Quest of crime writer to devise detective puzzler

WHEN author Vaseem Khan was assigned a mission to write a book about Q, the tech whizz behind James Bond’s ingenious spy gadgets, the result was Quantum of Menace, a puzzle-packed detective story.

He will be talking about the book, which is out next month, at this year’s Henley Literary Festival.

Having been booted out of MI6, Q returns to his home town of Wickstone-on-Water. His childhood friend, quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving him a cryptic note…

As Q investigates, can he find out what happened, even as danger draws near?

Vaseem, who lives in London with his wife, Nirupama, says: “I was approached by Ian Fleming’s trust through their publishing arm a couple of years ago to write a series featuring Q.

“They had read some of my Malabar House novels, they liked those books, and what they were looking for was something similar in vein.

“They didn’t want another spy series because they’ve got that with James Bond. What they wanted were well-crafted mysteries with some dry humour and a focus on the puzzle and the intellectual side of the mystery, which is what we associate with Q, him being a scientist and a great intellect.

“It was a great honour to be asked but I hesitated for a bit because people are so wedded to this iconic character.

“In the end I agreed, with a couple of conditions: one was that I would be able to write my version of Q and my second was that I would like James Bond to make a cameo.

“I didn’t think that they would allow me to do that, but they did, and so he does.

“It was an emotional moment for me, when I was writing the scene between Bond and Q, and it’s quite a serious scene and I had to stop, because I thought, this is crazy. There you are, a British Asian who has grown up watching James Bond, always wanting to be a writer, writing officially a book featuring James Bond and Q — it’s the stuff of dreams.” As a young writer, Vaseem found inspiration in the country of his parents’ birth. I lived in India for 10 amazing years in my twenties. Frankly speaking, I wouldn’t be a writer today without that as it was only after I lived in India and wrote a book set there that I was finally published.

“I was born in the UK but my parents were from the subcontinent and I grew up with very much an Asian culture in the house but not really knowing much about India herself.

“I’d never been there personally and it was only when I was 23 and I was working as a management consultant and my boss got a massive contract in India. We went out there for three months and ended up staying 10 years.

“This was when India was changing massively due to globalisation and I saw all of that first-hand living in Bombay, as locals call it, but Mumbai, as it’s now known.

“I wrote The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, the first of the Baby Ganesh novels, after I’d returned from India to live in England again and that was the book that got me a publishing deal.

“It’s set in modern Mumbai, a middle-aged policeman forced into early retirement has to solve one last case after he sheds the uniform but at the same time inherits a baby elephant.

“I was astonished when I got a book deal and then I wrote five books in that series. I got more interested in Indian history and then I went to my publisher and said I’d like to write a series set in 1950 in Bombay, because I want to look at how the British time ended and then how Indians took over and reacted and transformed their country and that’s where Midnight at Malabar House, the first in the Malabar House series, came about.”

Vaseem and Nirupama have been to Henley Literary Festival before.

“I met my wife in Bombay and then dragged her back to the UK for which she’s never forgiven me, mainly because of the weather. The last time I came to Henley, my wife came and she thought it was one of the prettiest towns that she’d seen since coming to England.”

A previous chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, Vaseem says that readers of Quantum of Menace will find parallels in his latest Malabar House novel.

“City of Destruction is the fifth in the series, and these books feature India’s first and only female police detective, Inspector Persis Wadia. She is working with an English forensic scientist named Archie Blackfinch who’s been sent to help set up Bombay’s first forensic science lab. It begins with a bang — literally — when an assassin tries to kill the new defence minister in India and Persis stops him by shooting him dead but before he dies, he whispers something to her.

“She ends up in Delhi, the old ancient capital of India, and she ends up crossing paths with MI6, who happen to be in India in Delhi advising the Indian government.

“With Quantum of Menace, there’s just been such a groundswell of interest in what I might do with Q, I think there was just this feeling that if ever a character was created to intellectually solve mysteries, it is Q.”

l Henley Literary Festival presents Vaseem Khan: Q at the Relais Henley on Tuesday, October 7 at 6pm. Vaseem will be in conversation with James Scudamore. Tickets cost £12.50 adults. Quantum of Menace is published on Thursday, October 23. For more information, visit henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk or vaseemkhan.com