Vaseem Khan

Vaseem Khan (born 1973) is a British writer, author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels – a series of crime novels set in India – featuring retired Mumbai police Inspector Ashwin Chopra and his sidekick, a baby elephant named Ganesha. Khan had won the Shamus Award and the Eastern Eye's Arts Culture & Theatre Awards for Literature.

Biography

Khan was born in the London Borough of Newham, studied at the Coopers' Company and Coborn School in Upminster, Havering, did A-Levels at Newham College of Further Education, before studying Accounting and Finance at the London School of Economics. He then spent a decade on the subcontinent working as a management consultant to an Indian hotel group building environmentally-friendly hotels around the country, called ECOTELS. He returned to the UK in 2006 and has since worked at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science.

The decade that Khan spent in India led to him writing ''The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra''. Khan was offered a four-book contract by Mullholland Books, an imprint of publishers Hodder & Stoughton, for the first books in this series, referred to as the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series.

In January 2016, ''The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra'' was selected for the Waterstones Book Club, and later named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. It was also named as a ''Daily Telegraph'' Pick of the Week (in conjunction with WHSmith), an Amazon Best Debut, and was a top 10 best-seller in The Times Saturday review.

In 2021, Khan was awarded the Sapere Books Historical Dagger Award by the Crime Writers' Association. In May 2023, Khan was elected the chair of the Crime Writers' Association.

Works

''The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra'' is the first novel in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series, in which newly-retired Inspector Chopra investigates the suspicious drowning of a poor local boy. At the same time he comes to grips with the surreal situation of being sent a baby elephant by his long-lost uncle. Published in August 2015, it went on to become a Times best-seller. Khan has stated that his objective with this series was to take readers to the heart of modern India to give them an idea of what India "looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, even tastes like".

The second novel in the series is ''The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown''. The plot of the novel revolves around the theft of the world's most famous diamond – the Koh-i-Noor, originally mined in India before being appropriated by the British and handed to Queen Victoria during the Raj. In the novel the Crown Jewels are brought to India for a special exhibition. A daring robbery sees the Koh-i-Noor stolen and Chopra and Ganesha called in to try and recover the great diamond.

In the third contracted novel in the series ''The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star'' Chopra and Ganesha are on the trail of a kidnapped Indian film actor, and in the fourth ''Murder at the Grand Raj Palace'' they tackle the murder of an American billionaire at India's most iconic hotel. The fifth in the series, ''Bad Day at the Vulture Club'', sees Chopra investigating the death of a wealthy man from the Parsee community. The Parsees do not bury or cremate their dead. They leave them out in stone structures called Towers of Silence for vultures to consume in a process called excarnation.

On his decision to include an elephant as Chopra's sidekick Khan has said: "I thought it would be different and fun to cast an elephant in a crime-fighting role. On a purely practical level elephants possess all the qualities of the best detectives. They're highly intelligent, and have those amazing memories – that's not a myth. They also have a wide range of emotions, which is important to me as a writer because my novel isn't just about the crimes but about the dynamic between Inspector Chopra, this rigid, middle-aged policeman, this baby elephant who he is forced to adopt, and his irrepressible wife, Poppy."

In 2020, ''Midnight at Malabar House'' was published, introducing India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia. The story is set in Bombay, 1950. As India stands on the eve of becoming a republic, Persis is tasked to investigate the murder of senior British diplomat Sir James Herriot. Khan won the Crime Writers Association Historical Crime Dagger award for 2021 for his novel, ''Midnight at Malabar House''.

In 2021, the second novel ''Dying Day'' was published. Set in Bombay, 1950 again one of the world’s great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay’s Asiatic Society for over a century. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on Inspector Persis Wadia’s desk.

Bibliography

Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels
* 2015: ''The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra''
* 2016: ''The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown''
* 2017: ''The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star''
* 2018: ''Murder at the Grand Raj Palace''
* 2019: ''Bad Day at the Vulture Club''

Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novellas
* 2018: ''Inspector Chopra & the Million Dollar Motor Car''
* 2019: ''Last Victim of the Monsoon Express''

Malabar House series
* 2020: ''Midnight at Malabar House''
* 2021: ''The Dying Day''
* 2022: ''The Lost Man of Bombay''
* 2023: ''Death of a Lesser God''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Khan, Vaseem
British male novelists
1973 births
Writers from London
Living people
Alumni of the London School of Economics
21st-century British novelists
21st-century English male writers
British mystery writers
People from the London Borough of Newham
British people of Indian descent
British people of Pakistani descent
People associated with University College London