London, A UK-based author’s second instalment of an Indian-Irish cosy crime mystery series was launched in London recently, with its India release set for next week.
Paul Waters, from Belfast in Northern Ireland, fell in love with India when he fell in love with his Delhi-born wife Aneysha. He went on to set ‘Murder in Moonlight Square’ in his wife’s city and has now followed up the success of his unusual crime-fighting duo of an Irish nun and Delhi hotel proprietor with ‘Death At the Elephant House’. “In book one, they meet accidentally over a sneaky smoke behind his hotel and get into all sorts of trouble with the police, spies, a disappearing guest and a secret killer while maintaining their sense of humour.
“In book two, the world’s most unlikely crime solving duo returns to figure out a deadly locked room mystery involving one of Delhi’s richest families, a charismatic gangster, a police siege and a cigarette-stealing elephant,” he said.
The storyline and characters of Waters’ mystery series, a sub-genre referred to as cosy crime for their puzzle solving characteristics, draw heavily from reality. His Irish family has links with India through a real-life aunt Agatha, who was a teaching nun who worked across the country. “My wife noticed that in her first posting, my auntie Agatha taught in Pune or Poona as it was then. That’s also where my wife’s mother and her mother’s two sisters went to school, after the family was displaced from what is now Pakistan. After some detective work, we realised that my auntie Agatha taught my wife’s late mother.
She was deemed too “feisty” to stay in Ireland and was shipped off by her order to India, with her final position being Principal of Jesus and Mary College in Delhi.
