Book discussion thread: Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh Investigates series

[julesjones]

I've previously reviewed the three books published so far in the Inspector Singh Investigates series by Shamini Flint, but those were reviews that tried to give an idea of what the books were like without significant spoilers. Is anyone interested in spoilerific discussion, since at least one of you has gone out and read the books as a result of my reviews?

A quick summary: Inspector Singh is an overweight, chain-smoking, unfit detective in the Singapore police force. He's very good at catching killers, but he doesn't really fit into the current force culture, and his superiors are only too happy to get this disgrace to the force temporarily out of sight and out of mind by loaning him to the police forces of neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons he's so good at his job is that he works by understanding how and why people behave the way they do -- a Singapore Sikh version of a certain Belgian detective, or a little old lady from St Mary Mead. Singh's his own man, not just a flimsy pastiche of those characters, but he holds the same appeal for a reader.

The books are set in South East Asia, but some aspects of policing are the same the world over. And the setting is written from the inside -- Flint is a lawyer who has worked in both Malaysia and Singapore, and knows whereof she writes.

I picked up the first book from a table in The Works, because the premise of a crime-busting Sikh detective travelling South-East Asia sounded intriguing. The blurb on the book looked worth investing a couple of hours of time, so I bought it, and found a book that certainly had its flaws, but showed a lot of promise. When the author found my review and offered me review copies of the next two books, I was glad to accept. Those books made good on the potential I'd seen in the first, and I'm now eagerly waiting for the fourth book to come out. Some reasons why coming up in the comment thread...

Comments

[julesjones]

I'll start off by copying a comment I made in Stevie Carroll's LJ:

I love that about Inspector Singh too. He is such a grumpy old git, but he's saddened by prejudice. It's a good piece of characterisation as well, since the theme of the series is that he's good at solving murders because he's good at getting inside people's skins and seeing the world the way they do.

Singh can be very misanthropic, and his job makes him cynical about people. But he he also has a great deal of empathy, and is remarkably tolerant of people who aren't like him. This is, of course, one of the ways in which he doesn't fit within the politics of the force, as Singapore is a fairly conservative culture, and Singh tends to the view that as long as people aren't hurting each other he doesn't really care what they do, even if it's not something he personally likes.

There's a particularly good scene showing his empathy in the Bali book, where one of the Australians who has lost a family member sees his turban, assumes he's a Muslim, and abuses him. Singh quite reasonably finds this tiresome; but he also understands the woman's grief and need to lash out, and speaks gently to her, trying to help her.

In the Singapore book, one of the suspects happens to be a distant nephew of Mrs Singh, who has an assignment from the young man's parents back in India to find him a nice Sikh girl amongst the locals. It's really quite ridiculous that a handsome young lawyer with money and prospects hasn't found someone to marry yet. It eventually turns out that the particular secret that this suspect has been trying to hide from the police, especially his relative in charge of the investigation, is that he's not interested in girls. Singh is not happy about the bigoted reaction from his colleagues, and not just because the boy is family. He has to keep his sympathy to himself, because he's still investigating a murder; but when Jagdesh is hospitalised after a suicide attempt, Singh's understanding and sympathy let him get vital information from the man's occasional partner, where his bigoted colleagues would have met a blank wall, or not even realised that there was information to be had.

[(Anonymous)]

I like that scene in Bali too, and I could see what was coming with the nephew, but loved Singh's matter of fact reaction to the big reveal.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

The above was me, by the way.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Definitely interested in a discussion, although I won't be around much until Thursday.