Detective stories

I think I was in sixth grade when I first read an unabridged Sherlock Holmes' story. I had to look up the words in the dictionary, yes, but that was the beginning of my rendezvous with detectives. Then came the stories of Felu-da which is a part of every Bengali person's growing up, Byomkesh whom I think as my next door neighbor and a little later Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I love them all but I wouldn't take a moment to think who's the best, for me it's no one but Holmes!!

After I started working as a Software Test Engineer and have to depend on developers' mistakes for my bread and cheese, I have grown a knack for details and suspect everything that my common sense detects as out of the ordinary. I follow Byomkesh's idea of "jekhane dekhibe chhai, uraiya dekho tai paileo paite paro amulya ratan". Wherever I see a strange thing in developer's code I poke there. Who knows if it may be a defect! Also, same as detectives, software testers have to suspect all users. We can't say "Oh we expected the user to put in his password here" when hackers get's past a security point. We should have suspected that behavior beforehand and thought of stopping that. So I have thought of detective stories from a different perspective.

There are various types of detective stories. With all due respects to Ms. Christie, even though I enjoy her books a lot (I read Nemesis this weekend) and do think that it needs a lot of "thiking outside the box" to create a detective like Miss Marple, her stories always have a lot of suspects each with motives and opportunities and one of them is the killer. Also, her stories sometime lack information. For example, in "Cat among pigeons" we didn't have enough information about the killer, Ann Shapland. In "Murder in the clouds" I simply don't see how anyone can put on a dentist's robe to pose as a flight attendant, nor can I imagine how in "Sparkling cyanide" she says that if you are sitting at a round table you only know your seat relative to the other people. No way lady, that's not how it works! The Christie novels I like are "Death comes as as the end", "Sleeping murder", "The mirror cracked from side to side" (this is the story on which Rituparno Ghosh made his movie "Shubho mahurat"), "13 at dinner" and a few more...but I do feel that picking from a pool of suspects is quite easy.

About Felu-da, I don't want to really compare him to others. The main reason would be the fact that Felu-da's stories are written for the young. They are interwoven with our growing up days, with summer vacations, with getting the thin hard bound books on birthdays and looking at the illustartions on the covers. Actually, I even used Ray's pictures from Felu-da to practice sketching. My art teacher said they were really great human figure sketches which would make my foundation strong. "Gorosthaney sabdhan" is my favorite. Not just that the plot is awesome, but also because I'm a a fan of Calcutta and of family histories, both. I don't want to watch the movie though. Arnab tried to persuade me to watch it but to not avail. I have a very strong imaginative power and it ticks me off to see a 50-yr old Felu-da. If you scrutinize stories that well, you'll see Felu-da stories don't have a host of suspects. They have very mature plots.

Now to Byomkesh. Saradindu is one of my most most most favorite writers. I need an entire article dedicated to him to say how fond I am of his stories, but for Byomkesh, he's one of the finest detectives. It's just that I can see an inspiration from Holmes somewhere behind his stories that makes him a close second to Holmes. Here comes the difficult to solve plots. Take for example "Seemontoheera". You know who the culprit is, you have permission to search his whole household but you have no clue to where the diamond is! Or consider "Pather kanta", what a fine story!! Byomkesh doesn't have a lot of people to pick and choose from, he has to hit the bull's eye. "Sajarur kanta", "Chiriyakhana" and to some extent "Bahni patanga" are I guess the ones where there are a lot of suspicious people. I don't know which one of Byomkesh stories is my most favorite. "Pather kanta" I super like. "Durgorahasya" might be next. "Chorabali" is awesome. I can't leave out "Agnibaan"...Naah, I should leave this here, no way can I pick out one as the best.

The most difficult stories are where all evidences point towards some one who is not the criminal though. Example, "Arthamanartham" where apparently it couldn't be anyone but Sukumar who killed his uncle or "The beryl coronet" where Arthur was seen with the coronet in his hands. Those ones ARE difficult. It needs a lot of knowledge and confidence on the writer's part to think of and solve something like these.

Why is Homes my favorite though? Firstly because he's the pioneer of modern detectives and also because Conan Doyle has a way of providing every single piece of information to the reader. Be in the form of diagrams or floor plans or whatever he thinks he can elaborate with. (Example, "The dancing men") If you have Holmes' brains you can try to solve them yourself! My most favorite Holmes' story is "The Hound of the Baskervilles". The mystery, the people, the family legend and the surroundings create a strange mysterious atmosphere in the countryside. To top it is the family portrait! Oh, if there was only one detective story in the world and that was "The Hound of the Baskervilles", I think it would have been enough for all!!

On a different note, last Friday we were involved in a hit-and-run accident when a guy rammed into our car from behind and then fled while we were calling 911. I had to remember his 7 digit (and letter) license plate number and guess what came to my mind? Felu-da's suggestion! Break the number up into two parts and it's easier to remember two blocks of 3 or 4 digits (or letters) than the whole thing together. Well, that hit-and-run guy is in jail now so you know the advantages of reading detective stories :-)