Tarquin Hall is a British author and journalist.
He has written six crime novels featuring Vish Puri (The Case of the Missing Servant, 2009; The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, 2010; The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, 2012; The Case of the Love Commandos, 2013; The Case of the Reincarnated Client, 2019; and The Case of the Elusive Bombay Duck, 2025). As part of this series, he has also written The Delhi Detective’s Handbook (2017).
Tarquin’s books include three works of non-fiction: Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits: Adventures of an Under-age Journalist (1996); To the Elephant Graveyard: A True Story of the Hunt for a Man-killing Elephant (2000); and Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End (2005).
Tarquin started as a freelance journalist and photographer in Afghanistan, Pakistan and East Africa. As a roving Senior Producer for Associated Press TV, he was posted in Iraq, Rwanda, Angola and the US and was based in India for ten years. He has also worked for the BBC World Service.
Talking About Books asked Tarquin about his Vish Puri novels and his career as a journalist.
TAB: Where did the idea for the Vish Puri novels come from?
TQ: It all started when I saw a short feature in an Indian newspaper about private detectives being used by middle-class parents to investigate prospective brides and grooms for their sons and daughters—a new twist for the arranged marriage tradition. I mentioned the piece to one of my wife’s cousins who is from Jammu and was unmarried at the time, and happened to be sitting across from me at breakfast when I was living in Delhi. As it turned out she had been investigated a few times. Private detectives had called up her work colleagues to ask about her habits and personality, to check on her qualifications and job status—and to also ask about her looks, whether she was of “fair complexion”, this being a big plus as in the marriage market. One private detective had even asked one of her colleagues to bring her out in front of the company’s building during her lunch break so that a potential groom could drive past and get a look at her!
So I jumped on the story and found a couple of real-life Delhi detectives who were doing this kind of work, and did extensive interviews with them for a feature for the Sunday Times in the UK. What struck me most was the range of cases they had worked on—everything from murders and fraud to really outlandish cases, like one that involved a kidnapped pet monkey. To be an effective detective in India, I realized, you have to be incredibly adaptable, wily, extraordinarily streetwise, able to read an incredibly varied ancient cultural landscape, and navigate constant unpredictability and quite a bit of corruption.
I guess it was then that I started to think that writing detective novels set in modern India would be a brilliant way of exploring today’s India, but crucially with a certain amount of humour. This is was important to me because I’ve always found that Indians have a great sense of humour—especially in the north, they’re constantly ribbing one another. To write some foreign correspondent-type critique on the economics, politics and religion of the place was best left to others.
TAB: You capture India so well in your books that I actually thought you were Indian. How did you do that?
TQ: Ha ha, well, that’s quite hard for me to answer, to be honest. I suppose I have spent a lot of time living in South Asia—around 12 years when you put it all together, and I’ve learned a fair amount about the place. As a journalist, I covered a lot of different stories and travelled extensively throughout India. I love the country and I love details, and I tend to store them away a bit like a magpie stores shiny objects. I think what has probably helped the most, however, has been my marriage. My wife of 25 years is from an Indian family, they’re Punjabis from Jammu and Delhi mostly. I think this has helped me appreciate that if you want to try to understand India you really have to understand how the mindset is completely moulded by the family dynamic. Most Westerners, though perhaps not the Italians, find this pretty hard to grasp: the idea that you are completely tied emotionally to your family, that pretty much every decision you make is done pretty much by committee. We in the West today find that prospect quite stifling, and it can be up to a point. But Indians, let’s say all South Asians in fact, would not have it any other way. Family members expect to be around one another 24/7 and involved in one another’s lives. Crucially, this means that the age hierarchy is fully intact, something we comprehensively rejected in the West; and that has a profound impact on the way Indians go about their daily lives and how ultimately the place operates. When you couple that with a society that maintains an out-and-out belief in the divine, in whatever shape or form, you have a culture that’s absolutely fascinating to explore.
TAB: You use the Vish Puri novels to talk about issues, such as what happened during the Partition between India and Pakistan in The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, and the plight of housemaids in The Case of the Missing Servant. How do you select and research these issues?
TQ: It’s really important to me that each book continues to explore modern Indian culture—for the reasons I’ve just given you. I’ve never been solely interested in writing crime novels or mysteries for the sake of weaving together a sensational plot. It’s Indian culture, with all its colour and variety and extraordinary history that keeps me engaged—and of course, the people, the incredible characters you meet. Whenever I come across something that fascinates me, I try to find a way to weave it in to one of the books. In fact, that’s my starting point. So, for example, when I read about the women who crossed the borders created in 1947 to partition India and Pakistan, to locate young girls and women who had been separated from their Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families—a good many of them were kidnapped or held against their will by all sides—I used the history as the foundations for Vish Puri 3, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken.
Similarly, I had long been interested in the Rationalists who tackle fraudulent godmen in India, so I made one of them the victim of a sensational murder in The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing. Ditto with The Case of the Love Commandos, which explored mixed faith relationships and how controversial they remain. In my latest, The Case of the Elusive Bombay Duck, I wanted Puri to come to London where he has to deal with his NRI[1] relatives who have lived outside of India for decades, in particular, his nephew Jags whose English and general attitude he struggles to comprehend.
TAB: You had a really interesting career before you started writing fiction. I’d like to ask you about your most short-lived job, as a cowboy in Texas. How did that happen and what was it like?
TQ: Oh, gosh, where to start? I’ll need to keep this brief because I could talk all day… Basically I decided not to go to university, I wanted to get out into the world and explore it, to fully engage with life. So I headed first to the USA when I was just shy of 19. I worked as a bellhop in a 5-star hotel in Manhattan; and after that got a job on a cutting horse[2] ranch in west Texas. The pay was terrible, but it was amazing—for a few months I was completely immersed in cowboy life. I had to ride cutting horses from dusk to dawn, herd and brand cattle, muck stalls, go to weekend roundups, and hunt rattlesnakes. I bunked with a young cowboy called Rowdy. Sometimes we’d get his rifle and shoot tin cans. And sometimes on a Friday night we’d go to Sweetwater, the nearest town. Basically, there wasn’t much to do apart from drive up and down “the drag” and stop at drive-in burger joints, trying to meet nice Texan girls who were also driving up and down in pickup trucks. We never did have any success with the girls unfortunately. But the whole experience was great fun. I think if you’ve grown up watching a lot of Hollywood cinema, as I have, being in America feels like you’re on set and starring in your own movie the whole time.
TAB: As a journalist, you were in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of the Soviets and the ensuing civil war, in Iraq during the Turkish invasion, and in Rwanda during the genocide. Could you share some of your most memorable experiences as a journalist?
TQ: Wow that could take some time. I went to Afghanistan just after the Soviets withdrew. That was 1989. I went there from the USA. Well, in actual fact, I went to Pakistan where I lived in Peshawar. That’s where I started out as a cub journalist, first selling photographs to the Associated Press and the Reuters news agency. Eventually, my career would take me all over South Asia and much of the Middle East and Africa. I suppose when I think back, my early experiences in journalism were the most exciting, though I often put myself in extremely dangerous situations, which I would not want my own children getting into now!
I think the most vivid of those experiences was my first trip inside Afghanistan from Pakistan. To get across the border I had to disguise myself as an Afghan Mujahid in a salwar kameez and pakol hat, like the one that Ahmed Shah Masood always wore. It was like being a character in the Great Game with my face darkened with boot polish. Unfortunately, I was caught on the border by a sharp-eyed Pakistani border guard and hauled in front of the commanding officer who threatened me with jail, which was a very real prospect. So I told him that I had converted to Islam and was going to fight the communists. Hearing this, his attitude changed and he warmed to me. But he still told me I was wasting my time with the Afghans. “You should go and fight in Kashmir!” he said. “I will arrange it!”
TAB: You have also worked as a photographer, doing photo-features, which is story-telling in a different medium. How does your approach differ from telling a story with images?
TQ: To be honest, it has been a long time since I did any photo-features. But yes, I did do quite a few in my early years, and my pictures were published in the Sunday Times, Marie Claire, the Mail on Sunday and so forth. I love doing both together: words and pictures. And this helped me tremendously when I transitioned into TV news in my mid-20s. I worked for APTV initially as a roving Senior Producer, and pretty quickly I learned how to shoot with professional cameras—back then it was Beta SP—and covered events and features all over the world. I guess I’m a very visual person, and I find the process of editing video, or crafting sequences with sound, incredibly satisfying. TV production also has the advantage of being hugely collaborative whereas writing, as much as I enjoy it (mostly), can be pretty lonely and isolating.
TAB: How is writing fiction different from journalism? Does your journalistic experience influence your novels?
TQ: Yes absolutely. Vish Puri is fiction, but the novels contain a huge amount of fact. When I’m describing something, it’s generally from notes. When I’m describing someone, that’s pretty much always based on someone I’ve met. Vish Puri himself, for example, is a composite of several people, including one of my wife’s late uncles, and of course, the real-life detectives I interviewed all those years ago. I think this is one of the reasons the books have been popular in India. I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve told me that they have an uncle just like Vish Puri. A little pompous, tells bad jokes, fond of a peg or two of Royal Challenge, but very decent, 100% a family man and doesn’t miss a trick.
TAB: Is writing something you have always done?
TQ: No, absolutely not. I left school at 18 hardly able to put a sentence together. And that’s not much of an exaggeration. My grammar was appalling, my spelling even worse. So I had to teach myself to write. I started reading a couple of newspapers every day, all the weekly magazines, and I started reading a lot of history. I think the key thing was learning to appreciate language, and to recognize what made good writing. My stuff still needed a lot of editing through my early 20s. But gradually I improved, and meanwhile I found that I had a very good sense for structure and an eye for colour, which of course are rather crucial elements for the whole package.
That said, I never thought I would write fiction. I kind of just fell into it. I went for a walk one day and started thinking of a detective character and his whole team. Then I sat down in a cafe in Holborn in London and started putting these details down on paper, including the name, Vish Puri. Then I thought I’d try a chapter and it jelled. As of now I’m working on the seventh novel—The Case of the Monsoon Murder Party. It’s set in a Maharaja’s palace in the white desert in Gujarat. Great fun!
TAB: Thank you for the interview and for sharing the genesis of one of my favourite fictional characters! I look forward to reading the seventh instalment in the series.
[1] Non-Resident Indians
[2] Cutting horses are trained in separating a single cow from a herd and then prevent it from getting back to the herd.
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