Byomkesh Bakshi (2): Picture Imperfect and Other Mysteries

Classic tales of crime detection featuring Byomkesh Bakshi, the master inquisitor. Written long before Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries heralded a new era in Bengali popular fiction . Set in the old-world Kolkata, three stories featuring the astute investigator and his chronicler friend Ajit are still as gripping and delightful as when they first appeared.

Byomkesh’s world, peopled with wonderfully delineated characters and framed by a brilliantly captured pre-Independence urban milieu, is fascinating because of its cotemporary flavour, In the first story, Byomkesh works undercover to expose an organized crime ring trafficking in drugs. In the ’Gramophone Pin Mystery’, he must put his razor-sharp intellect to good used to unearth the pattern behind a series of bizarre roadside murders. In ’Clalamity Strikes’, the ace detective is called upon to investigate the strange and sudden death of a girl in a neighbour’s kitchen, In the next story, he has to lock horns with an old enemy who has vowed to kill him with an innocuous but deadly weapon. And, in ’ Picture Imperfect’, Byomkesh unravels a complex mystery involving a stolen group photograph, an amorous couple, and an apparently unnecessary murder.

Born in 1899 in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay started his literary career by writing poems when he was a student in Vidyasagar College, Calcutta. Subsequently, he studied law, and then dedicated himself to writing. By 1932, when the first Byomkesh mystery appeared, he was already an established writer. He went on to become a popular and renowned writer of ghost stories, historical romances and children’s fiction in Bengali. He was the recipient of the Rabindra Purashkar in 1967 for his novel Tungabhadrar Tirey. He also received several other awards before his death in 1970.