Book Review of Dipy Singh Private Detective by Ketan Joshi
I downloaded Dipy Singh Private Detective by Ketan Joshi only
this morning. By evening I finished the book and decided to write a review –
partly because I like Ketan Joshi’s writings and partly because I think I
should point out a few things that if the author does care for my humble
opinions, could help him improve his writings.
This is the second book by Ketan Joshi that I picked up this
year. The earlier one Three Amigos on Motorcycles was a pretty impressive work
of literature. In fact if you have already finished his Dipy Singh series, you
will definitely see the big leap his writing has taken in Three Amigos. If you
reverse the order then there is a possibility that you may judge the author
harshly.
The first thing you notice in Ketan Joshi’s writings is his
remarkable grip over language. He knows how and when to create humour. Now that
quality alone will make you fall in love with him. Humour – the carefree and extravagant
sort of fun – that you find in his writings is rare. We come accross dark
humours, satires, sarcasms everywhere – and that seems to be normal considering
all sorts of unfortunate things we had to deal with in last decade. Literature
of our times mirrors everything perfectly without bothering to know how much we
are capable to face. This journalistic matter-of-fact way of telling stories
deprives literature of much of its charm. Just when you are about to lose all
hope, writers like Ketan Joshi arrives with their utterly ridiculous,
dumb-and-dumber kind of original fun. It brightens you up, makes you giggle
like crazy. Can one help but adore such writers?
The Adventures of Dipy Singh Private Detective, however hides
most of Ketan Joshi’s art. While reading it I found out a few lines,
paragraphs, that if were written otherwise could substantially improve the
stories. This I am going to discuss now. But first let me tell you what this
book is about. Deepinder Singh Gehlot or in short, Dipy Singh is a private detective.
The writer made Dipy’s acquaintance at a party and became friends. The
Adventure of Dipy Singh Private Detective is a collection of short stories. They
are cases solved by Dipy. He loves Tandoori with beer.
The stories however gave me the impression that they were
hurriedly finished. In the case of the blood bank Vampire the owner of the blood
bank suspects one of his employees, Bhalla to be a Vampire. When Dipy asks why
he hired Bhalla, the answer he came up with is,
Well, I ... I don’t know ... I just thought that he could do the administration and clerical jobs and other odd jobs ... but ...
The same man when Dipy asked him to fire Bhalla said,
On what grounds? If he goes to the courts or to the press, the local corporator ... or anybody at all, I will be permanently disgraced s a complete nutcase.
The two answers somehow don’t go together well. The inherent
fallacy has the risk of being interpreted as a badly finished plot.
In the case of the Tantric dreams, though the culprit was
caught, several things remained unexplained or explained half-heartedly.
And we were even more startled when an answer came ... from the goat!
How the dead goat spoke up, that too in human voice and vernacular
was never explained.
The perpetrator burned one of the victims hand while the
latter was lying in a hospital bed. It was done so perfectly that there was no
trace on the bedsheet, or the shirt the victim was wearing and yet it was
explained later that the culprit,
...probably burnt his hand with acid or some plant extract which causes blisters ... ruthless and cruel ... clever too ... no sign of burns on kurta or bedsheet ...
Simply saying something was ingenious isn’t the same as
explaining it.
In Three Amigos Ketan Joshi was remarkably discreet in
character formation. But then the three friends there and the wife were all
important characters. I think in Dipy Singh he was less focused on the minor characters. There
was nothing distinguishing in their speeches. They all sound the same. For
example, in The case of the Uncatchable Thief, two different characters
described two different safes, placed in two different locations by using the
same phrase – the Huge Bloody Thing. The author has to work on these things.
What I found absolutely unforgivable, however appears in the
last story where the author could find no other solution to the Agatha
Christie’s locked door puzzle and comes up with the logic of teleportation.
What’s worse is the lack of surprise Dipy Singh shows at discovering such a
thing as teleportation. He takes it as if it was an already popular,
nothing-extraordinary method of transport. He says,
The scene that flashed over my eyes had me doubling over with laughter. The sigh of me laughing, and the memory of that day got Dipy laughing too, and for the next few minutes we laughed until I got a stitch in my side.
Fine. But my sufferings became unbearable when after the
thief teleported back to his house, Dipy Singh who was already present there
made him a cup of tea.
After he had calmed down, we chatted about his gift of teleportation that I found very interesting.
So instead of jumping and shouting “Eureka” at the top of his
lungs, Dipy Singh decided the chat because he found the phenomenon of
teleportation interesting. And the thief gave up his life of crime and started
a business of Instant Courier.
And that left me completely shattered.
The book cover of The Adventure of Dipy Singh Private Detective gives you the impression that its an utterly
meaningless, ridiculous comedy. In fact, the book could very well be so. But
the seriousness with which each case starts added to the megalomania of Dipy
Singh made the stories a breed between Sherlock Holmes and The DefectiveDetective by Stephen Leacock. It is a thoroughly enjoyable book and fun to read.
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