I wish I could say I’d been dying to get back to the
entirely personable and pleasant Joe Sandilands, but Ragtime in Simla (2002; this edition, Dell, 2006) was more of a
desperation move after a few other false starts. Ratlines
was an initial bust, and so was Detective
Inspector Huss. The former was too
much of a prose adjustment after Benjamin Black, and the latter was just
boring. While it is true that Huss is a
refreshingly positive change after the dour Scandinavians of Henning Mankel and
that crowd, her story just never sparked much interest and worse, seemed to be
written in cliché after cliché. Could it
have been the translation?
In any case, I’d decided to give Barbara Cleverly’s early 20th
century detective another try, and I’m not unhappy that I did. For various reasons, World War One veteran
and Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands (just got the connection – does he
know Ian Rutledge?) seems to find himself regularly in India, and there is
always some nefarious activity going on that only Our Hero can get to the
bottom of. In this instance, Joe is on
his way to the high mountain town of Simla, the summer capital of the British
Raj, when he witnesses a murder. Faster
than you can say bobs-your-uncle, that murder is connected to an earlier one,
and the cinematic characters and settings are piling up left and right. There are beautiful women with tragic pasts, disreputable
drunken chums, brisk bureaucrats, lordly elites, mysterious madams, inscrutable
natives, plucky kids, and all the rest you’d expect to find in a novel set in
the final decades of British rule in India. Ragtime in Simla is a pretty straight-up mystery, with some mixed-up identities, but it will keep you reading to see how it all comes out.
And you cannot miss with the setting. Cleverly has a terrific eye for detail, and while I don’t
know much about India, it all reads authentically. You can look up Simla, or Shimla, as it is
now called, and if you do a google image search you will indeed find pictures
of an absolutely stunning setting on the edge of the Himalayas. Cleverly was not making it up, nor was
Kipling, whom her characters all adore and have apparently memorized on the subject of this charming hill town. And while she has an obvious affection for the
British in India, Cleverly is not above an accurate portrayal of its lesser lights,
such as this description of a “chummery” where a group of the aforementioned
louts live:
“Joe’s impression of Old India was reinforced as they
entered the house. The furniture was
European but shabby and knocked about.
Bills and invitation cards jostled each other on the mantelpiece; not a
few of these were over a year old.
Inevitably, the prints of the “Midnight Steeplechase” hung on the wall
along with a fine leopard skin and the head of a markhor. A fencing mask and crossed foils added a note
of gentlemanly athleticism, and there were whips, boots, boxing gloves, boxes
of ammunition, not-well-secured gun cupboards, boxes of cigars sealed and
opened, the remains of what obviously been a copious breakfast amongst the debris
of which could be seen a bottle of gin and a bottle of Angostura bitters.” (146)
Yes, I like the distinction between “Old India” and the current
setting – suggesting that one shouldn’t paint anything – even British colonialism
– with too broad a brush.
But you know, that colonialism – precisely the source of all
that marvelous atmosphere – is really a bit hard to take if you think about it
even a little bit. Colonialism has apparently
become a focus of tourism in India, which gives about the same frisson of
discomfort as touring plantations in the American South that play the
antebellum romance card just a little too hard.
Simla in the 1920s is about 25 years away from Indian independence,
but of course this is coming after decades, centuries of British domination. And if you really go down that path, it is
just ghastly to contemplate how the British imposed themselves and their nation
on so so many other indigenous peoples and entire continents for so very long: North
America, Africa, South Asia, and so on. It is not
coincidental that I’m thinking about this because we’re planning a family trip
to Ireland, and of course you can’t miss how they feel about the British. I know that lots of folks think that the US
acts the same way today, but while I agree that we come on a bit strong
sometimes, in context, the US’ efforts at world domination pale in comparison
to the 18th and 19th c. Brits. But yeah, I felt a little breeze of
collective white guilt reading Ragtime in
Simla, if only because it does all sound rather lovely. Oh well, as my husband likes to gently chide,
as long as you feel guilty about it.
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