![]() “We thought: why should we compete against each other? Why not send in one story?” recalls Suresh, when we meet them in their Adyar apartment complex. ![]() When the time came to apply to a short-story contest hosted by Kalki in 1976, the friends demurred. They were students of Presidency College, Madras, when they met, both drawn to writing and not the clockwork inevitability of a nine-to-five job. The city has been an essential element in Suba’s stories. “These writers shake up your notion that Chennai is an ultra-conservative, docile town they show you a city steeped not only in tradition but also in crime!” says Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, editor of Blaft, the publishing house behind The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Volume I, which provided much-needed shlock and awe to the English reading world in 2008. Like in many other cultures, Tamil crime fiction drew on the energy of a fast-moving, unequal city, caught in several time zones simultaneously. The crime novel brought with it the frisson of desire, “modern” men who smoke and fight, women who wear Western clothes and practise karate chops, even if they are often cut to size by cheesy, snarky sexism. Till then, Tamil readers been fed a diet of chaste, domestic stories printed in “family magazines like Kalki and Kumudham. ![]() ![]() Their stories were serialised in magazines, printed as monthly novels, and devoured by a people on the move. Suba, along with writers like Rajesh Kumar and Pattukottai Prabhakar - and before them, Sujatha - was a part of the explosion of Tamil crime writing in the 1970s and 1980s. Stranger things have happened in Tamil noir. ![]() This is a story about stuffed birds and suicide missions. A proposed railway line threatens to displace people and memories. In Narendran Jakkirathai! (Look Out, Narendran!), which was published in September 1987, Madras is a city growing at a clip, swallowing up nearby villages as it expands. That question leads the sleuths of the Eagle Eye detective agency - Narendran and his deputy, Vaijayanthi - on the trail of a man who is setting off explosives in police stations and has threatened to blow up the Taj Mahal. ![]()
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