the force of uncountable thought

While on the topic of Genre Mystery I also want to write up Nev Marsh's Murder in Old Bombay, a book marketed and titled as mystery-qua-mystery that I do not think really succeeds as either a mystery or a romance. However! It absolutely nails it as a kind of genre that we don't have as much anymore as a genre but that I really unironically love: picaresque adventure through a richly-realized historical milieu in which our protagonist happens by chance to stumble into, across, around, and through various significant events.

(I said this to genarti, and she said, 'that kind of book absolutely does still exist,' and okay, true, yes, it does, but it doesn't exist as Genre! it gets published as Literary Fiction and does not proliferate in mass-market paperback and mass-market paperback is where I want to be looking for it.)

Murder in Old Bombay is set in 1892 and focuses on Number One Sherlock Holmes Fan Captain Jim Agnihotri, an Anglo-Indian Orphan of Mysterious Parentage who while convalescing in hospital becomes obsessed with the unsolved murders of two local Parsi women -- a new bride and her teenaged sister-in-law -- who fell dramatically out of a clock tower to their deaths.

Having left the British Army, and finding himself somewhat at loose ends, Captain Jim goes to write an article about the murder and soon finds himself engaged as private detective to the grieving family. In the course of trying to solve the mystery, he falls in love with the whole family -- including and especially but not exclusively the Spirited Young Socialite Daughter -- and also wanders all around India bumping into various Battles, Political Intrigues and High-Tension Situations.

Why do I say the mystery does not work? Well, this is the author's first book, and you can sort of tell in the way the actual clues to the mystery become assembled: a lot of, 'oh, I picked up this piece of paper! conveniently it tells me exactly what I need to know!' and 'I went to the this location and the first person I saw happened to be the person I was looking for, and we fell immediately into conversation and he told me everything!' You know, you can see the strings.

Why do I say the romance does not work? Well, it's the most by-the-numbers relationship in the book ... Diana has exactly all the virtues that you'd expect of a Spirited Young Parsi Socialite from 1892 written in 2020, and lacks all of the vices that you'd expect likewise. Jim thinks she's the bees' knees, but alas! he is a poor army captain of mysterious parentage and class and community divide them. Every time they even come close to actually talking about their different beliefs and prejudices the book immediately pulls back and goes Look! she's so Spirited! It's fine.

However, the portrait of place and time is so rich and fun -- Nev Marsh talks a bit in the afterword about how much the central family and community in question draws on her own family history, and she is clearly having a wonderful time doing it. The setting feels confident in a way that plot doesn't quite, and the setting is unusual and interesting enough to find in an English-language mystery that this goes a long way for me. And, structurally, although the twists involving the Mystery were rarely satisfying to me, I loved it every time historical events came crashing into the plot and forced Captain Jim to stop worrying about the mystery for a few chapters and have some Historical Adventure instead. My favorite portion of the book is the middle part, which he spends collecting a small orphanage's worth of lost children and then is so sad when it turns out most of them do have living parents and he has to give them back. I'm also sad that you had to give the orphans back, Captain Jim.