Q&A with Arvind Ethan David

  

Photo by Valerie Cavaness

 

 

Arvind Ethan David is the author of the new novel The Great Game. His other work includes producing the TV show Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He lives in Southern California.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Great Game?

 

A: A few years ago, I was on a panel at Comicon with my TV show, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and an audience member asked each of us who our Comicon Cos-Play of choice was.

As they worked their way down the line, I realised I had a problem. I would have liked to have answered Sherlock Holmes, or Arthur Dent, or Peter Parker or Philip Marlowe. But those are all white guys, and I'm a brown, Indian-Pakistani, British Asian guy.

Maybe that shouldn't matter, but we live in a world in which it does, and I don't get to just put on a deerstalker hat and become Sherlock, at best that would make me "Brown Sherlock".

 

So, I started to think about the “why” of that. Why don't people of colour feature in classic genre stories? It's not that we weren't about, these stories took place at the height of Empire and Empire is their constant context and subtext. Out of that kernel was the character of Balvinder born, and The Great Game began.

 

Q: As you were writing the novel, what did you see as the right balance between your own characters, the fictional characters of Arthur Conan Doyle and others, and historical figures?

 

A: Something very lucky happened about 10 pages into the writing of this book. Balvinder Singh announced himself. I think if you are lucky, a few times in a writer's life, you meet a character who you know everything about and can write in every circumstance.

 

I’ve met those when adapting other people’s work (Dirk Gently, Philip Marlowe…) but this is my first time meeting someone of my own creation who fits that criteria.

 

So this was, from the beginning, Bal’s story. We go where he goes, meet who he meets and experience London through his eyes. His choices and his agency determine the story. If Bal had wanted to spend the entire novel following Sherlock about, I’d have been happy to. Fortunately for the story, he had other ideas.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: This is a book that hopefully wears any scholarship lightly, but it was important to me to get the texture of 1905 London right and to get it right from the perspective of an Indian immigrant.

 

I owe a debt to many historians and cultural commentators, but probably most of all Sathnam Sanghera (Empireland, Empireworld) and Professor Carlone Elkins (Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire). 

 

Reading their work made me understand in a deeper way than I had before of the evils and power of empire, and made me angry at how poorly we are taught that, in either the imperial West or the colonised East. The dangers of that failure of education is sadly too obvious in our daily headlines.

Oh, also, the ball point pen? Was first invented in 1888 but only perfected in 1938 by the brothers László and György  Bíró. The Brothers Biro. I think that’s my next book.

 

Q: The writer Dave Rudden said of the book, “David breathes new life into familiar characters with this wry, wickedly arch tale about decolonization, integration, and imperial arrogance, not just interrogating the classic caper but elevating it--stealing it out from under the Empire’s nose.” What do you think of that assessment?

A: Dave is both too smart and too nice a man for me to disagree with him.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: There is a conversation going on about a sequel to The Great Game, but before that I have to finish a play about America’s first magician, a TV show about a retired detective and - the thing I’m working on right now even as I answer these questions - is a fantasy novel called Backstory in which a group of 20-somethings try and fix the magical kingdom which their parents destroyed. It’s got nothing to do with real life.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The audiobook of The Great Game is narrated by the extraordinary British actor, comedian and my honorary cousin Sanjeev Bhaskar (star of Unforgotten on PBS) - the four days we spent in the studio making it were thrilling and hilarious and I think folks who choose to experience the book that way will share in that.

 

Oh, also, congrats on your new book! It’s a thrill isn’t it to have something new in the world!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb