Anita Ray – Ladies of Mystery

I’m in the middle of the sixth book in the Anita Ray series, which is set in a tourist hotel in a South Indian resort. Over the years the area has grown from a tiny fishing village with a few hotels just up the coast to one of the most popular destinations for Westerners eager for the sun and sand, not to mention the sunsets and the fishing boats bobbing on the horizon at night. I know the area well, having visited it for the first time in 1976 and several times in the 2000s.

The pathways laid out in the early years are now paved walkways through marsh with little pools covered with lily pads. The paths have been widened in some areas to allow shop owners to hang out rows of brightly colored silk saris and blouses. When I think there’s no more room for another restaurant or shop, I turn a corner and spot five square feet turned into an open-air cafe with the owner stirring a pot on a two-burner cooktop, ready to serve the foreigners sitting on stools before a board table. The food is good, the price is right, and the cook’s son works in one of the high-end hotels. Much of Kovalam has spread on what was once paddy fields that came down to a low berm fronting the beach. All those are gone, and only the rare private home remains, hidden away beneath tall palms.

A reader often tells me they know “exactly where I am” in an Anita Ray story, and that’s because I do too. I have a strong sense of direction in India (and elsewhere), a deep understanding of India (after years of graduate school), and a personal love of the region. All of that informs the Anita Ray stories. What I don’t have is a sense of place in any story if I haven’t been there, walked through a public park, found a typical cafe for the area, and visited a municipal building—perhaps a library or town hall. I can make up a lot of it, but I need to experience the “feel” of the place.

The Joe Silva series, in seven books, takes place in a small coastal New England town. I know these towns well, having grown up in one. The rocky coast speaks of the “flinty” Yankee, and the harsh winds call to mind the ever-present threat of hurricanes and other storms. Winters may be changing because of climate disruptions, but the birds still come, the land demands careful attention, and life for the fisherman is never easy.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading crime fiction is the other landscapes I get to explore. I’ve been through the Southwest and lived for a brief time in Tucson, so I appreciate any writer who can take me into that world of mountains and deserts, long straight roads, and small adobe houses with gravel yards. The openness of Montana and Wyoming brings out the best in some writers, and I look forward to their stories and landscapes.

Regardless of where we grew up or now live, we are creatures of our environment, and the best fiction uses that sense of place, what is distinctive and unique about one location, to propel the characters and their story. This, for me, is the reward of a reading a novel with a rich, fully developed setting. I come to understand both people and place, and know a part of the world I may never visit a little better.

After publishing the first four Anita Ray mysteries, my publisher ended its mystery line. For many writers the transition to being a hybrid author was easy, but for me it was fraught with frustrations. I moved on to writing another series based in the US and not South India, and limited my work on the India series to putting the first three books into trade paperbacks. That’s about to change.

The fifth Anita Ray has been sitting on my desk (almost literally) for over a year while I focus on other stories (short and novel length), but the time has come. In Sita’s Shadow continues the story of Anita and her Auntie Meena and their hotel guests, who arrive as a large tour (large for Hotel Delite) and take over the little converted home.

Anita Ray and her aunt have a small group of devoted followers who occasionally ask me about the next book. I reply as any ambivalent writer might, mentioning a work in progress, other demands, and lots of mumbling. But the time has come and my ambivalence is once again being challenged.

I am not Indian. My love affair with Asia, and India in particular, began when I was young, a preteen, and continued through high school, college, and into graduate school. I was fortunate enough to live there for a year in 1976 and again in 1981-1982, while writing my dissertation and later doing research. With a PhD in Sanskrit and Indian studies, I’m always eager to learn ore. I’ve returned for monthlong visits almost every year since 1999, but that stopped in 2014 for family medical reasons.

In the advancing twenty-first century, writers are less likely to tell a story through the mind and heart of a character outside their own personal history and ethnic experience. This is unfortunate because the imagination opens doors—it doesn’t close them—to our understanding of the human experience, and the more we stretch ourselves, the more we grow and the more we have to share with others. When I’m reading a well-written and well-thought-out mystery, I never think about who the author is in relation to the cultural identity of the protagonist or any other character in the story. The story is all that matters to me.

By this spring Anita Ray will once again be chasing down a murderer at Hotel Delite (really, it’s a wonder they still have any business at all, considering the body count) and coping with Auntie Meena’s anxieties over her niece’s unmarried state and shameful obsession with murder.

As the TV announcer used to say, Stay tuned. There’s more to come.