Murder under the dreaming spires: Travelogue tangoes with mystery in this ‘destination thriller’
Shashi Tharoor heaped praise on Manjiri Prabhu for ‘exoticising the Orient through intrepid storytelling’. He went on to hail her as one of the first woman exponents of the murder mystery.
For most people, that would be encomiums enough. However, Ms Prabhu went a step further and crafted a genre-defying ‘destination thriller’. This is a type of book that gives you all the information normally found in a travelogue, but spices up the boring parts with murders.
Her latest ‘destination’ is the fabled University of Oxford. So craftily is the plot woven that you begin to believe even the location has had a hand in the crime, and Oxford should consider itself lucky it didn’t get arrested as an accessory after the fact.
ALSO READ | Through My Eyes: Top cop offers a glimpse into the challenges of men in khaki
‘The Grand Oxford Mystery’ is about two elderly Oxonians bound together in a college romance that didn’t get anywhere. Just when the embers seem to be rekindled under strenuous fanning, a venerable university professor ruins the lovey-dovey atmosphere by getting murdered.
Like all good dead people in mystery books, the professor has left behind a clutch of posthumous clues strewn across the campus, so as to give readers a conducted tour of the halls, the terraces and libraries of the centuries-old university. The clues are given in instalments so that the tension is held taut for all 300-odd pages of the book.
There’s also a ticking stopwatch—all the clues have to be discovered and justice delivered before an impending deadline, or else a disaster will befall them. We do not know what kind of disaster it is, but with President Trump not around, it could be much worse than being starved of funds. Other dangers await too: there’s a whiff of the 'Cambridge Five’—five students in the 1930s that turned out to be the most intellectual Russian spies ever.
ALSO READ | Chile, magic & memory: Isabel Allende returns with another finely crafted novel
Manjiri Prabhu has written 22 books, earning for herself the moniker ‘Agatha Christie of Indian fiction’. Unlike seamy murder mysteries, the pages are not littered with blood and gore. Ms Prabhu is elegant (almost antiseptic) when it comes to describing a murder—‘an excruciating blow to the head’ is as far as she is prepared to go.
It makes it seem as if she is narrating an amusing parlour game played to relieve the tedium of a Sunday afternoon. Yet, she sustains the pace with a series of carefully orchestrated events. Her forte is the kind of vivid description that makes you feel you are right on location, and you can’t ask for a more suitable venue than Oxford, with its ‘ochre stone walls, multiple turrets and soaring arches’.
Most people would kill to be able to get to Oxford. You don’t need to go that far. Just solve a murder or two with help from Manjiri Prabhu.
The Grand Oxford Mystery
Author: Manjiri Prabhu
Publisher: Comm Dot Media
Pages: 316
Price: ₹450
Books Review