Won’t make this a long post (a sluggish Sunday afternoon being better spent in reading the book than writing about it) but another reason I find these stories appealing is that they evoke a very particular mood and milieu, a style of living that I haven’t encountered firsthand but have heard a lot about (thanks to a preponderance of Bong friends). I was particularly taken by the narrative structure of “Quills of the Porcupine” (“Shojarur Kanta”), which intercuts the mystery with observations on caste differences, the alienation inherent in big-city living, and the dual natures of people. In another, Byomkesh lies sprawled on an armchair looking up at the beams on the roof and thinking for 15 minutes before making a fairly commonplace inference.) But on the whole the stories are well plotted, there is an eye for detail and for nuances of character, and some of them are sinister in a way that seem quite at odds with the comfortably bourgeoisie south Calcutta setting. (A letter written in invisible ink is the earthshaking plot twist in one story. Inevitably, these stories have dated to an extent some of the deductions will seem slightly naïve if you’re an experienced reader of detective fiction.
The first two are novella-length, the others are short stories, and they’re all engrossing and fast-paced – though personally I much preferred the two longer ones.īandyopadhyay created Byomkesh Bakshi in 1932, which makes him a forerunner by several decades of that other famous fictional Bengali sleuth, Ray’s Feluda. If you’re looking for some cosy, reasonably undemanding detective stories to fill a lazy summer day, do pick up The Menagerie and other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries, a new translation (by Sreejata Guha) of four of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s stories about the popular amateur detective: “The Menagerie” (which was filmed by Satyajit Ray under its original title Chiriakhana in 1967), “The Quills of the Porcupine”, “The Jewel Case” and “The Will that Vanished”.
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