to unearth the political heart of the mystery. While Blackfinch is the sort of sidekick who might often be found conveniently loitering around in a murder mystery, he does double duty here in the political background of the story: new state bodies and systems are required in the new India, and policing is no different in (apparently) requiring some ‘capacity building’ support, and from where else than England? This, itself, is a source of tension well beyond the usual novelistic grumpiness of a police force required to let a random outsider insert themselves into a case.
Although this lagged ever so slightly at the end, this was a really fun read, and I’m sure I will eventually manage to get a chance to read the other four of these!
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- The Fine Art of Invisible Detection (Robert Goddard)
- The Fraud (Zadie Smith)
- The Picture House Murders (Fiona Veitch Smith)
- Slow Horses (Mick Herron)
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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