Last Resort Lalli or the New Age Miss Marple
Shrehya Taneja
Publication: Volume 1 Issue 1
Abstract
The space occupied by female detectives in fiction has formed an important part of the subgenre of Crime Fiction. Looking at the famous fictional female detectives who have captured the reader’s imagination, one is reminded of Christie’s ‘Miss Marple,’ Keene’s ‘Nancy Drew,’ and Heilbrun’s ‘Kate Fansler.’ Moving to the Indian landscape, we are familiar with ‘Byomkesh Bakshi,’ ‘Feluda,’ and ‘Inspector Ghote’ but there are not many female detectives to be mentioned. The lack of representation of an Indian female detective is a lacuna that many authors attempt to bridge like Kalpana Swaminathan, Smita Jain, and Madhumita Bhattacharya. Their creations are positioned within a cultural milieu that acknowledges their debt to the Golden Age Crime Fiction writers posing significant questions. The paper focuses on Swaminathan’s silver haired detective, Last-Resort Lalli. Her fictional creation takes its cue from Christie’s Miss Marple enjoying the authority of experience. The adaptation of this subgenre necessitates a constant engagement with the cultural expectations demanded of an Indian woman in the backdrop of an emerging new economy addressing the cosmopolitan Indian reader. The reader recognizes the manner in which both the genre and the figure of female detective travel from the European epistemological structure. The case she is entrusted with is often related to crumbling matrimony rather than espionage or murder. Can the order be restored after chaos in the post apocalyptic Eden where Eden is a city landscape and the savior a female detective? The paper reflects on these questions through Swaminathan’s novels The Gardener’s Song (2007) and The Secret Gardener (2013), respectively.
Keywords: Indian detective fiction, female detectives, Crime fiction.
Shrehya Taneja (tankoo1992@gmail.com) is a research scholar. Her research interests include Detective Fiction, Cultural Studies and Post-millennial Genre fiction. She holds an M.Phil. in English from University of Delhi, India.