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A review by cardica
The Dying Day by Vaseem Khan
5.0
This is Herds bringing you our 4th place contender for the greatest novel of all time. At least for this year. At least in murder mystery. Well, at least on Death of the Reader. I bet you’re just dying for me to stop this bit and so is the book The Dying Day by Vaseem Khan! Very clever.
The Dying Day is a master class in puzzle construction, containing within its leaves the most devilish historical maze that I’ve had the pleasure of solving this year. As I was the rookie when we covered the book early on this year I was able to grab it by the proverbial horns and indulge in Vaseem Khan’s love of historical trivia, brain-teasers, and Indian architecture. We once again find ourselves swept up in the arms of Bombay, modernly known as Mumbai, where we follow the footsteps of Persis Wadia, a police detective stationed at the much maligned Malabar House, where all of the problem children of the police force are sent to wile away their days with bit cases and one false move will send all of their careers careening off a cliff.
Persis herself is a fictional creation and stands in 1950’s India as the country’s first female police detective. Persis herself is only concerned with the job, with chasing bad guys and saving the day where she can. She has spent hours and hours poring over the books in her father’s bookshop, which makes her the perfect mouthpiece when Khan wants to pour forth trivia about the city and its inhabitants. But Persis herself is the subject of several terrible conflicts that each pull her in different directions. She is attracted to a British forensic scientist named Archie Blackfinch, who is a lovable, intelligent, clumsy and sometimes oblivious man who her father disapproves of as a match. Persis also finds herself at the centre of the Indian feminist movement, throughout the story being recognised at key moments as ‘that’ police detective who girls all around the country can aspire to be. Persis of course, despises this narrative and just wants to be left alone. She doesn’t want to give inspirational speeches, to inspire, at least not on that scale. She doesn’t particularly want to stand out from the crowd, but just to be treated the same as all of her colleagues. A battle that she fights every single day even as she outclasses all of her fellow detectives as the case winds on. It is the push and pull between modernity and tradition, as well as Persis’ contradicting motivation to achieve things outside of her status as an Indian woman in the 1950s while not appearing particularly special, which drives her character.
There are more material obstacles in the way, the aforementioned puzzles can only be described as a treasure hunt spanning the city of Bombay, when Persis is called up to the plot she is taken into supreme confidence of the Asiatic society, where it is explained that the society’s 600 year old copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy has been stolen away from them, and not only that but their head curator has vanished. There seems to be no trail at all to latch onto, but then Persis stumbles upon an obscure clue, and then another and another, she is tasked along with the reader with decoding ciphers and analyzing literary references, connecting the dots across time and space in order to go from place to place gathering more clues and finally uncovering… whatever lies at the end of the rainbow.
Suffice to say that the construction of these puzzles is ingenious, with safeguards being put in along the way to ensure that only the most dedicated of followers will reach the end of Khan’s wild ride. I really enjoyed the whimsy of a proper riddle mystery in modern crime fiction, as it is a habit that has lost its style over time, paving the way for crime fiction that is more focused on material puzzles with showy explanations or Mafia-style whodunnits. It was refreshing to watch Vaseem Khan indulge in this art of riddle-making, and he has clearly taken a lot of time testing and finetuning his riddles to be finely solvable, although I will admit that having access to modern internet services made it a little easier for me than for Persis, who had to travel along using naught but the books she had read as a young girl.
The whole thing is nestled within a context of historical conflict, race and class and sex all play a part in the darker parts of the novel, with the text going so far as to describe the horrors of holocaust survivors. I would not say that this is the darkest novel that I’ve ever read in my life, but there is a level of due caution owed to anyone who wants to give it a go. I would highly recommend this story for the puzzle alone and I look forward to seeing what other Janus-like machinations of murder mystery that Khan can manipulate in the next installment of Malabar House.
The Dying Day is a master class in puzzle construction, containing within its leaves the most devilish historical maze that I’ve had the pleasure of solving this year. As I was the rookie when we covered the book early on this year I was able to grab it by the proverbial horns and indulge in Vaseem Khan’s love of historical trivia, brain-teasers, and Indian architecture. We once again find ourselves swept up in the arms of Bombay, modernly known as Mumbai, where we follow the footsteps of Persis Wadia, a police detective stationed at the much maligned Malabar House, where all of the problem children of the police force are sent to wile away their days with bit cases and one false move will send all of their careers careening off a cliff.
Persis herself is a fictional creation and stands in 1950’s India as the country’s first female police detective. Persis herself is only concerned with the job, with chasing bad guys and saving the day where she can. She has spent hours and hours poring over the books in her father’s bookshop, which makes her the perfect mouthpiece when Khan wants to pour forth trivia about the city and its inhabitants. But Persis herself is the subject of several terrible conflicts that each pull her in different directions. She is attracted to a British forensic scientist named Archie Blackfinch, who is a lovable, intelligent, clumsy and sometimes oblivious man who her father disapproves of as a match. Persis also finds herself at the centre of the Indian feminist movement, throughout the story being recognised at key moments as ‘that’ police detective who girls all around the country can aspire to be. Persis of course, despises this narrative and just wants to be left alone. She doesn’t want to give inspirational speeches, to inspire, at least not on that scale. She doesn’t particularly want to stand out from the crowd, but just to be treated the same as all of her colleagues. A battle that she fights every single day even as she outclasses all of her fellow detectives as the case winds on. It is the push and pull between modernity and tradition, as well as Persis’ contradicting motivation to achieve things outside of her status as an Indian woman in the 1950s while not appearing particularly special, which drives her character.
There are more material obstacles in the way, the aforementioned puzzles can only be described as a treasure hunt spanning the city of Bombay, when Persis is called up to the plot she is taken into supreme confidence of the Asiatic society, where it is explained that the society’s 600 year old copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy has been stolen away from them, and not only that but their head curator has vanished. There seems to be no trail at all to latch onto, but then Persis stumbles upon an obscure clue, and then another and another, she is tasked along with the reader with decoding ciphers and analyzing literary references, connecting the dots across time and space in order to go from place to place gathering more clues and finally uncovering… whatever lies at the end of the rainbow.
Suffice to say that the construction of these puzzles is ingenious, with safeguards being put in along the way to ensure that only the most dedicated of followers will reach the end of Khan’s wild ride. I really enjoyed the whimsy of a proper riddle mystery in modern crime fiction, as it is a habit that has lost its style over time, paving the way for crime fiction that is more focused on material puzzles with showy explanations or Mafia-style whodunnits. It was refreshing to watch Vaseem Khan indulge in this art of riddle-making, and he has clearly taken a lot of time testing and finetuning his riddles to be finely solvable, although I will admit that having access to modern internet services made it a little easier for me than for Persis, who had to travel along using naught but the books she had read as a young girl.
The whole thing is nestled within a context of historical conflict, race and class and sex all play a part in the darker parts of the novel, with the text going so far as to describe the horrors of holocaust survivors. I would not say that this is the darkest novel that I’ve ever read in my life, but there is a level of due caution owed to anyone who wants to give it a go. I would highly recommend this story for the puzzle alone and I look forward to seeing what other Janus-like machinations of murder mystery that Khan can manipulate in the next installment of Malabar House.