Brian Stoddart is Professor Emeritus at La Trobe University where he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) and as Vice-Chancellor. He took his first two degrees at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand where he first became interested in India, then completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia that looked at the rise of nationalism in south India. Along with his work on India, Brian has been a pioneering writer in sports culture and has produced books on Australian sport, Caribbean cricket and other related subjects. In addition, Brian Stoddart writes the Superintendent Le Fanu crime fiction series set in British India. A Madras Miasma and The Pallampur Predicament attracted excellent reviews and recognition while the third, A Straits Settlement, was longlisted for the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for best New Zealand crime novel.
In A Straits Settlement, the third installment of the Chris Le Fanu Mystery series, the intrepid superintendent is promoted to Inspector-General of Police in 1920s Madras, which proves to be more boring than he had envisaged. Instead of pushing papers across his desk, Le Fanu focuses on the disappearance of a senior Indian Civil Service officer and an apparently unrelated murder. As the two incidents intertwine, the world-weary detective is drawn into the worlds of indentured labor recruitment and antiquities theft.
Brian Stoddart stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and research his novels:
Looking For Le Fanu
When the first book in the Chris Le Fanu series appeared, many readers loved its atmospherics of 1920s Madras in colonial India, and the city itself being as much a character as the protagonist and his colleagues on both sides of the crime fence. Even the Madras/Chennai media critics thought I had it “right”, a source of great satisfaction.
All those readers marvelled at the research behind the book and its successors, wondering how I had done it all.
Well, I cheated, in a sense.
I began writing, badly, at school in New Zealand, then went to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch to become an historian. Two things that happened back then now mark the Le Fanu series. First, I began re-reading all my sports books as an historian, realising that since the later nineteenth century sport has had a deep and meaningful impact on life globally. That began my pioneering sports history and culture work, but also determined that Le Fanu be a golfer and one of his assistants a cricketer. They reference that intellectual journey.
The second impact was even bigger. In first year I took a course in Pacific and Asian History at its first time of offering. That began a lifelong fascination with Asia. Then I took a specialist intensive course on modern India with Ian Catanach, one of those teachers and mentors who change your life. That led to a Masters degree, a fixation with India, and a high school teaching job. A year later Ian engineered a PhD scholarship for me at the University of Western Australia where I began researching the growth of nationalist politics in south India.
That research put me physically into what was then still called Madras, now renamed Chennai, and indirectly began the Le Fanu story thread. By the time I got there, I “knew” the city, its suburbs, streets, highlights and lowlights because I had studied it so closely. When I got off the ship in the Port of Madras, I knew where to go despite never having been there before. Years later I had the same sensation in Venice, “knowing” the place simply from having read Donna Leon.
I spent months then, over time, years in the Madras archives opposite Egmore Railway Station, ransacking files that recounted clashes between nationalists and police, and the ruminations of British Raj officials trying to handle it all. By definition I learned about police processes, methods, thinking and organisation in the British India context. That included the evolving, difficult relations between European officers and Indian other ranks.
Fortuitously, the archival work was supplemented by an important personal one. By complete chance the patriarch in the house where I stayed turned out to have been one of the first Indian Inspectors-General of Police in post-Independence Madras, and began his career during the period I was studying. So every night I returned to the house, sat outside and discussed the files I had been reading while he reminisced about being amidst the action.
My thesis was not about the police but I read everything possible on the Indian Police Service, an academic colleague wrote a book on the Madras Presidency police service that graced my shelves alongside a growing line of Indian police histories and autobiographies.
Then I went off and write about sport but retained the interest in India. A string of academically-oriented works followed, but that police interest remained while I read all the crime fiction I could for fun. Eventually I wrote the biography of an Indian Civil Service maverick, something I thought I would never do. Then came a memoir of living in Damascus just before the start of the present troubles, another literary form I had thought beyond me.
I never thought to write fiction, either, but with time to spare on foreign assignment in Cambodia, instead of reading crime fiction I decided to write some, so Le Fanu emerged.
At one level I followed that rubric of “write what you know”. I had always considered India a great potential crime fiction site for both historical and contemporary settings. All that research from all those archives and conversations was still sitting there, I “knew” Madras. My Indian Civil Service biography sprang the idea of having someone “odd” as protagonist to set up tensions and complexities. A Le Fanu had been in the Indian Civil Service in Madras during the nineteenth century and, of course, there was the twist provided by Sheridan Le Fanu who had rivalled Edgar Alan Poe as a mystery writer. Besides, a Le Fanu had also played rugby for England, so there was another strand.
While I returned physically to Madras, as I still call the place, to “see” it again as a crime setting, the Le Fanu cases, locations, combatants and all the rest were just there waiting to be disinterred. Some of the characters are even real historical ones, while the main “fictionalised” ones all have people and personalities discovered long ago lurking in behind.
Strictly speaking, then, years of research sits behind Chris Le Fanu. But the passage of time has allowed me to re-approach that research more dispassionately, allowing the story and stories to take precedence rather than that research. As people say, the biggest problem is that having done all that “research” you feel compelled to use it. That is less of a problem for me now because even though I am revisiting it, the research has settled in my mind.
The great bonus? A lot more people like Le Fanu than read the thesis on which he is based!
You can learn more about the author and his books (both fiction and nonfiction) via his website or follow him on Facebook and Twitter. His crime novels are available from Crimewave Press and all major booksellers.
Terrific journey and one helluva description of it, Brian.
Posted by: Bernard Whimpress | October 28, 2017 at 01:20 PM