Add to this the tensions remaining from the traditions of the caste system and colonialism, as well as the unique and rich cultural history, and it is easy to see why such novels as A Passage to ...India, The Jewel in the Crown, Kim, Siddhartha, and Life of Pi were highly popular. Last January, the Crime Writers Forum of South Asia (founded only in 2014 by Namita Gokhale and Lady Kishwar Desai) held its third annual Noir Literature Festival in Delhi, featuring author panels such as "Modus Operandi," "Judgment Day," and "She's Sexy When She's Dead," a title that just might be the ultimate noir title. In a classic mystery device, an apparent suicide is revealed as a murder, and her police detective finds himself up against political influence and moneyed obstruction, frequent tropes in Indian crime fiction. Palmyra, Virginia J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schütz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line.
An Indian sheriff!" The commonness of this sort of badfaith story cobbling is why it is surprising to me that the Native American detective seems to be a rather late invention in the mystery and ...really only becomes a distinctive item on bookstore shelves after Tony Hillerman's The Blessing Way (1970) and Dance Hall of the Dead (1973), a multiple award winner. Of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Irish ancestry, eminent Steinbeck and Native American literature scholar Louis Owens also tried his hand at crime fiction with, among others, The Sharpest Sight (1992, which won the French Roman Noir award) and Nightland (1996, which won the American Book Award). Some point to the first Canadian detective novel called November Joe: Detective of the Woods (1913), by big-game hunter and Great War sniper H. Hesketh-Prichard. Since November Joe's "Indianness" is meaningless to the story, several sources say that the earliest may be as late as The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth, published in 1933, the same year that Tonto first began his adventures on radio with the Lone Ranger. Palmyra, Virginia J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schütz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line.
