Episode 11

00:13 Theo Brun: Hello and welcome to The History Quill podcast. My name is Theodore Brun. I am an author of epic historical fiction and I’m here with my lovely co-host, Julia Kelly. Julia, how are you today?

00:26 Julia Kelly: I am very well. I’m quite excited because I’m at the start of some new projects. So I’m putting down plans for new words, which always feels really good. And it feels appropriate because we’re almost, almost a spring. So new beginnings all around while we’re recording this episode. How about yourself?

00:46 Theo Brun: Yeah, I’ve been doing some writing, unfortunately not for myself, but do you remember we talked about this ghost writing project for kids, sort of semi fantasy, it’s actually a thriller, or a kind of mystery novel. So in a way, it’s appropriate to the topic that we’re going to cover today. But so that’s going quite well, actually. So a little bit of a sideways step from historical fiction, but meanwhile, other things going on in that in that genre as well.

But today’s episode, as I alluded to, is about crime. It is about mystery. And we’ve got a great guest for you today, Vaseem Khan, who is a prize-winning author of both crime fiction and also historical crime fiction. And he’s also chair of the Crime Writers Association. So we’ve got a very esteemed guest for you today. Shall we meet him?

01:51 Julia Kelly: Vaseem, welcome to The History Quill podcast. A very warm welcome as we’re going to have what I’m sure will be a great discussion about historical crime fiction as well as other things. But before we get started, I wanted to make sure to ask you to give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and your books.

02:08 Vaseem Khan: Right, well, first of all, thank you for inviting me on. It’s lovely to be here. What can I tell you about myself? So, well, I’m a writer, obviously. I’ve been writing for a very long time. I wrote my first novel age 17, sent it in some agents, was roundly rejected because it was rubbish. And spent the next 20 odd years writing another six books across various genres, including historical, before I was published with a crime novel 10 years ago called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra.

It’s about a middle-aged policeman in Bombay, modern Bombay, who solves crimes but also inherits a baby elephant. I never expected it to be published. I was as shocked as anybody else at how well it did, and it basically gave me a career. And then five books in that series, and then I pivoted to historical crime fiction with a series called the Malabar House novels, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, set in 1950s India. Other than that, I’m the current chair of the 70-year-old crime writers association, the first non-white chair, and we might touch on that. I’m one of the country’s leading amateur cricketers. That’s a lie, that’s not true, but I do play a lot of amateur cricket.

03:19 Julia Kelly: I was gonna say, that’s interesting. Didn’t realise that.

03:24 Theo Brun: It’s great to have you with us. Thanks for that intro. We haven’t met or certainly I haven’t met. I think Julia may have met you before this episode but obviously I was looking up at what could be found out about you online and see all these kind of milestones as it were in your life. So it’s really interesting to me that you say that you wrote your first novel when you were 17 because I was kind of thinking what happened? Something it felt like a switch just got turned on in 2015 and like, ratatata, out come all these books, which obviously is, I thought, well, maybe that’s not exactly how it happened. But you did have this experience, I think it was, if your Wikipedia page is correct, after university where you went to India for 10 years, which must’ve been incredibly kind of rich, varied and eye-opening personal experience for you. 

Do you think that was like one of the key ingredients to, you know, that fed into your writing that then enabled you when you came back, I suppose it was still some time after you came back, wasn’t it, that you that you finally got your the first of the Baby Ganesh books published. But do you think that all fed into that kind of winning formula when it eventually came together?

04:44 Vaseem Khan: Well, thank you for calling it a winning formula. On the subject of Wikipedia, I’m going to go on a mini rant here for about 10 seconds, because my page is massively out of date. And every time my publicist or anyone tries to change it, Wikipedia changes it back. Just don’t get me started on that. Yeah, I grew up in this country, but my parents were from the subcontinent. And I never, you know, I never went there until the age of 23.

Yes, I wrote my first novel, Age 17. I was reading Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld series, and I thought, this looks really easy. I can do this. So I wrote a comic sci-fi fantasy. I told my parents, I’m not going to university because I’m gonna be a rich and famous writer. You can imagine how Asian parents took that. Anyway, it was, as I said, rejected. And then I did have to go to university and do accounts. I became a management consultant. And I was lucky enough that the company I was working for got a massive contract in India.

My boss walked in the office one day and he looked around. He came over to me and he said, Vaz, you look like you can speak Indian. Well, he was a very funny chap, my boss. And anyway, he took me out to India, age 23, and it was a massive culture shock because it wouldn’t have been much different to you, the pair of you going out to India for the first time. I’d never been everything I knew about India was from, say, from, you know, a few snippets my parents had told me, but also from Bollywood movies. And if you’ve ever seen one of these things, you’ll know that they bear no relationship to reality whatsoever. I went for three months, spent 10 amazing years there. And when I came back, I wanted to put all of those amazing memories off the subcontinent into a book. I never expected it to be published. It was called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. And it gave me a career.

06:34 Julia Kelly: Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what attracted you to crime, and then pivot into, or I guess the transition into historical crime writing as well, because I’m very curious about where those two genres intersect, given that that’s also what I’m doing as well.

06:52 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, well, crime fiction for me, I think, was something that came a lot earlier in my life. I watched the Agatha Christie Poirot series starring David Suchet in the 90s, and I used to watch it with my father who loved it. And I could never understand why, because he could barely speak any English. And yet somehow halfway through every episode, he’d point at the screen and he’d say in Urdu, his native language, that’s the killer.

And somehow, most of the time, he was always right. I don’t know if he’s blind guessing or he had some sixth sense. You know, you could see dead people or at least the people who made other people dead. And anyway, so I fell in love with the genre, particularly the golden age tropes of crime fiction. But all throughout the time that I was writing books and sending them in from wherever I was in the world to agents, I didn’t write a lot of crime fiction, I have to be honest. I started with sci-fi, then I did some historical stuff.

I did some literary fiction. And when I eventually came to write the book that got me published, it didn’t originally start as a crime novel. It was more a book about the 10 years I spent in India. And then I decided I love crime fiction, so I’ll make it into a crime novel. And then at the very end, I decided to shoehorn this baby elephant into it. It was never part of the original plot.

It was simply a symbol. I mean, I should be clear to listen as the elephant doesn’t talk or sing or fly or solve mysteries. It’s a device. It’s a symbol of India. And I put it in there because I met elephants for the first time on the streets of of Mumbai, which obviously you can’t do in the UK unless maybe you’ve had a few too many on a Friday evening.

08:40 Theo Brun: You got an amazing, what’s the word, just beautifully colourful titles, particularly to the Baby Ganesh books. I think that maybe is part of the humour of the books as well that comes through in the books. But also, it just flicks, I mean, you’ve already got quite a backlist as it were, a list of bibliography, and just flicking through the synopsis of each of them, you really get this sense of this, I don’t know what you would call it, a dichotomy between the European and, you know, your, your, I suppose your background of living and growing up in London, and therefore European characters and or even European interaction with the subcontinent and other bits of, let’s say, call them, you know, the Asia and the east. Is that something that you deliberately aim at? Is that an interesting fault line for you, but that that sort of crossover between those two things and how they interact?

09:40 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, very much so. I mean, I’ll answer that and partly answer the question that Julia also posed, which I just realised I didn’t quite answer, which was why the pivot to history? Well, one, history was my favourite subject in school. And but what I realised when I got out to India and began to learn a little bit of the history of this incredible country was that we’re pretty crap at teaching, teaching anything to do with India, Indian history in our schools. 

And I understand we have a curriculum and I really enjoyed the curriculum learning about World War II and the Tudors and all the rest of it. But it would have been nice to learn a little bit more about this country that Britain shared a 300 year relationship with. Not all of it was good. And we do tend to in history and not just us, but most countries tend to cover the things that make themselves look good rather than things that possibly make themselves look not so good.

And once I began to learn that amazing history of a country that is essentially thousands of years old with ancient cultures and philosophy and religion but in a very in a very important fundamental way the modern India that we see today was largely a function of that period just after the British left in in 1947 because so many of the things that were established and became the roots of this modern India were a function of the impact that the British had over those 300 years. And I guess for me, seeing that history and then seeing this contemporary India that was moving forward at a rate of knots, I mean, the money that was flowing into the country at the time, the way that the urban centres were changing. My boss, whose name was Terry, he was a sixty-year-old snowy haired gent from Kent. And after we’d been there a few months, he came to me and he’s a funny guy. And he said, Vaz, I’m really worried. And I said, Well, Terry, why are you worried? He said, every time I come into the into the office, all these Indians are really happy to see me don’t they know what my ancestors did? And I said to him that Indians are they understand their history, they know their history, but they’re far too busy moving into the future to almost becoming a global superpower now to dwell too much on the past. And those are the things I obviously want to explore in my books.

12:10 Julia Kelly: I’m curious about how you went about digging into the research as you talk about exploring these different elements, but then also, of course, all of the things that come into play when writing anything historical, you know, needing to ground your story in time and place and all of those elements that really make it feel like it’s authentic and accurate, I guess, to the time. How did you start diving into that research?

12:35 Vaseem Khan: You know, whenever people talk to me about research, I always take my cue from one of my favorite writers, a literary writer. We only wrote really one one amazing book and it was called A Suitable Boy and his name is Vikram Seth, which I’m sure you guys have come across. Now, A Suitable Boy is, it’s a book that took him 10 years to write and it’s one of the longest books in the English language. It’s, you know, like 1500 pages or a million words or whatever it is. But Seth basically locked himself away for a decade, he ignored his family, ignored his friends, and the research is so painstaking, and for some people it’s too painstaking. You know, he at one point he spent, because one of his characters was a shoemaker, he went and spent a month working in a shoe factory. Now I haven’t quite got to those levels of research, but I do do a lot of research, and I think most historical writers will be familiar with what I’m about to say next, which is that 95 to 98 percent of the research that you do never ends up in the book. And it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t, because you’ve got to strike a fine balance between showing off and showing people how much you’ve learned about that period and moving the plot forward and the momentum that goes with that. But at the same time, you want to give just enough so that people are immersed in a particular environment. 

And also for me, it’s very important that because I’m exploring history, which, and because my books are sold around the world and a lot of that is in Western countries, which don’t know a lot about, the readers don’t know a lot about Indian history. It’s very important for me to tease out themes that I think would be of interest to both Indians and Western readers. And, you know, I can talk a little bit more about that later.

14:29 Theo Brun: Is there something not only about the research and the sort of substance of whatever the topic or the period of the book that you happen to be writing, but also, I’m wondering whether there’s a difference in nature when it comes to, you know, the Indian attitude to a crime story or a thriller story. And, you know, you mentioned Agatha Christie, I suppose if I was to, you know, give you the stereotype English version, it’s the cosy crime, the little village but deadly, you know, killers lurking in the bushes as it were. And is there something to play with in terms of creating contrast between those two things? And if so, I wouldn’t know, like, what are the differences in your view for a sort of crime story in the Indian mindset?

15:19 Vaseem Khan: Well, let me take the first of my historical as an example. So Midnight at Malabar House. So this is set in 1915 Bombay, just a few years after Indian independence, the horrors of partition when a million Indians killed each other in religious riots, Gandhi’s been assassinated and he was all set to lead India into its new future, but he was gunned down by a fellow Hindu for various reasons.

Now into this environment, I introduce India’s first female police inspector. She’s qualified. Nobody knows what to do with her because India is an intensely patriarchal society at the time. Some will say it still is. The police force is incredibly misogynistic. So they dump her in Bombay’s smallest police station called Malabar House, with a whole bunch of other rejects and misfits. And then the murder of an English politician based in India happens and she get somehow the case lands in her lap and she has to go off and solve it. And she has to solve it in the company of an Englishman, a forensic scientist from Scotland Yard who’s deputed to Bombay to help them set up their own forensic science lab. His name is Archie Blackfinch. And what you have is these two people representing the two core themes of that period, which is Persis, who’s come through the independence movement, fought for independence, and largely that’s because of the feeling of not just, you know, we don’t want to be ruled by a colonial power anymore, but because of the injustice, the crimes that, if we’re talking about crimes, the crimes that many Indians felt that their colonisers were able to commit without any form of punishment or censure. And then you’ve got Archie, who, you know, he wasn’t part of that because he’s just come to India. He wasn’t there during the Raj.

But the Raj hangs heavily around his neck. So he represents this 300 years of colonial rule and injustice. And of course, like any good crime or historical novel, there is a will they won’t they get together, but how can they possibly do so? It would ruin her career to be seen in a public relationship with an Englishman, but that’s part of any good narrative. So yeah, absolutely. For me, I think when you contrast a city like Bombay, which even then was incredibly populated, with a cosy crime, Midsomer (type) village of maybe sort of a few thousand people. 

And Bombay today has 20 million people in its greater metropolitan area. And unless you’ve been there, it is impossible to imagine the cacophony, the sounds, the sights, the smells. It’s like being hit in the head with about 10 different frying pans as soon as you step outside your door. Using that as a canvas for a crime novel, I think. Particularly in an incredibly turbulent historical period, was incredibly exciting for me to do, but I think most readers have responded to that as well with the Malabar House novels.

18:24 Julia Kelly: I’m always curious to get the perspective of an author who writes in series, because within historical fiction there are of course series, but I think historical crime in particular lends itself to that. I’m at the very beginning of my historical crime writing journey, and I’m finding that it is very different than writing standalone novels, you know, carrying these characters through elements of things.

Like a will they won’t they or themes that you develop in book one that you want to sort of carry through the whole series. Can you talk a little bit to what it’s like writing in series and how much planning and development you do in order to then create this world that readers will follow from book to book?

19:14 Vaseem Khan: Well, it’s the only argument, isn’t it, that you often hear of plotters versus pantsers and by pantsers we mean people who write by the seat of their pants. They sit down with an idea and just bash out a novel. You know, personally, I think that all writers do do some planning, but some love the mythology of saying that they can sit down and just write a whole novel. I’m a plotter. I think it’s especially if you’re writing the kind of books that I write, which have a lot of cryptic clues. They have historical themes that I’m keen to explore with each book, a lot of historical research, and then you’ve got clues and alternate suspects, and it all becomes very complex. So I’d spend months planning before I actually start writing. And for me, I think the key with series fiction is, and you probably won’t hear this a lot, because often when you have writing seminars, people say, well, what’s more important, plot or character? And people will hedge their bets and say sit on the fence and say, no, they’re both equally important. Well, it’s not true. With series fiction, characters are more important. And the reason they’re more important is because publishers know that if you can create characters that readers fall in love with and want to spend time with, they will forgive you the odd plot hole. They will forgive you the odd historical inaccuracy. And they will buy the next book because they just want to spend more time with your characters.

So more than anything else, I believe your characters have to have something I call charisma. That doesn’t mean they have to be entirely good or entirely wonderful, but they do have to have something that appeals. And another example I can give is the Shardlake novels. Right, those are historical crime novels set in the Tudor period, if I remember correctly. But they, you know, the lead character is a hunched back lawyer who is incredibly intelligent, but in that society of that era, clearly he’s not top of the tree because of his slight disability. 

And yet we fall in love with him because of his mind, because of his ability to navigate this incredibly difficult period in history when, you know, with the dissolution of the monasteries and the rest of the things that were happening. So, yeah, great characters, I think, the most important bedrock for historical fiction series.

21:40 Theo Brun: Yeah, that’s interesting. I can see, I don’t think I’ve got the experience of both of you in terms of crime and that sort of particular necessity of having all the mechanics, if you like, of the plot working out into forming the complete structure of the mystery. But I can see how in a series, you know, you need that for the characters that follows through from one book to the other. 

But what I was wondering was technically, when you are populating a particular book with the different characters and the different possible culprits, do you switch horses a lot? Like as you’re developing characters, do you go, oh this would be a killer motive for this woman or this man and this is how it’s all going to work and then suddenly you get an even better one for another character and start reconfiguring exactly what’s going to happen in this book. I mean maybe that’s part of the process of trying to figure it out as the reader anyway, and the fun of being the writer and the originator of it. But does that happen with you? And if so, kind of what does that look like?

22:47 Vaseem Khan: It happens a lot, you know, although, you know, I often, I have a detailed plan before I start writing. And I’m sure this is the experience of most writers that no matter how detailed your plan, you will find that plots and characters and will will shift under you, simply because the act of writing itself, you know, means that you’re creating on the go no matter how rigid your, your plan is and I can give you an example.

So this is the fourth in the Malabar House series, and I’m waving it around because I quite love this cover. It’s the first title I’ve ever been allowed to keep, Death of a Lesser God, and it’s got this white tiger on there for a reason. And in this book, so it’s the fourth in the Malabar House series, and it started originally as an attempt for me to invert the narrative. So you’ve got a white man, James Whitby, born and raised in India, who’s been convicted of murdering an Indian nationalist lawyer, 11 days left before he’s hanged.

His father, an old colonial industrialist in India, forces through a last minute investigation, and my protagonist, Persis and Archie, reinvestigate because James Whitby claims that he’s innocent, claims he’s the victim of a form of reverse racism, and he’s being punished for the sins of his ancestors during the Raj. So they start off in Bombay and they end up in Calcutta, which was the former centre of the British Empire in India before it moved to Delhi. And it was an old series of villages, tigers going around snacking on locals until the British came and drained the swamp and built Calcutta. But part way through writing this book, I came across during my research the fact that during World War II, there were about 150,000 American soldiers, GIs, camped in Calcutta and its environs because they were trying to stop the Japanese advance into India from the eastern side. 

And 20,000 of those were African American black soldiers. And Indians, Calcutans had never seen black soldiers before. And so, you know, it was an incredible meeting of different cultures. And even then, the white soldiers, the Americans were segregated. The black soldiers had their own barracks, they had their own swimming pools and entertainment and the rest of it. And the white soldiers tended to keep to themselves.

But the black soldiers went out into the streets of Calcutta and integrated a bit more with the locals. And once I knew this, it was utterly fascinating to me. I had no idea that this had ever happened. I decided that I was going to have a second murder of a black American GI at the end of the war, and I would build it somehow into the book. So I had to unwrap the plot a little bit and seed this in without losing the James Whitby case, and then somehow find a way, see if they can connect or not connect. I mean that’s part of the essential mystery. So yes things do change, do change as you go along.

25:53 Julia Kelly: I love hearing that because I’m at the beginning of plotting a book right now. And I know no matter what I do, there are going to be things that I discover, whether it’s research or, you know, characters going in a different direction. And I find it very reassuring hearing about that with a completed book. And congratulations on keeping a title, by the way, I know that is not easy when it goes to the whole publishing machine.

I want to make sure and take a few minutes to talk about some of the other things that you do in your life, including your being recently named chair or elected chair of the CWA. Would you like to tell us a little bit about the Crime Writers Association and your role in it?

26:35 Vaseem Khan: Yeah, sure. I mean the CWA has been going for about 70 years. It’s the largest association of crime writers in Europe, one of the largest in the world. It hosts the prestigious Dagger Awards, which are one of the world’s most important awards for crime fiction. And I am the first nonwhite chair.

26:51 Theo Brun: Of which you were a winner, we should say, in 2021. We should have dropped that in earlier.

26:56 Vaseem Khan: Well thank you Theo. I did, listeners I did not pay Theo to make that public announcement. Midnight at Malabar House, the first in my historical crime novels, won the historical dagger and yes it’s very important, it gives you worldwide exposure and for me it put my career to the next level.

I did have to think twice about whether or not I wanted to be chair of the CWA because it’s extra work that I don’t need. But then at the same time, what I believe is that crime fiction has been leading the way in introducing new voices, new stories into publishing. And we all know that there’s been a debate over the last 10, 15 years about making the creative arts more diverse.

And my personal experience has been reasonably positive. Yeah, it took me 23 years to get published in the first place, but since being published, I’ve seen incredible change. I’ve seen lots of different voices come on who were previously excluded. Is that the right word? It’s more that the industry is very risk averse and the inertia is so strong that it doesn’t really like change. And if in the past books that have been successful, successful have been mainly books written by white authors with white protagonists set in white environments, it’s very difficult for the publishing industry to think that they can make money by publishing something different. Thankfully, that has changed. And it’s not just about colour, you know, people of different genders, sexualities, people who have come from working class backgrounds, who are traditionally very found it very difficult to get published. All of those changes are happening. Yes, we’d all love it to happen at a faster pace. 

But I think overall, that map of change has transformed the kind of books that we offer to readers. And I’ve always believed that readers are intelligent people. If you give them a choice, they can decide for themselves whether or not a Vaseem Khan book set in India is interesting to them and worth reading. But if you never put those books in front of them, they will just stick to what they know, which is more Midsommar, more Agatha Christie. Nothing wrong with that.

But I personally believe that it’s as a reader first and foremost, it’s exciting to me when I come across a book that’s set in an environment with protagonists that I personally, that a community that I don’t know anything about, and then I can learn something about that as well as enjoying, hopefully a good read.

29:33 Theo Brun: Yeah, it sounds like you think that it’s the industry sort of suppliers have changed their approach as opposed to the appetite may well have been there just untested as it were in terms of readers out there just saying, give me a good story.

29:49 Vaseem Khan: Very much so. And you know, one of the funny things is in my Malabar House series, I kill a lot of white people. And, you know, most of the people who get killed in my books are white people. And I do that partly because I know that I have a wide readership in America, in Australia, in the UK. And people like something familiar, as well as something that is new to them. So there is a way to bridge, I think, that gap. And because of my dual heritage growing up in the UK, but having that Indian heritage, spending time out there. I think I’m able to do that in a way that readers respond to. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having familiar tropes, but I think it’s also very exciting when you have something new as well that you learn.

30:35 Theo Brun: You put together a course for the Curtis Brown Creative Writing School. And I had a couple of questions really related to that. One was when you’re teaching people how to do what you do, crime fiction or historical crime fiction. On the positive side, is there a magic ingredient that you think should always be in there or something, something that you can sort of call the magic ingredient? And also, is there a kind of classic pitfall that all rookie authors coming into this area of fiction, again, are falling into, and maybe you can help them steer around.

31:15 Vaseem Khan: There is actually. I know people often fudge these kind of questions because they don’t want to upset anybody, but I won’t fudge it. The number one reason that books submitted to agents are rejected is because they do not meet the minimum standard of quality to be published. Now I know that’s something that people don’t want to hear because reading is supposed to be subjective. Writing is supposed to be subjective and it’s all everybody’s opinion.

But when it comes to the sharp end, particularly with big publishers, agents are inundated by submissions, literally thousands, across the piece, not just historical. And if you submit, say, a historical novel, then the first thing the agent wants to know is, is the quality of this writing in terms of the actual writing, the plot, the characters, the handling of themes, is it at a level where I can push it forward?

Commissioning editors who are the people who buy these books and will they look at it and say yep this is something that we can see ourselves publishing and on a bookshelf and out with critics reading it. So that’s the first barrier and specifically for historicals I think you need to write about something I personally believe that you care about. Of course we don’t have personal experience of you know if you’re writing about the the 1200s or whatever we don’t have personal experience.

But there needs to be something that you care about and it should shine through in what you’re writing. Now, just simple example, with my Malabar House novels, I indulge in something which I call historical revisionism. What I mean by that is correcting some of the things that we’ve learned through historians writing about India, who have largely been middle-aged white men. Nothing wrong with that. I read a lot of their books to try and get some of my information, but we haven’t had much of the Indian perspective.

And so simple things like, for instance, I mentioned in Midnight at Malabar House that the fingerprinting system that we use in the West was invented by two Indians in Calcutta. But their supervisor during the Raj was an Englishman named Henry. And so it was called the Henry classification system. Then it went to Scotland Yard and then from there it went around the world. And it’s largely the same system we use at the moment, although a bit more techified.

So small things like that I seed in and people write to me, my readers, and they say, we had no idea about this, we had no idea. And that passion for that history shows through in small nuggets of information like this. And so I would urge anyone who’s writing historical fiction to be passionate, to write about something, a period of history that they’re passionate about so that they know when is the right place to seed in things like this.

34:05 Julia Kelly: I love that advice about having passion for what it is that you’re writing about and, and finding ways to bring that to your books. I wanted to ask one last question. And again, you know, we’re talking about all the things that you do in addition to all of the books that you write and all the work that you do. So I wanted to ask about your work at the Department of Security and Crime Sciences at UCLA. I’m sorry, UCL. I’m from California, clearly a bit of a slip there. UCL, University College London. How does that come into your work as an author? Do they influence each other?

34:42 Vaseem Khan: Well, I’ve been at UC Edwards University College London in London for 17 odd years. And I keep trying to leave because the books have gone really well. But because I don’t teach and I don’t do the research myself, I’m not an academic. It means that I have lots of time to go off and do book stuff and my boss doesn’t want me to go anywhere. And I actually enjoy it. I enjoy because I don’t spend the whole day writing. I write for about four hours in the morning, then I have the rest of the day free and I’d get bored senseless or my wife would find me tasks around the house to do.

And so I quite enjoy and we work a lot in the department. I help manage projects and we work a lot on crime and security topics. And I particularly help with a centre for future crime, which sounds very Tom Cruise Minority Report, but it’s looking at how future technology will be used by criminals. So we do work on artificial intelligence and crime, how that’s being used. And I could scare you straight right now if I told you, you’d never go on social media again or post anything again.

If you knew what AI algorithms could do by just hoovering up your social media profiles. We’re working on autonomous vehicles and how criminals might, you know, hack into them and use them for crime. So for me, because I write historical, not a lot of that information is useful now. But, you know, I love working with my colleagues and you never know, because as a writer, the one thing you can’t guarantee is what you will be writing three years from now.

And I may well end up writing contemporary novels featuring very futuristic crime. So it’s good to keep my hand in.

36:17 Theo Brun: Or else you come full circle to your sci-fi origins.

36:21 Vaseem Khan: I’ll just say this in passing just to show people that no matter how, you know, for want of a better word, successful you are as a writer, there are always things in the drawer that you can’t get published. So for 20 years, I’ve been working on my magnum magnum opus, which is a literary novel set in Egypt from the years 1899, the beginning of the British protectorate in Egypt to 1970 the end of General Nasser’s reign. It covers three generations of an Egyptian family and it’s told in the style of magical realism so it follows one of my favorite books. This is where my love of history came from, books like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Shogun by James Clavell, Birdsong by Sebastian Fawkes, all of these incredible books that dissect a period in history for us. So my book has been 20 years in the making, I cannot get my agent to read it, cannot get my publisher to read it because they say it’s got nothing to do with your crime novels, your readers will get confused. So I’m hoping that I will get to J.K. Rowling levels at some point where I have so much power that I can just publish anything I like. But I’m not quite there yet. One day.

37:34 Julia Kelly: One day. Well, this has been fantastic. Before we go, I want to make sure that you have a chance to tell people who are listening where they can find you online and how they can follow on with your career. And maybe one day the magnum opus, you never know.

37:52 Vaseem Khan: Well, I hope so. You know, in India, we have a saying, may sugar be put into your mouth when you say something like that. So, well, even if you Google my name, you’ll find my website and you can see what the books that are out there, what’s being released. By all means, if you if you like your historical fiction and you like a few murders thrown in, do try the Malabar House novels.

They seem to be doing quite well around the world and people do enjoy them and I do get lots of feedback and occasionally people do pick me up on getting a historical detail wrong. I mean one very irate chap, he wrote to me from the States in fact, he might even have been a Californian, Julia, and you know he started, well yeah, well he started very nicely by saying oh dear Mr. Khan, I really love your books, really love, really love this, sorry that’s not a very American accent, and then he said on page, page 82, line 17.

You’ve got Persis driving around in a Jeep and she rolls down the window. And I regret to inform you, but that model of Jeep in 1950 did not have any windows. And to be fair to him, he was absolutely correct. I had made a mistake and I wrote to my publisher immediately and said, please, can you make sure that I never put in a Jeep with damn bloody windows again, because I don’t want another letter from this lovely, lovely man in California, Julia’s friend.

39:12 Julia Kelly: I’ve had a similar, I’ve had a similar letter from somebody about farm equipment in the UK in 1942. So don’t worry happens to all of us.

39:22 Theo Brun: That’s great. All right, well, you’ve heard it from the man. There are lots of ways to get involved with Vaseem Khan’s work. And it’s been a real pleasure having you here on the episode. So thank you so much. And we wish you well with your next one for the future.

39:49 Julia Kelly: What a fantastic interview and a lot to talk about, I think. We have got a little bit of time to do that, but first I think Theo, you have a bit of a reminder for us.

40:01 Theo Brun: I do, I do. I want to let all of our listeners know about a special bonus episode of the podcast available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode about how to succeed in historical fiction. And we’re joined by two very accomplished historical fiction authors, Gill Paul and David Penny, who share with us the ingredients of their success and how you can succeed in the genre as well. To get the bonus episode, go to thehistoryquill.com/bonus. You can find the link in the description or enter it into the browser.

40:34 Julia Kelly: Yeah, we really encourage you to sign up and receive that because there’s a lot of fantastic advice and insight in that bonus episode, especially if you’re a historical fiction author and you won’t want to miss it. Okay, when it comes to having chat about everything we’ve just listened to with Vaz, I think we have a lot of places that we can start, Theo. Do you have anything in particular that stuck out that you want to tackle first?

40:59 Theo Brun: Yeah, I think the probably the last thing he said, or the last big thing he said, which was this kind of dose of reality. You like a bit of dose of reality. I mean, rather than as he in his words, fudge it and give some sort of little detail about what’s good or what’s not. I think, you know, that the sort of essence of reading something and you can tell, can’t you, in in 30 seconds of reading, like whether someone can write or not. And that is a reality. And often, I mean, I don’t know, you’ve probably got similar experience of people sharing stuff or friends of friends sharing stuff that this, he’s written a novel or he’s written a story. 

And I have to say, it’s always like drinking a cup of cold water when you read the first page and you think this is, I can’t actually read this. It’s not completely awful. And whether, yeah, is that, can you teach that? Is that just something innate? I don’t know, but it’s definitely a reality that comes with the turf.

42:07 Julia Kelly: I think it’s an interesting point because for me, you know, writing is a craft and you work at it. And I think as an author, you hope to continue working at it for, you know, a long and healthy career. But, you know, certainly I’m not the writer that I was when I first queried. I hope I’m not the writer, you know, in 10 years that I am today. I hope to continue to keep growing and changing.

But I think part of, part of that is understanding that, you know, writing again is a craft and it is something that you need to work at. I do think that there is something to be said about understanding what is, if the goal is publication, what is a manuscript that is ready to be presented to an agent, ready to be presented to an editor, ready to be acquired. And it’s not a first draft. It’s something that has, you know, that level of quality.

 And I think that’s a great reminder as well. And it may be difficult, I think, for some people to hear that because, you’ve poured passion and excitement into your manuscripts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready yet. It doesn’t mean that it can’t become ready, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t grow as an author, but I think it is important to remember that, even though writing is subjective, there is also an industry. And if you wanna play in that industry, you need to understand what it is that you’re getting yourself into and the requirements of it.

43:37 Theo Brun: I suppose it can be a painful experience, or a laborious experience writing out anything, really, whatever the purpose of this piece of writing is. And often you just don’t feel like going back into it and seeing if you can make it better. It’s like you’d rather just push it out to someone and say, there, that’s what I’ve done. And that’s kind of as good as I can get it. Whereas, like you said, the reality is, as we come back to with a lot of guests, it’s kind of the perseverance and endurance. And part of that is the recycling of looking at what you’ve got down on a page. I think the reading, often reading other authors who are really good. And then it’s sort of how you hone your voice, isn’t it? Because so, you know, you can’t say this is good. Well, you can say this is good writing. This is not good writing. You can’t exactly say why, but and what they’re doing different to that one other than a voice is coming through, some sort of voice that makes, that is engaging and sort of catches you as a narrator. 

And I don’t know what, how you, you help people sort of find that, whether it’s a case of reading back your own stuff aloud or something like that. And like, does this sort of sing in your head somehow? But, but it’s noticeable when people have it and it can just be a little bit off, but you can spot that this is not a professional. 

Or not that this is not a professional, this is not of that level that he was talking about, this is not of that kind of benchmark quality. So yeah, it’s tough to assess yourself and evaluate yourself, but I think you do get better at it, don’t you?

45:21 Julia Kelly: I think so. And I think in some ways it ties into his point about, you know, when you’re looking at writing a series rather than a standalone novel, that will be a complete story.

I think I loved his point about writing characters that people care about, that people want to follow. And I think, again, that’s a skill that you can develop and you can really flesh out characters. And you can, as an author, find out more about those characters as you continue to write them and more about the relationships and build out not just that character, but their, again, their relationships, their world, how they move through your books. I thought that was a great reminder of one of the challenges that’s different about writing serious fiction, but can be incredibly rewarding and also can be incredibly rewarding for your readers as well, to follow somebody who you really like to be in the company of. 

A great example for historical crime, or I guess we’d think it’s historical now, some of it was contemporary, is Hercule Poirot. He’s just been fascinating for decades and people connect to the mysteries and to the individual books, they’re following the detective, they’re following the character, and that’s why there’s this sort of almost cult-like fascination with him. He is just one of those characters who people really respond to and latch onto.

46:46 Theo Brun: Yeah, and I suppose that’s that is a danger of crime as well, that if people are going to be dying or sort of dropping like flies, you what is what is there to care about the end of the mystery? I mean, even talking about Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot type mysteries, as soon as you know who did it, you kind of stop caring.

You know, often in the TV series or even in some of the books, there’s the little suggestion of a kind of romance between maybe one of the witnesses and one of the suspects or whatever. But you don’t really care in the same way that you might care in a historical sweeping epic or a historical romance. It is just, as you said, is there a character that you just want to hang out with and see how their mind works? I suppose when it’s someone as cerebral as Poirot or as he was talking about. Gosh, who was it he mentioned? Oh yeah, the Shardlake books. Yeah. And at the end of the day, if you’re in, it’s quite particular to that genre, isn’t it? That it’s the character that immediately pops to mind all the other books and the nature of what happened in those books is not what sticks with you. Whereas for other kind of series, historical series, it’s kind of like, oh, wow, and do you remember that the sort of sweeping plot went over here and then it was this particular sort of dramatic climactic event in history? Yes, the characters are important, but it’s not, the plot doesn’t fall away from it over time in the same way that it seems to a little bit with historical crime.

48:34 Julia Kelly: Yeah, I think the ideal situation is you manage to marry together great plot, great characters, and then an intriguing series hook that will carry you along. I think that’s the sweet spot. And telling people how to do that can be difficult because you know what I think will make a great character and a great series hook.

You know, readers might disagree with me, but I think that’s part of what you’re trying to do as an author who is planning out these longer series is what’s going to keep this interesting. How is this going to be intriguing to somebody and what, what are people going to carry care about carrying through from book to book? And I think he’s right. There is something about having a detective with charisma of some sort. You know, it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not necessarily, you know, one size fits all, but something that draws you to them as a reader.

49:23 Theo Brun: No, I noticed when he well, actually, I think it was from the background reading I did about him that his first offer or contract was a four book contract, which when I read it, I thought, if I was a debut novelist, I got a four book contract on the one hand, you’re going, I’ve got the golden ticket. And on the other, I find that quite intimidatins. He’s written many books already and he’s like okay yes I can do four more books. I don’t know whether that struck you in any way or whether you would find that intimidating or encouraging.

50:07 Julia Kelly: You know, I think all I can do is speak to my own personal experience. So when I first got a contract, it was for a series of three books. and I had, of course, you know, when you’re an author who nobody knows anything about because you’re a debut, you submit a full manuscript. and then, so what I did was I submitted a full manuscript and I submitted a plan for two more books after that related to that first manuscript. This was a series.

Writing that second book was a very different experience than writing that first book. You know, when I was unpublished and I desperately wanted to get a contract and be published and enter this world that I felt very kept out of, I got some advice that I didn’t appreciate at the time. Somebody told me, enjoy the time you have now when you’re not writing to contract because it’s never gonna be like this again. And I think I thought, but I wanna be published. I want a contract.

Why would I do that? And I understand now what they were trying to say. I think what they were trying to say is when you have entered the world of publishing, when you have a contract, when you’ve been published, there’s always going to be a level of pressure on you. There’s always gonna be a level of timeline. You know, when is the next book due? Or what is the next book that you’re writing to try to get another contract? You know, there’s always an element of what comes next. And I think there is something really beautiful about not having that same pressure on you.

Completely understandable if, you know, people who are listening, if their goal is to get published, I would, I would probably feel exactly the same way that I did when that person gave me that advice that, you know, it would be difficult to imagine not wanting that. but there is something that is a bit of a luxury when you do land, a contract or you have had a taste of what being published can be like.

Having that open-ended free time to play, explore, to figure out and to build the muscle that is being a writer, there is nothing quite like it. So I think when you’re presented with an opportunity, most people are going to take the opportunity and I think that’s great. I think there is sometimes a bit of intimidation that comes along with that. And certainly my experience was, it’s very different writing book two of a series than writing book one of a series when you’ve had that time to have, when you have the luxury of time, before anybody knew anything about the book.

52:32 Theo Brun: Do you find, just sort of pivoting to something a little bit more technical, perhaps, which is he obviously went from crime fiction to kind of back into historical crime fiction, which didn’t seem like a difficult jump for him because as he said he’s passionate about history and naturally interested in that culture as well. You I know have now done, is it two or three books in your Parisian Orphan series?

In terms of what you’re writing. I know there’s only one out but but there’s more coming on there.

53:00 Julia Kelly: Yes. Yeah, so… Yeah, I’m starting, literally starting book three right now. I’m doing all that pre-planning. So, uh, yes. Yeah.

53:10 Theo Brun: Yeah, are you finding that you’re having to learn a lot of new stuff in terms of how you go about the writing of this book because it’s crime?

53:21 Julia Kelly: You know, it’s funny, I think I’ve got a pretty solid grounding under me because of the other things that I’ve written when it comes to developing character. So I know going into a project, I’m going to flesh out the characters, I’m going to do these things in order to kind of help myself out, to really familiarise with myself, with who I’m writing about. Do I still end up in situations where characters are quote unquote misbehaving or going off in directions that I didn’t expect and I need to adjust the plot in order to reflect that? Absolutely. But I have a lot of experience with that, and so I have a pretty good method. 

What I have been fascinated and frustrated sometimes to realise is that I am having to develop that around the plot of a mystery novel. And so I’m learning from book to book what’s important for me to know before the book starts, what I might need to adjust on the fly. Book one, I had a pretty solid idea what was going to happen and how it’s going to develop. I literally, in order to sort out all the motives and the alibis and everything, I had a cork board and little pieces of string connecting everybody, it looked insane. But for book two, I didn’t do that. 

54:38 Theo Brun: Does anyone teach you that or you just figure that out for yourself?

54:40 Julia Kelly: I think I watched a lot of police procedurals and they always have a murder board. And so I was like, you know what? Let’s just build a murder board for this book.

I didn’t do that for book two because I quite frankly didn’t have the time. I was writing to a tight deadline, talk about deadline pressure of a second book. And I ended up finding that I was having to go through and make much larger scale editorial changes in the developmental edits. And so what I’m doing for book three, I’m really, really, I’m working backwards. Basically, I’m really trying to understand what it is that the killer, the motive, you know, all of those things are all of the alibis, where everybody claims they were, you know, different things that I can seed in through the book. So I’m doing much less of the going back and saying, okay, I realised that I need this character to say this thing for this thing to make sense and for this all of Locke. So what I’m trying to do is kind of reverse engineer the book and then from in terms of who did it.

And then go from the beginning and start to build those things in through my outline. It’s much more structure than I’ve even done for my historical fiction novels, my standalone novels in the past. But I think that because it’s a mystery and because so much of it centres around that puzzle, I really want to make sure that I get it right. And I think it also helps me to just work through a bit of that beforehand. This is all a theory. So, you know, follow along to find out whether this actually works.

56:11 Theo Brun: But I, yeah, I’m fascinated by the theory though, because I sort of, you know, it was something along the lines of like you work out what happened factually like this is what this is what actually happened then you kind of how do you conceal that barrier it’s like Churchill’s thing of you know the mystery wrapped in the enigma and then the riddle all covered by a riddle or whatever his description of the truth was but, you know, you kind of build, build red herrings and build like you say, different alibis, different motives of different characters, but that’s not what happened. 

You have that kind of central thread of already of like, this is who, this is why, this is how, more or less. And let’s bury that so sufficiently that no one can… well, as few people can guess it as possible. Is it something along those lines or…?

57:10 Julia Kelly: Yes, but also make sure that I, as the author know what that is before I bury it. I think that’s a big part of it. So I’m not excavating it as I go. I’m sort of knowing where I’m moving towards. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s been a fantastic sort of thought exercise and it’s really interesting hearing somebody else talk about how they outline and, you know, how much detail they go into because I, you know, in some ways I think.

Authors are always looking at other people’s processes and trying to figure out, you know, what works for somebody and could that work for me? Which is why I find conversations with authors about craft just endlessly interesting.

57:50 Theo Brun: Yeah. And do you have to, I mean, I know you’re doing forties, aren’t you? But are you doing a lot of research of police procedure and detective procedure in that of that period and like the technical details of the stuff they had to go on? Like he was talking about fingerprints and things like that.

58:08 Julia Kelly: One of my favorite things is that Agatha Christie was writing during this time and she was very good about keeping up with scientific developments in this area. So there’s a lot of, a lot of books that have been written about her science and how it developed and changed throughout her writing career. Super helpful. 

58:27 Theo Brun: Yeah, some shortcuts would be good.

58:30 Julia Kelly: So yes, I try not to get, yeah, I try not to get too into the weeds because I think it can be very easy to veer off. And I’m not writing a forensic scientist. I’m writing basically an amateur detective. and so I try to make sure that I’m not doing too much of that, but I do need to be aware of things such as, you know, the developments in, in fingerprint, ooh, pardon me, uh, the developments in fingerprinting that, that he was, he was discussing with us. So yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. And if you’re, I mean, if you’re an author who likes historical research, there’s a mine of historical research to do while writing historical crime.

59:05 Theo Brun: Well, that concludes this episode of The History Quill podcast. But before we go, I wanted to remind you to head over to thehistoryquill.com/bonus to get a bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction, featuring guest authors, Gill Paul and David Penny. It’s essential listening for any historical fiction writers, so make sure you check it out. You can find the link in the description and enter it into your browser.

59:30 Julia Kelly: And of course, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, make sure that you like, subscribe, and leave us a comment or a review. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.